I don't believe any of the founders believed they were creating a "true democracy," or even that it would be desirable. Read Federalist Number 10. The modern fetishism of democracy will lead bad places.
Yes, pretty much all claims of democracy come from the 20th century. I hardly think we were a more functional country at the time, though—it's only through the miracle of rampant exploitation we didn't all just immediately start killing each other. Thank god for the civil war to kick us to continue booting up a democracy.
One day we'll finish the job, I swear. Pinky-promise.
It's because this particular advisor has the full backing of the duly-elected President. It's absolutely wild to me that HN refuses to acknowledge this fact. This idea that the civil servants should defy the President (and his advisor) is substantiating the deep state critiques from the right.
As a Canadian I disagree entirely. Our prime minister Stephen Harper years ago muzzled scientists who had time sensitive, extremely pertinent research to act on. After he was replaced, that research was immediately put to use in policy making. Throughout his term, scientists in the public service spoke out about what was happening.
If justice is important to a democracy, these scientists did the right thing. That takes real courage.
I see no difference in what’s happening in the American public service. The processes occurring now are not democratic in nature. Musk’s role is extremely unorthodox and only ostensibly voted for ‘by the people’.
In the weeks since Trump took office, I see no hard evidence to support any kind of deep state corruption. I see inefficiency, and yet, I see that in how DOGE dismantles things as well. I see it in every organization I work in, in every industry, in every home. It’s inevitable.
Yes, but to the degree you believe in "democracy," then you believe the duly-elected President gets to come in and make changes, provided he's acting within the scope of the law. Trump specifically ran on the DOGE/Musk platform/strategy. It was a major component of his closing argument. This is, in fact, the exercise of popular will -- that is, "democracy."
Civil servants ultimately work for the President. That's how it works. There have been many reductions in force prompted by Presidents over time (my own grandfather took one in the seventies). I appreciate there is some disagreement about whether Trump is tripping over any specific laws, but to the degree he's not (the courts will answer that), then he's well within his right to take the direct advice of his advisors, and to act within the scope of his authorities. The President also has the power to get access to even the most confidential information (how could he not?), and to share that with his advisors who have the requisite security clearances (which in many cases he can dictate).
I'm just stunned by all the hand wringing about access to "government data." They're government employees!
I’m just not convinced homeless drug addicts are on the street because they’re shy of a house payment. The ones I’ve know have wound up there because they became drug addicts, and that addiction drove them into the abyss, exploiting family and friends and every relationship until they’re under a bridge.
We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.
> We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.
The agenda for during my adult life has been cutting services for needy (public housing, mental health, etc). Since we seem to agree that homelessness is getting worse isn't it also rational to agree that cutting these services is, at the very least, not helping.
I don't think it's true that funding for services for the homeless have been consistently cut in Chicagoland (or San Francisco) during your adult lifetime. In fact, I'm not even sure that would be true for public housing --- again, a different problem than the one we're talking about --- I think if you look you might find that we spend more on housing assistance now, in constant dollars, than we did in 1980.
Sure, and all cities of all sizes have crime hotspots, but even the rich transplant epicenter, Roma, has a crime rate of about 8 per 100 [1]. That’s well above the SF average, which itself is skewed by a few high-crime outliers like the Tenderloin.
The same is true with San Francisco, even if it isn’t as big. We could cherry pick compare the best neighborhood of Mexico City against the worst neighborhood of SF to falsify a claim that Mexico City is safer than San Francisco.
Nah — usually they decided to do meth and the rest followed. I used to be pretty libertarian about drugs. Victimless crime and all. But in the last ten years, it’s become clear to me that they exploit fundamental human weaknesses. TBH - I’ve become a much bigger fan of the war on drugs, and very heavy penalties for dealers.
Cuz they like it. I’ve known plenty of meth heads in my life despite never trying it myself. Most of them took it because it was powerful, cheap, and they liked the way they felt on it. These were people with decent jobs or trade jobs and it fucked a few of them out of work and I know one girl who died because of her abuse.
In the war against drugs, you're losing very, very, badly.
What, though, is 'pretty libertarian' about drugs? I ask, 'cus every professed-libertarian I've met doesn't seem to be very clear in their arguments about anything really.
This is always the Motte & Bailey of the left. "Equity" doesn't mean you recruit better. It means when your recruitment efforts fail to produce the outcomes you want, you lower the barriers on the basis of skin color. That's the racism that America is presently rejecting, and very forcefully.
It's because people see the manifestation of racism implicit in these policies affecting their daily lives. And they're done with it, no matter how much the elites hand-wave "what's the big deal?" The insufferability runs entirely the other direction.
I'm not so sure. The acceptance of mass migration is rooted in many of the same principles, and push-back on that issue is fundamentally reshaping the political landscape in the UK and Europe.
The rejection of woke ideals goes well beyond the US. The Japanese people also hate elements of woke getting into their culture and they don't even speak English.
It thought you were going to explain how "woke" is a bad thing, and how Japanese were counter progressive stuff.
Instead, you give me two links to the current fascist White House propaganda - which makes me wonder if for you, woke is the exact opposite of "christian"?
And a link about a video game which is... related how to woke/progress or conservative/fascism?
What's peculiar is that we are in a situation where we hold so exactly opposite views about... life. Indoctrinated? I could return the exact same thing to you, from the perspective of someone whose families saw the exact same script play thrice: in Italy, in France and in Germany.
> Also, you need help because you are clearly indoctrinated. Wokeism is not Progressive and Conservatism is not Fascism.
No, clearly, conservatism is not fascism. I come from a European, conservatist family, milieu, education; strict, aristocratic heritage (whatever that means today), catholic. It's not an argument of authority, but I do know pretty well, from the inside, what conservatism is, the pretty parts and the ugly parts. And I know what disguises as such and is not. Fascism is of a twisted one of that kind.
