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As per https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/kilmar-abrego-garcia-el-salvador-maryland-man-deported/ Chris Van Hollen was informed by the vice president of El Salvador that the reason Garcia can not be released, is because the US is paying El Salvador to keep him imprisoned.
While it is accurate to say that "Bukele doesn't work for Trump" the fact that Garcia seems to be imprisoned solely due to the US paying for it, suggests that Garcia is constructively in US custody.
I think I'm counting at least 3 levels of hearsay for this claim that the US is paying El Salvador to imprison Garcia. But we also know, see here, that the Trump administration did ask Bukele to release Garcia, and Bukele said no. That says to me that even if there are payments coming from the US, those payments are definitely not the only reason El Salvador has to keep Garcia imprisoned. They have other reasons of their own. If such payments are actually occurring, then I agree we should stop them and see what happens, but I would bet against it resulting in Garcia's release.
I don't know with absolute certainty but I am really sure. I can observe that El Salvador has a strong presidential system, and Bukele a strong grip on power.
Then you are massively overconfident. The US also has a strong presidential system, and our president cannot just free any prisoner he likes. Our president is under both legal constraints (he has no power over state prisons) and political constraints (freeing certain prisoners would look bad and he wants his party to win future elections). Unless you have an El Selvadoran law degree I don't know about, or have consulted someone who does, you should not be particularly confident what powers Bukele has. But even if you are right that Bukele has the power to release Garcia, so what? Bukele doesn't work for Trump. He heads his own sovereign government. What reason do we have to think that Trump could convince Bukele to release Garcia? Maybe you buy Trump's claims to be the best deal-maker on earth, but I am skeptical.
> This is an interesting point about to what extent judges can make geopolitical judgment calls. The way they are handling this is by judging the administration on the steps it has taken. This could just be a strongly worded letter. So far that hasn't happened.
I'm not entirely sure I follow what you are trying to say here. I agree that there is significant ambiguity in the word "facilitate". If we read it as the administration has, that they are simply obligated to ask for Garcia's release and, if Bukele agrees, to transport Garcia out of El Salvador, then that seems like a fine and reasonable response to what has happened here. If it turns out that this was not simply an administrative error as the administration claims, that someone in the government knew about the court order and intentionally defied it, then contempt proceedings against such person may be warranted. But if the courts interpret "facilitate" the way the liberal media is, as requiring Trump to get Garcia back regardless of the political or legal realities in El Salvador, then this situation may be equivalent to the courts ordering Trump to make the sun rise in the west and set in the east, and then being outraged when Trump doesn't do it. That is the scenario that threatens to tear this country apart. That is the scenario that frightens me. And that is the scenario that you make more likely when you just assert, without evidence or reason, that Trump could get Garcia back if he wanted to.
> Bukele could release Abrego Garcia to the US
Could he? I don't know El Salvador's legal system very well, but I do know that just because someone is incarcerated in an American prison it does not follow that Trump could release them. The US President has no legal authority to release a person from state prison. Do we actually know that Bukele has authority to release Garcia?
and the US could bring him back, if the administration wanted to do so. As a point of reference, the US has routinely negotiated for the return or release of citizens and even of non-citizens considered at risk in other countries.
That is one hell of an unwarranted assumption. The US does sometimes try to get people released from foreign prisons, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. For the not case, see here for an example. I don't know if the Trump administration even could get Garcia released if it wanted to. Neither do you. Neither do any of American judges issuing orders in this case. Even if there is something that El Salvador would accept in exchange for Garcia, (1) there is necessarily a weighing to be done of the cost of that thing versus the benefit of bringing Garcia back. Judges are not in a position to do that weighing, and are not attempting to do it. (2) If El Salvador can see that Trump is under a court order to get Garcia back, that puts Trump in a terrible negotiating position. It would essentially allow El Salvador to coerce whatever it wants from our government. That would be a terrible outcome. This is why negotiation with foreign governments is a function of the executive branch, not the judicial.
Interesting. I think I'd take the same position about deafness that I would about blindness. But I also find it a very understandable and natural human emotion for a person who is damaged to want to surround themselves with others who are damaged in the same way, and to be disappointed when their child isn't. That seems entirely compatible with not being willing to intentionally damage a child.
I'm mainly talking about engineering that happens before the embryo stage.
I'm not sure if you're correcting my technical vocabulary or trying to counter my argument. Either is welcome. While I am excited about this technology and its potential to improve the human species, I'm obviously not a biologist myself.
Of course it's one the law makes. IIUC it's not even illegal for a pregnant woman to drink alcohol.
Nor is it illegal to use harsh language with your children. "Abuse" is a word that exists to pick out a sufficiently extreme degree of wrong that most people would not do it, and intervention is warranted against those who do. Most states do regulate drug use by pregnant women somehow, see https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/maternity-drug-policies-by-state. And the controversy around this is based mostly on the idea that taking a medical approach rather than a criminalization approach results in better outcomes for the children, which is an argument that just doesn't translate over to the genetic engineering context.
I agree. We aren't talking about whether blind people should be allowed to reproduce freely, even when doing so has the foreseeable consequence that the child will be blind. We are talking about whether they should be allowed to do an action, beyond the simple act of reproducing, to cause their child to be blind.
