chaosjevil

That sounds considerably more expensive than Microsoft's usual "embrace, extend, extinguish".

>I posit that one should be afraid of fighting an ant because the ant is weaker than you. The fear in this case is not of being defeated or humiliated, but of being cruel and unkind. So simply, what kind of character are if you can only fight something that is weaker than you?

That's different - that person wouldn't fear the ant like a coward, but take a moral instance against fighting entities weaker than oneself.

>On the other hand, if you choose to climb the harder hill or fight the harder fight (lions, kraken, etc.), that isn't indicative of foolhardiness and neither is it indicative of courage (I agree). It is a simply a fight that befell you and you decided not to roll over and die. I think it is nihilist to fight something that is stronger than you, and you tacitly accept your defeat before you even begin the fight.

I think that courage is only a meaningful attribute to assign to a being when there's an actual choice between fighting and not fighting. In the case of a "fight or die" situation, you don't really have much of a choice.

>Tbh, fights are depressing. I am more inclined to being a fool than a fighter.

Frankly? I hear ya. Ditto, in large part.

The same reasoning could be used with other moral dimensions than coward vs. courageous vs. reckless. I'd argue that it applies to greed; by Aristotle's reasoning the opposite of greed would be making oneself poor, or perhaps lack of care for material possessions. It's a silly argument, in the eyes of someone living in 2023. (Even if it was a rather clever reasoning for those times.)

Contrariwise to your assumption I was not trying to bring a flamewar up, even if feeling the need to point that out.

With that in mind, your silence towards the potential nationalist for doing something that _also_ goes against the spirit of HN* is rather... curious.

*bringing up what's at the very least off-topic trivia (i.e. noise, or "fluff" as Graham would call it).

Nah. It's either the 2nd biggest communication problem, or a side effect of a bigger problem. Depending on how you analyse it.

The biggest communication problem is that you always need to take into account that your reader might be braindead trash. That has two consequences:

1. Unless you expose your full train of thought, expect screeches like "I dun unrurrstand, SPOONFEED ME BASIC REASONING, REEE".

2. Unless you explicitly say something, expect some assumer to claim that you said the opposite. Bonus points if this is due to failure to take context into account, or even notice that the context is missing.

Both consequences have been training writers to idiot-proof their texts with big walls of unnecessary words. And that's the case here.

TL;DR: AI doesn't understand human language prompts, it's just associating specific tokens with specific outputs.

I don't think that the internet is currently dead ("dead" = "bot activity mistaken for human activity greatly surpassing genuinely human activity"), but that this is a real future concern.

One thing to take into account is that current bots suck major balls. Specially when it comes to utterance purpose, and for longer utterances; they fail the Turing test really hard, provided that the one asking "is this a bot or a human?" is able to interpret utterances based on nearby utterances and non-textual information around it. In other words if the internet was dead already we would've noticed it.

And someone might argue "ackshyually, there are more advanced bots that model language on pragmatic levels, you just don't know about them because it's all hidden!". Well, then you get a conspiracy "theory" with its typical appeal to ignorance, not something worth thinking about.

>Web advertisers seem like a classic case of taking miles when given an inch.

I agree. And for me they're also two (!) good examples of tragedy of the commons.

From the side of the advertisers, your ads are only competitive if they're slightly more obnoxious than your competitors, but as you make your ads more obnoxious you're degrading a common resource - the willingness of the public to put up with your crap. Eventually the public says "this is too obnoxious, I'm going to block it".

And, from the side of the sites showing ads, you'll want (or need) the additional money brought by one more ad. But once you do it, you're creating yet another ad space - making the market value of ad spaces a tiny bit cheaper. And as everyone is doing this, the price of ad spaces drops down to the bottom, so you need to include more and more ads on your platform to stay competitive (or even to stay online).

I would expect governments to intervene in those situations. At the end of the day, a government should, among other things, prevent its citizens from making things worse for everyone, when seeking their own interests. Sadly governments aren't big fans of contradicting megacorps like the Ad Sense (from Alphabet) mafia.

The author might call Nichomachean Ethics "ancient"; I'd call it "unrefined".

>Virtue is a state “consisting in a mean,” Aristotle maintains, and this mean “is defined by reference to reason, that is to say, to the reason by reference to which the prudent person would define it.” (For Aristotle, the “mean” represented a point between opposite excesses—for instance, between cowardice and recklessness lay courage.)

The idea of virtue being a mean is an unchecked assumption, from oversimplified matters.

Reusing the example with the cowardice-courage-recklessness triplet: suppose for a moment a fool that acts only when it is not necessary to act; he runs away from an ant, but throws himself into a fight against a pack of lions. The fool in question is, at the same time, coward and reckless, but he is not courageous.

You might say "he's being coward or reckless on different circumstances"; and you'd be right. This shows that there's a second dimension to take into account here, besides "ability to act": it's "ability to detect when to act". And once you do this split, you notice that courage is not a mean between cowardice and recklessness; it's simply the opposite of cowardice, with recklessness having another opposite (let's call it "carefulness").

I'm not too eager to assume that _all_ virtues work like this, but the presence of at least one virtue not behaving this way already shows that Aristotle's "virtue as a mean" concept is flawed and assumptive.

_________________

Another issue; from the book. Aristotle makes an unholy mess of what's good for the individual and what's good for society, around book III; almost like he was preaching "hey if you want happiness/eudaimonia you should have arete/virtue~". Things simply don't work like this on an individual level - you can be the biggest arsehole in the village and still potentially live a happy, meaningful life. Or live in virtue and miserable.

I read it. (Although I wish that I didn't. Reddit exodus is taking its toll on other sites, it seems.)

>A fallacy is saying that something is wrong because of fallacious reasons.

A fallacy is a basic flaw of logic reasoning supporting or ditching a claim, view, statement or position. The post above does it, implicitly, as yourself acknowledged - "I'm not buying it" is still a view - it's ditching a claim because of things unrelated to said claim, like "who said it".

>often deploy the rhetoric (not really a fallacy) that AI is about to doom us all because everything is supposedly so simple (like intelligence) and therefore it’s conceptually simple for a sufficiently advanced (but not that advanced) AI to keep improving itself.

It's both the rhetoric (on a discursive level) and a fallacy (on the logic level): oversimplification. (Although "appeal to my ignorance" sounds funnier.)

>Now how do you respond to someone that just says that things are not complex when in reality things are indeed complex?

Provided that you're talking with a somewhat reasonable person, you say something like "Shit is far more complex than you're pretending that it is.", then highlight a few instances of on-topic complexity that affect the outcome.

Now, if you're talking with braindead trash, things are different. Those things aren't convinced by reason, so you use emotive appeal, even if it's itself a fallacy (you claim something because it makes someone feels good/bad, not due to its truth value). Something like "oh poor thing, complexity hurts your two neurons and your precious, OOOHH SO PRECIOUS! feelings? Too bad! Things won't become MaGiCaLlY simpler if you screech hard enough. Reality does not revolve around your belly."

>A lot of the AI doomerism comes from folks who do not understand the real complexities in making systems which really can function in a fully autonomous way in an environment which is hostile and dynamic.

That's a rather interesting mix of appeal to ignorance and argumentum ad hominem. Two genetic fallacies, together; neither addressing what is said, but instead who says it.

>Evolutionary goals are not easy even with autonomous systems as goal definition is largely defined by societal needs, the environments we stay in and the resources we work with.

Great way to say "I didn't read the article".

The author is not talking about evolutionary _goals_.