Suggesting specific odds without being able to define a threshold seems a bit, um, confused. Being willing to take the word of a stranger on the internet when these quantities of money are at stake seems outright stupid. I'm staying out of this market. I suggest that you withdraw your offer.
If we assume that the likelihood of a pregnancy leading to a child who lives long enough to be in our records is independent of the child's order / mother's age, then I agree that that the effects on the average birth order and average family size of our cardinals should in some sense cancel. However, it should still increase the error bars on both numbers and therefor the uncertainty of any conclusion. And I'm not sure I'd expect survival to be independent of order.
No? If non-surviving children are absent from the data, then the birth position that we have for a cardinal (1st born, 2nd born, etc) is really a lower bound. A cardinal who our records show as a 2nd born might actually be a 3rd or 4th born, but cannot be a 1st born.
If the FBOE is due to earlier pregnancies changing the chemicals present in the mother's womb during later pregnancies, then the absence of non-surviving children from the data could actually be a problem with the data.
I would bet pretty hard on option #3. The older the parents are at the time of conception, the lower the quality of their gametes, which can translate into various negative health and cognitive effects on the child.
I'm not especially distinguishing the methods, I'm mainly distinguishing whether it's being done to a living person.
Genetic engineering is a thing you do to a living person. If a person is going to go on to live a life, they don't somehow become less a person because you are influencing them at the stage of being an embryo in a lab. That's just not a morally coherent distinction, nor is it one the law makes.
Nothing in my position is hinging on my personal moral views. I am trying to point out to you that almost everyone in our society has the view that blinding children is evil. And our society already has laws against child abuse which would prohibit blinding children by genetic engineering. Virtually nobody wants to change that, and any politician who tried to change those laws would be throwing away their career. It's not about me. I'm pointing out where society is.
If you want to start a campaign to legalize the blinding of children, well, we have a free speech clause, you are entitled to do that. Have you considered maybe doing it separately from the genetic engineering thing? The technology to blind children already exists. If you really think it is worth running an experiment on a generation of children, why don't you try to legalize doing it with the technology we already have and go from there? If, somehow, you succeed in changing the law, you'd even get your experiment quicker.
if you fail to listen to the people themselves who you're erasing, you're the one who's being evil.
How would a person who has been blind their whole life know? They haven't had the experience of sight to compare to. They seem like the people in the worst position to make the comparison. People who have the experience of seeing are necessarily the ones who can judge whether that is a good thing or not.
When it comes to their own children, it's up to them, not you.
When it comes to any child, it is up to the existing law of child abuse. That trumps whatever an individual parent may think.
if you ask blind people or autistic people, some fraction of them will say "hell yeah!"
Lets not get into autistic people. Autism comes in more varieties than blindness, and some of those varieties I think are much more debatable. For blindness, do you have any idea what that fraction is?
I think the frames in which you are looking at this are just completely wrong. We aren't really talking about "decisions about an individuals' reproduction". We are talking about how a parent can treat their child. This is something that is already highly regulated by the state, CPS is a thing, and it is good that it is a thing. There may be debates to be had about whether CPS has gone too far on certain issues, but there is a core sort of evil that CPS exists to address, and that it is good for the state to address. And blinding your child is a very core paradigmatic example of that sort of evil. Whether you do it by genetic engineering or surgically or through some other means is entirely beside the point. Genetic engineering isn't special. It is just another technology. To take something that is obviously wrong and evil when done by other means, that everyone will agree the state should prevent when done by other means, and say that the state should allow it when done by genetic engineering, that strikes me as a major political threat to genetic engineering. We don't get genetic engineering to happen by creating special rules for it that permit monstrosities forbidden by any other means. We get genetic engineering by showing people that it is just another technology, and we can use it to do good and not evil, applying the same notions of good and evil that we would anywhere else. If a blind parent asked a surgeon to sever the optic nerve of of their newborn baby, and the surgeon did it, both the parents and the surgeon would go to jail for child abuse. Any normal person can see that a genetic engineer should be subject to the same ethical and legal constraints there as the surgeon. Arguing otherwise will endanger your purported goal of promoting this technology.
This notion of "erasing a type of person" also seems like exactly the wrong frame for this. When we cured smallpox, did we erase the type of person called "smallpox survivor"? When we feed a hungry person, are we erasing the type of person called "hungry person"? None of this is about erasing anyone. This is about fixing, or at least not intentionally breaking, people.
As for your list, I'm not going to go through point by point. There surely are debatable cases. I'll just reiterate my basic point that genetic engineering is not special. Would we allow a parent to take a normal child and give them the specified condition by non-genetic means? On some of these society may not have a consensus, as there just isn't a known non-genetic means for reliably inducing some of these conditions. But that's the question to ask. We have had parents and other adults interacting with children for as long as there have been adults and children. We have pretty well developed notions of what things it is ok to do to a child and what things it is not ok to do to a child. Those notions don't change when we have to evaluate whether we should do things to a child by means of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is not special.
Ok. So to check, you're saying that a world with far fewer total blind / deaf / dwarf people, and with far greater total health and capability for nearly literally everyone including the blind / deaf / dwarfs, is not worth there being a generation of a few blind kids whose parents chose for them to be blind?
I feel like you've just asked me if it is worth committing a few murders now to being about a future world where there are far fewer murders. Like, if I really thought causality worked that way, maybe, at that point we are getting into hard consequentialism versus strong conventional ethical norms and that is a murky place to be but maybe. But really my objection is why the fuck would you think causality works like that? People who want to blind their own children now are not going to be useful allies in eliminating blindness later!
Would you also endorse forcibly sterilizing currently living people with high-heritability blindness, who intend to have children anyway?
Of course not. As I said, most blind people's lives are worth living, and we don't yet have the technology in place to allow such people to procreate without passing on their blindness. Once we do, then some legal intervention probably is warranted, though I haven't given much thought to its shape and its shape might depend on the particulars of the technology.
If you can't do it without removing almost all of the nervous system, I think it would be bad!
Why? A human body without a meaningful nervous system inside of it isn't a morally relevant entity, and it could be used to save people who are morally relevant.
Possibly. I think all your examples are quite alarming in part because they remove a core aspect. Possibly we could rightly decide to do some of them, but that would require much more knowledge and deliberation. More to the point: I'm not making a strong statement like "prohibit these uses". I'm a weaker statement: "Genomic liberty doesn't really protect these uses, in the way it does protect propagation, beneficence, etc.". In other words, I'm just saying that those uses aren't in the territory that the principle of genomic liberty is trying to secure as its purview, as I'm proposing it.
I'll continue with your free speech analogy to illustrate what I think is the problem here. It is true, as a matter of constitutional law, that when the Supreme Court carves out an exception to the Free Speech Clause, that does not automatically make that speech a crime. But I think that is more a matter of how our system is structured - the Supreme Court gets to interpret the constitution, but does not get to create crimes. Legislatures get to create crimes, and so for a sort of speech to become a crime, even after the Supreme Court creates an exception for it, still requires action from a legislature. But when I think about particular exceptions, they all fall into one of two categories. Either I think the speech is really bad and should be criminalized (true threats, incitement of imminent lawless action) or I think the court was mistaken to create the exception (obscenity, fighting words). There isn't an in between category where I think a type of speech is rightly an exception to the Free Speech Clause, but it's ok for a legislature not to ban it. Similarly, if we think genomic liberty is important enough to be called a "liberty", and we also think that some particular use of genetic technology is bad enough to warrant an exception to that liberty, then I think that use also has to be bad enough that it should be banned. I don't see a coherent middle ground.
Gouging the child's eyes out is much more of a boundary violation and betrayal of bedrock civility. They'd then have very good reason to treat whoever did that as abjectly hostile.
I don't see why this wouldn't be the case with blinding a child through germ line engineering. If I imagine myself growing up blind, and then I learned that my parents had engineered my genome that way, I would absolutely see that as a boundary violation and a betrayal of bedrock civility. If anything I would view it as worse than gouging my eyes out, because it is necessarily cool and calculated and premeditated in a way that gouging out of eyes might not be.
You're causing a switch from one type of body to another; the growing consciousness was growing fitly for the first type, and you took that away, leaving that consciousness somewhat hanging.
Again, I don't see how this could make it better. Would it be permissible to gouge out a newborn's eyes? Does infant male circumcision become less bad because it is done before the child can experience a fully intact body? Of course not. Mutilating an infant, in either case, is more bad because the child doesn't ever get to experience an in tact body, or have any say in the decision.
- It could very well be that a sighted person approves of their life by their own lights and doesn't wish to be blind, and a blind person approves of their life by their own lights and doesn't wish to be sighted, but a sighted person who is blinded doesn't approve of that happening and wishes it weren't so.
If by "approves of" you just mean "has a life worth living", then yes, of course blind people's lives are generally worth living. But if you mean something stronger, "would turn down sight if it were offered for free", it seems obvious to me that any blind person expressing that view has something seriously wrong in their head in addition to the blindness, and is not competent to make that decision for any child. We don't let adults abuse children in any other way, even if the adult was subject to the same sort of abuse as a child and says they approve of it.
Diversity of capabilities is good. Blind people may think differently, and, as it were, see things you don't naturally see. Ditto for many other phenotypes. I think you get less of this benefit if you maim a child vs. through germline engineering (where the adaptation is from birth). (You can of course argue that this isn't enough of a benefit to genomically do it, and I'd certainly agree with this as a guess and wouldn't do that with my own child and wouldn't recommend others do it, but it's still a benefit.)
Blindness isn't a different capability. It is a lack of a particular capability. It may be true that a blind person will tend to build more skills with the capabilities they do have, but a sighted person who puts in the effort could surely build the same skills. Treating blindness as a different capability comes off as an ideologically motivated delusion to me.
It makes sense to have laws that protect existing people; a right to not be killed or maimed is a very basic right for a state to enforce. This doesn't apply as much to a hypothetical future child, in terms of what it makes sense to have laws about.
A fundamental premise of EA is that future people matter just as much as present people. We may have uncertainty about whether a particular person we can conceptualize will actually come to exist in the future, but if they do come to exist in the future, then they aren't hypothetical even now. So it absolutely does make sense to have laws to protect future people just as much as current people.
As I suggested, I think we ought to set the world up in such a way that the great majority of people don't have good reason to oppose the creation of germline engineering technology. If you start going "well, surely we have to stamp out this type of person" you're pretty quickly eroding / betraying that coalition. Hence propagative liberty as a tentpole principle.
Blind people don't strike me as a "type of person" in the relevant sense. A blind person is just a person who is damaged in a particular way, but otherwise they are the same person they would be with sight.
I also do not believe for a second that people who want to blind their own children exist in a significant enough number to impact political calculations. But if they did, I would say that I do not want to make common political cause with such people, even if it costs us genetic engineering technology. Such people are monsters. They are the enemy. Depriving them of the power to effectuate their goals is a moral crusade worth making enormous sacrifices for.
I do think there are a lot of other people who find the idea of blinding children to be horrifying, no matter how it is done. If you are concerned the politics of advancing genetic engineering, suggesting that it might be ok seems like a blunder. By saying that, you will alienate many more people than you attract.
Mostly this sounds remarkably good. A couple of minor points though.
On the exception for genomic choices that remove a core aspect of human nature – There is a vagueness problem here. But lets look at some of the possible specifics mentioned. If one is going to create a soldier, removing fear might be valuable. If one is going to create an astronaut for a long term mission, removing dependence on other people might be valuable. If one is going to create an organ donor, removing consciousness and self-awareness seems essential. These are all worth doing if we can figure out how.
On the negative externalities question, I actually strongly disagree with the counterexample of a blind couple choosing to blind their child. That's child abuse! It's no different than gouging your child's eyes out! Don't allow that!
at a four way stop sign we go one at a time clockwise around the intersection
NO! At a four way stop sign, the driver who arrived at the front of the intersection first goes first.
I agree that one could approach the issue that way. I don't believe anyone is. One big reason not to do that, and not to support the ERA at this point in general, is that it is not at all obvious what "not abiding by the ERA" would even look like. The legal landscape has changed so much since it was initially proposed. Most importantly, since the ERA was proposed, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to prohibit most discrimination based on sex. I'm not sure what work the ERA is supposed to do that the 14th Amendment isn't already doing. And since no court has ever recognized the ERA as part of the constitution, there is no case law to guide us in figuring out what it might mean.
So lets imagine that you are a lawyer, and a client comes to you and asks you to sue the government because, say, the government awarded a contract to her male competitor despite her obviously superior bid, and she thinks it was because of her sex. So you verify the facts as best you can and draft up a complaint (the legal document that initiates a lawsuit). After describing the facts and the basis of the court's jurisdiction, you then have to tell the court which legal provisions you think the government violated. You could write "Count I - 28th Amendment". But if that's all you write, you will almost certainly have committed malpractice. There are much better things you can write, and it is your job as a competent lawyer to know about them and write them. You're going to have to also write "Count II - Equal Protection Clause", and maybe some more counts after that. And now you've given the judge an opportunity, which they will almost certainly take, to avoid deciding the validity of the ERA. Maybe the judge decides that you win on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause, in which case it is unnecessary for the judge to address the ERA at all. Or maybe the judge decides that you loose your Equal Protection Clause claim, and then they can write something like this: "the court assumes without deciding that the ERA is part of the constitution. In the absence of any authority to the contrary, the court chooses to apply the same standard, intermediate scrutiny, under the ERA as under the Equal Protection Clause. Plaintiff's claims under the ERA therefor fail for the reasons already discussed." And now you've spent years of your life, and your client has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, litigating a case to get the ERA recognized as part of the constitution, and you have not gotten a ruling on whether the ERA is part of the constitution. Whereas if you sue the Archivist of the United States for not publishing the ERA as the 28th Amendment, then there really is no way for a judge to rule on the case without deciding whether the ERA is in fact the 28th Amendment. It's the difference between giving a judge an opportunity to decide the issue, and putting them in a position where they must decide the issue.
As I'm imagining this, it would not constitute accepting a tip unless the server or the restaurant keeps it. Ideally the server would notice before the customer was out the door and return the money to the customer. But surely that won't always happen, especially in the transition. In that case, let the restaurant donate the money to a nonprofit.
With regard to fixing tip culture, I think the solution is obvious. Make it illegal for a server to accept a tip. It probably looks bad to enforce this against individual servers, so enforce it at the restaurant level. Any restaurant where a server accepts a tip can get sued or fined or shut down by regulators or something. Frame it, accurately I think, as cracking down on fraudulent pricing practices.
With regard to the ERA, on a strict textualist reading of Article V (the one that talks about amendments), it is not crazy to think the ERA is valid. The constitution says that an amendment becomes part of the constitution when it is proposed by 2/3 of each house of congress, and ratified by ¾ of state legislatures. Those things happened. Nowhere in the constitution does it say that congress gets to add extra conditions like time limits. That said, the Supreme Court has long held that such time limits are valid and I see no reason that would or should change now.
As to why the archivist matters here, it’s a litigation thing. You need to name a defendant if you want to bring a case. You can’t sue the Supreme Court to ask them to declare the ERA part of the constitution. You can sue the Archivist of the United States for not listing it as part of the constitution. And several states did. That’s how the Archivist became a focus of this issue.
Honestly, the thing that bothered me most about Biden’s comment was the hypocricy of it. He’s been the president for four years. He could have directed his DOJ to litigate in favor of recognizing the ERA as the 28th amendment at any time during his presidency. Not only did he not do that, his DOJ defended the Archivist’s decision not to include the ERA in the constitution when several states sued over the issue. State of Illinois v. David Ferriero (D.C. Cir. 2023). Changing your position just as you are leaving office is cheap.
I am quite glad to see that Lighthaven is on a path to financial sustainability, as I sometimes attend events there, and I am very much not looking to be subsidized by anyone's charity. One clarifying question. The rough Lighthaven budget above has a line for "interest". Am I correct in assume that that is the entire mortgage payment, both interest and principal, not just the interest? In other words, by successfully making the $1M payment each year, the amount you owe the bank is going down each year and will eventually hit zero?
"Agnostic" doesn't necessarily mean "unknowable and not subject to testing". Much more often it has the weaker meaning "not currently known". There is a house being built across the street. Is there a work van parked in front of it right now? I don't know. This is certainly knowable and subject to testing - I could get up, walk over to a window in the front of the house, and look. But I don't care enough to do that, so I continue to now know if there is a work van parked in front of the house across the street. I am agnostic about the existence of such a work van.
For people who do test prep seriously (I used to be a full time tutor), this has been known for decades. One of the standard things I used to tell every student was if you have no idea what the answer is, guess B, because B is statistically most likely to be the correct answer. When I was in 10th grade (this was 2002), I didn't have anything to gain by doing well on the math state standardized test, so I tested the theory that B is most likely to be correct. 38% of the answers on that test were in fact B.
> This is pretty weird. As far as we know, humans don’t tend to prefer choices labeled B, so we’re not sure where this could have come from in the training data. As humans, it initially didn’t even occur to us to look for it!
Remember, LLMs aren't modeling how a human reading text would process the text. LLMs are trying to model the patterns in the texts that are in the training data itself. In this case, that means they are doing something closer to imitating test writers than test takers. And it is well known that humans, including those who write tests, are bad at being random.
In the automatic response they told me that they expect to give me the decision before this deadline.
Contrary to the promise, I don't get any response.
There is an obvious disconnect here. A statement that someone "expects" to do something is not a promise, especially not when made in an automated response. If Igor misread this as a promise, and given that he has not provided exact quotes of the other alleged promises, it seems quite plausible that nobody ever promised anything, and that Igor was imprudent in re-arranging his life based on a pending grant application. If I'm right about that, then Igor has defamed EAIF by accusing them of "lies".
Great post!
> a client can show me where they buried their dozen murder victims and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell a soul, even if an innocent person is sitting in prison for their crimes.
For any Alaskan serial murderers reading this, do note that this does not apply to you. Your Alaskan attorney can breach attorney-client privilege to prevent an innocent person from going to jail. See Rule 1.6(b)(1)(C).
That's it. You continue to refuse to engage with the argument that a norm against lawsuits is harmful. You presume that such a norm exists, to try to illegitimately shift the burden to me to show that it does not. Now you presume that lawsuits are more harmful than a norm against lawsuits, to again try to illegitimately shift the burden to me to show the reverse. Even if your position were sound, your argumentative tactics are dirty, and I will not continue to engage with them.
I am talking about the community norm of not using lawsuits to settle arguments (and, more generally, disputes that are… just about words, let’s say). It’s not exclusively a property of small communities—that’s my point.
Then you misunderstood what I was trying to point at when I brought up the distinction about the scale of a community. I was trying to point at the fact that when lawsuits occur, there is likely already too much negative feeling between the parties for them to enjoy direct interactions even in a small group context, and if there isn't already, the lawsuit causes it. I was pointing to a fact about human psychology, which on a pragmatic level we need to arrange our social structures to deal with. I was not pointing to a norm about using libel lawsuits.
At this point, you've failed to engage with my point that having a norm against lawsuits is harmful, even though lawsuits themselves are also harmful. I'm guessing your case for having such a norm is that lawsuits are harmful, which is not something I dispute. Is there any more to say?
But the fact that we’ve not deviated from the behavior the norm would mandate, is evidence of the norm’s effective existence.
Negligible evidence, especially in comparison to the lack of any past discussion of such a norm. Your argument here is so bad, and your choice of language so ambiguous, that I have to question whether you are even arguing in good faith.
Can you articulate what exactly the property of small communities is that we are talking about, and what its benefits are? I still am not forming a coherent picture of what the heck you are talking about because, again, the thing I was trying to point to in making this distinction I think is inherently a property of small groups.
Are you seriously now claiming that all of society has a norm against lawsuits? I think that is just obviously wrong, particularly for the US. And the misappropriation of the more traditional "arguments get arguments, not bullets" is just astoundingly oblivious. Lawsuits are a kind of argument! They are an example of the thing we are supposed to do instead of bullets!
No, I cannot empirically observe that the rationalist community has operated by such a norm. I can empirically observe that I know of no instance where one rationalist has actually filed a libel suit against another, but this is much more likely to be due to either (1) my ignorance of such a suit, or (2) the low rate of actually filing libel lawsuits in society at large combined with the small size of the rationalist community. I know of no instance of a rationalist going to space either, but I'm pretty sure we don't have a norm against it. I'd never heard anyone speak of such a norm until the NL drama. That is significant evidence that there is no such norm.
May I ask which city you live in?
I agree that these different sorts of communities exist along a continuum. What startles me is that you seem to think that the intimacy of the something of the smaller community can and should be scaled to the larger sort of community. To my mind, it is inherently a property of the small size. Trying to scale it sets of loud alarm bells. I'm not sure to what extent I endorse this, but possibly one way of summarizing the problems of overly controlling organizations like cults is that they try to take the intimacy or something of a small community and scale it.
I also strongly disagree with your presumption that we are talking about "Going from having [the understanding that we do not use libel suits within the community], to not having it". I have never understood the rationalist community to have such a norm. From where I am sitting, Habryka is trying to create such a norm out of nothing, and I am not ok with that.
As I believe I have said already, I agree that libel suits, and law suits generally, can be damaging, and I certainly do not encourage anyone to use them. I'm just pointing out that having a norm against using lawsuits can be even more damaging.
A real court would apply complex rules of evidence, which sometimes involve balancing but often are more categorical. But yes, it's a different notion of public interest than whatever one rando thinks is public interest.
I agree that there is a significant difference between cases where the accused knows the identity of the accuser and cases where they do not, and we should split our analysis.
In cases where the accused does not know the identity of the accuser, I think the accusations would necessarily be so vague that I wouldn't update much on them, and I would hope other rationalists and EAs wouldn't either, but clearly there is a significant contingent of people in these communities who do not share my epistemic scruples. Given that, I don't know, seems a mess. But your rule that only the accused should share the identity of the accuser seems too absolute - surely accusers are sometimes in the wrong, and sometimes malicious, and in that case having their identities publicly known seems good. Yes that will result in some amount of social punishment, and if the accusations were false and malicious, then I think that is good.
The case where the accused does know the identity of the accuser is where my above logic about the accused appearing retaliatory would suggest it is better for a third party to name the accuser.
I think you are using an inapplicable definition of "community". Your example of a D&D group calls to mind a "community" in the sense of "a group of single digit number of people who are in the same room socially interacting on a recurring basis." In this sense of the word, neither EA nor rationality is a community. I agree that we should not expect Ben/Alice/Chloe to be in the same community with Kat/Emerson, for this narrow sense of community. And my assumption is that they weren't on the day before Ben made his post. And that is fine.
There is a broader sense of the word "community", which we might define as "an extended social network with shared identity and values", which does apply to EA and rationality. I don't see a reason why two people in a legal dispute shouldn't be able to remain in this sort of community.
Why do you think that third parties shouldn't name an accuser? If an accusation is being handled in the court of public opinion, presumably it is because the public has an interest in the truth of the matter, and therefor I would think that any member of the public who has relevant evidence ought to be able to present it. If the accusation depends on the credibility of the accuser, then the identity of the accuser seems like relevant evidence. If anything, I'd think the accused should be particularly hesitant to name the accuser, at least as a strategic matter, for fear of appearing retaliatory. Third parties, not being under that constraint, might be in a better position to name the accuser.
I find the general response to the threat of a libel suit to be deeply concerning. It is true that libel suits, and lawsuits generally, are expensive, time consuming, and generally unpleasant for everyone involved, including the victors. That is why I think NL ultimately made the right decision not to sue. That said, I also think that it is important not to use social pressure to discourage lawsuits. And I think we can all see this when we look at other communities from an outside perspective. When a community mistreats its members badly enough, it is important that the law be there as an escape hatch, and attempting to interfere with that by creating norms against lawsuits is therefor likely to be very harmful. The Amish famously will never seek recourse in the secular legal system, no matter how bad the wrong or what the circumstances are. Does anyone here admire this aspect of the Amish culture? Cults also famously use all kinds of pressure tactics to prevent members from seeking out the law. This is bad. We should not be like this. So when I see the way Habryka for example talks about the threat of a libel suit in this case, or Gwern, or a number of others, that sets off alarm bells for me. I don't think Habryka is a cult leader right now, but I do think he is veering uncomfortably in that direction and I hope he changes course.
I did not know this. How long has this been around?
Still strikes me as a really bad idea to ignore the norms that actual financial markets have developed over centuries of experience, but I am curious if this will actually solve the problem of judges biased by having a position in their own markets.
I knew they did not prohibit it, but I am surprised they are actively encouraging it. In any real-money market, doing anything analogous would almost certainly be grossly illegal. I have significant restrictions on my real-life trading, and I just work at a company that sells information about the market, but doesn't actually run it. I've found the practice of people betting in their own markets on manifold to predictably result in unfair resolutions, and so I do judge people who do it, and I judge more harshly if they don't actively disclose the fact. I came to manifold on the expectation that it was trying to be like a real-money prediction market, and just couldn't because of laws in the US. As I see them diverging more and more from the standards of real markets, I become more and more disappointed. But you do make a fair point that perhaps I should judge Manifold more than the market makers if they are actively encouraging such bad behavior.
I would were the judge not betting in the market. You really should be more upfront about that.
"anything related to", depending how it's interpreted, might be overly broad, but something like this seems like a necessary implication, yes. Is that a bad thing?
Oh, I agree that utilitarian considerations, particularly in the case of an existential threat, might warrant breaking a norm. I'm not saying Toner did anything wrong in any objective sense, I don't have a very strong view about that. I'm just trying to question Zvi's argument that Sam and OpenAI did something unusually bad in the way they responded to Toner's choice. It may be the case that Toner did the right and honorable thing given the position she was in and the information she had, and also that Sam and openAI did the normal and boring thing in response to that.
You do seem to be equivocating somewhat between board members (who have no formal authority in an organization) and the board itself (which has the ultimate authority in an organization). To say that a dissenting board member should resign before speaking out publicly is very different from saying that the board itself should not act when it (meaning the majority of its members) believe there is a problem. As I am reading the events here, Toner published her article before the board decided that there was something wrong and that action needed to be taken. I think everyone agrees that when the board concludes that something is wrong, it should act.
requiring that those who most have the need and the ability to scrutinise the power of a corporation do so the least.
I have no idea how you got that from what I said. The view of governance I am presenting is that the board should scrutinize the corporation, but behind closed doors, not out in public. Again, I'm not entirely confident that I agree with this view, but I do think it is normal for people involved in governance and therefor doesn't indicate much about Altman or openAI one way or the other.
Interesting. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "fiscal sponsor", and I don't really want to go down that road. My understanding of nonprofit governance norms is that if a board member has concerns about their organization (and they probably do - they have a shit tone more access and confidential information than most people, and no organization is perfect) then they can express those concerns privately to the rest of the board, to the executive director, to the staff. They are a board member, they have access to these people, and they can maintain a much better working relationship with these people and solve problems more effectively by addressing their concerns privately. If a board member thinks something is so dramatically wrong with their organization that they can't solve it privately, and the public needs to be alerted, my understanding of governance norms is that the board member should resign their board seat and then make their case publicly. Mostly this is a cached view, and I might not endorse it on deep reflection. But I think a lot of people involved in governance have this norm, so I don't think that Sam Altman's enforcement of this norm against Toner is particularly indicative of anything about Sam.
By members of the board of directors specifically?
From my perspective, even rebuking Toner here is quite bad. It is completely inconsistent with the nonprofit’s mission to not allow debate and disagreement and criticism.
I can't imagine any board, for-profit or non-profit, tolerating one of its members criticizing its organization in public. Toner had a very privileged position, she got to be in one of the few rooms where discussion of AI safety matters most, where decisions that actually matter get made. She got to make her criticisms and cast her votes there, where it mattered. That is hardly "not allow[ing] debate and disagreement and criticism". The cost of participating in debate and disagreement and criticism inside the board room is that she gave up the right to criticize the organization anywhere else. That's a very good trade for her, if she could have kept to her end of the deal.
It did show up in the podcast, which I believe is just filtered by upvotes?
I don't think I see the problem. Chevron deference is, as you say, about whether courts defer to agencies interpretations statutes. It comes up when an agency thinks one interpreation is best, and a court thinks a different interpretation is the best reading of the statute, but that the agencies prefered interpreation is still a plausible reading of the statute. In that case, under Chevron, the court defers to the agencies interpreation. Do away with Chevron, and the court will follow what it thinks is the best reading of the statute. This is, I should note, the background of what courts usually do and did before Chevron. Chevron is an anomaly.
In terms of implications, I think it is true that agencies will tend to interpret their mandates broadly, and so doing away with Chevron deference will, at the margin, reduce the scope of some agencies powers. But I don't see how it could lead to the end of the administrative state as we know it. Agencies will still have jobs to do that are authorized statute, and courts will still let agencies do those jobs.
So what does AI regulation look like? If it looks like congress passing a new statute to either create a new agency or authorize an existing agency to regulate AI, then whether Chevron gets overturned seems irrelevant - congress is quite capable of writing a statute that authorizes someone to regulate AI, with or without Chevron. If it looks like an existing agency reading an existing statute correctly to authorize it to regulate some aspect of AI, then again, that should work fine with or without Chevron. If, on the other hand, it looks like an existing agency over-reading an existing statute to claim authority it does not have to regulate AI, then (1) that seems horribly undemocratic, though if the fate of humanity is on the line then I guess that's ok, and (2) maybe the agency does it anyway, and it takes years to get fought out in court, and that buys us the time we need. But if the court ruling causes the agency to not try to regulate AI, or if the years long court fight doesn't buy enough time, we might actually have a problem here. I think this argument needs more details fleshed out. What particular agency do we think might over-read what particular statute to regulate AI? If we aren't already targeting a particular agency with arguments about a particular statute, and have a reasonable chance of getting them to regulate for AI safety rather than AI ethics, then worrying about the courts seems pointless.
In the models making the news and scaring people now, there aren't identified separate models for modeling the world and seeking the goal. It's all inscrutible model weights. Maybe if we understood those weights better we could separate them out. But maybe we couldn't. Maybe it's all a big jumble as actually implemented. That would make it incoherent to speak about the relative intelligence of the world model and the goal seeker. So how would this line of thinking apply to that?
For the less cryptographically inclined, or those predicting the failure of computing technology, there is always the old school method: write your prediction on a peace of paper, literally seal it in an envelope, and mail it to yourself. The postal marking they put over the stamp includes the date.
I think many people should be less afraid of lawsuits, though I'm not sure I'd say "almost everyone."
I wouldn't draw much from the infrequency of lawsuits being filed. Many disputes are resolved in the shadow of the legal system, without an actual court being involved. For example, I read a number of cases in law school where one person sued another after a car accident. Yet when I actually got into a car accident myself, no lawsuit was ever filed. I talked to my insurance company, the other driver presumably talked to their insurance company, the two companies talked to each other, money flowed around, things were paid for. Much more efficient than bringing everybody into a courtroom, empaneling a jury, and paying lawyers in fancy suits to make arguments. The insurance companies knew what the law was, knew who would have to pay money to who, and so they were able to skip over the whole courtroom battle step, and go directly to the payment step. This is what usually happens when an area of law is mature - the potential parties, sometimes with good advice from their attorneys, reach similar conclusions about the likely outcome of a potential lawsuit, and this allows them to reach an agreement outside of court. Lawsuits are much more likely to happen when the law is more ambiguous, and therefor the parties can have significantly different estimations of the outcome of the suit. So the frequency of lawsuits is often a measure of how much disagreement there is about an area of law. Other times it reflects a requirement to actually go to court to do something (like debt collection or mortgage foreclosure). But I don't think it is a good measure of the likelihood of having to pay out money for some arguable violation of the law.
Also, many contracts contain arbitration clauses, which also prevent conflicts from making it into a courtroom.
The notion of lawyers being overly conservative I think is also an incomplete description of that dynamic. A good lawyer will tell you how much you can expect a potential lawsuit to cost, and therefor whether it is more or less than the expected benefit of the action. If your lawyer won't do this, you should fire them and hire someone else. As an illustration, think about universities violating the free speech and due process rights of their students, and getting sued for it. They do this because the cost of not doing it (in public relations, angry students/faculty/donors, Title IX lawsuits) is more than the cost of a potential constitutional lawsuit, and they know it. How do they know it? Because their lawyers told them so.
I think sometimes people don't want to take the advice of lawyers they perceive as overly conservative, even when they should. People trying to build something or make a deal will often get very excited about it, and only want to see the ways it can go well. Lawyers have seen, or at least studied, many past conflicts, and so they can often see more clearly what conflicts might arise as a result of some project, and advise clients on how to avoid them. That is often what clients pay lawyers for. But to the client, it can often feel like the lawyer putting an unnecessary damper on the shiny project they are excited about.
There is also the moral aspect. Laws often have a moral point behind them. Sometimes when people refrain from doing things to avoid being sued, they are refraining from doing immoral things. And sometimes when people disregard legal advice, do a thing, and get sued, they actually did an immoral thing. To take an example that I watched closely at the time, and that connects to one of Alyssa's examples, during the 2014-2015 school year Rolling Stone published an article, based on a single young woman's account, of gang rape being used as a form of fraternity initiation at UVA. Rolling Stone did not do the sort of fact checking that is standard in journalism. (If memory serves the Columbia School of Journalism put out a report detailing the failures here). Over the course of several months, the story fell apart, it turned out to be a complete fabrication. And Rolling Stone was sued, and had to pay out. I can imagine Rolling Stone's lawyers advising them not to publish that article without doing some more fact checking, and those lawyers would have been right on the law. But more fact checking also would have been the morally correct thing to do. Even in the case of abuse/rape, defamation law does have a moral point to make - you shouldn't make up stories about being abused/raped and present them as the truth.
Finally, as an ex-lawyer, I unreservedly endorse Alyssa's advice not to take on six figures of debt to go to law school without researching the job market.
When you steal a newspaper from a kiosk, you are taking paper and ink that do not belong to you. The newspaper is harmed because it now has less paper and ink. When you bypass a paywall, the newspaper still has all the same computers and servers that it had before, it hasn't lost any physical object.
When I hear the words "intelligence" and "wisdom", I think of things that are necessarily properties of individual humans, not groups of humans. Yet some of the specifics you list seem to be clearly about groups. So at the very least I would use a different word for that, though I'm not sure which one. I also suspect that work on optimizing group decision making will look rather different from work on optimizing individual decision making, possibly to the point that we should think of them as separate cause areas.
When I think about some of humanities greatest advances in this area, I think of things like probability theory and causal inference and expected values - things that I associate with academic departments of mathematics and economics (and not philosophy). This makes me wonder how nascent this really is?