However, you visibly haven't noticed, western conservative minds (in the "West" at least) have been cleverly and patiently hijacked by a fascist, white supremacist ideology that has found luck in some technocratic and aristocratic circles, without which it would have no fund, no tools. Precisely what some fought against to death 80 years ago, they are embracing today. And it is no pure accident.
All that conservatives typically value (for short, Christian, patriotic, traditional values) has been used as bait to lure you and others into giving power to something that is the exact opposite, while thinking in good faith that this is good strategy. Twisting actual facts into their own narrative. Raising segments of the society against each other, rather than trying to reconcile and pacify. And unfortunately, given the order in which the scripts plays out, you may not have the time to be sorry at the time they will turn against you, because all those who could have spoken for you will be gone by then.
What an example? You gave me one:
> If "serving every person with equal dignity and respect", "reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work", and "prevent the hiring of individuals based on their race, sex, or religion" are "fascist propaganda" then you need help.
This is double-speak. You take it at face value, of course it's positive and desirable. I would definitely support that. Only, if you look at who's talking, what their history is, what the tone of their speech is, what their skills are, you cannot NOT see what the inter text is.
If you look deep, you'll notice it all leads back to a single first country which is decades ahead of "us" in strategic storytelling, and mass opinion manipulation. The damage to democracy is fast, abyssal, and it will take several decades to fix, if ever.
It will never serve the American people. That's a delusion so enormous it's difficult for most of us in Europe to understand. We saw the exact same script play with the Brexit, and they fell for it (although not as bad as it was planned).
The open question is, was this country capable alone of this level of long-time strategic thinking and coordination, or is it helped by a third one which has mastered this type of thinking for much longer?
All the damage that americans are going to face from now on, as well as probably Europe (Brexit was part of it, Hungary fell for it, so did Italia, France is hardly avoiding a far-right authoritarian take over in 2 years, and so on), is the logical consequence of that hijack in motion. The far-rights already had a rise, but they have seen massive financial and logistical support for the past 10 years.
All I can say is that I'm sorry you bought in the Republicans (or whatever is behind) propaganda and hope you'll stay open to the conversation, wherever it happens on your side, and come back some day from the very, very dark place that is ahead.
There's definitely deep difference in the understanding that comes from a USA person and from a European person. "wokeism" is a clever made-up tag, again, because, as it's not a definite notion, you can swipe a lot of things under it, as a lot of you have done with "socialism" or "communism". But it likely means actually nothing at all.
As for "woke", as it means a different thing historically, and is more difficult to take over by the far-right, I guess we don't put the same value into it.
Gosh, you have no idea how far I am from the left in France. And how far I am from the far-right too. It’s not even on the same axis… but to chose between Le Pen (Putin puppet, as is Trump) or Melenchon (Putin puppet as well), I know who I chose because of the team that goes with it, and the balance it gives to the institutions and which one will allow for a return to democracy and which one will trigger a bloody civil war.
Visibly, your refusal to consider a different point of view, your incapacity to argue for your own leads you down a single possible path and Trump gave you the perfect excuses and means for it.
Your perception of history is totally skewed from your lens.
Please don't cross into breaking the site guidelines yourself, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. It only makes things worse.
People who at one point in the past related to the Democrat Party and the Left but no longer do through no particular changes of their own.
>Gosh, you have no idea how far I am from the left in France. And how far I am from the far-right too.
Indeed I have no idea how far you are from the Far Right: You are quite literally calling liberal values like equality "fascist". You are at least so far from the Far Right that ostensibly Center and Left values are Far Right for you.
You need to realize how absurd you are being.
>Visibly, your refusal to consider a different point of view, your incapacity to argue for your own leads you down a single possible path and Trump gave you the perfect excuses and means for it. Your perception of history is totally skewed from your lens.
You are projecting your own behavior upon me (and others). Get some help, my dude.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. Not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Just to clarify, when you said "this account" did you mean me or the person I was conversing with?
EDIT: Seeing as I can post a comment I'm going to guess you meant the latter, but I would appreciate clarification if you don't mind.
EDIT the second: It seems I am shadowbanned, so I'll leave an email I guess. It saddens me that an American entity (Hacker News) doesn't support American values, though.
I meant you. You broke the site guidelines badly and repeatedly, and we'd asked you more than once to stop doing this.
I did post a moderation reply to the person you were interacting with (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43042302), but they didn't break the guidelines nearly as badly as you did.
In no uncertain terms, the only guideline I've violated as far as I'm aware is the one stipulating no political battles. As far as that, I defer to your judgment with one contention: Everyone else who were and are also engaging in that behaviour should be similarly reprimanded.
As I've written in my email, I've noticed a significant uptick in political threads and subthreads over the past month for fairly obvious reasons. If you are that adamant about the guideline, and that is your right, I hope you police all such (sub)threads much more vigorously in the future.
In closing, I'm just sad at the true colors of this community. I take supporting racism personally as a Japanese-American, and all the other positions like supporting fraud, wanton waste, and selective enforcement of laws (aka social justice) are downright absurd. We will inevitably have differences in our beliefs, but I expected better from a community of hackers and entrepreneurs/investors who would presumably support liberal (libre) values and fiscal responsibility.
"you are clearly not worth the oxygen you consume" is obviously against the site guidelines. Ditto for "Please get help, you are indoctrinated and incapable of holding a useful conversation", "You are projecting your own behavior upon me (and others). Get some help, my dude", and so on.
USA-style Republican today? The thing is… if they were upholding the Constitution, right now, I could name one.
Frankly, all that emerges from the brouhaha coming from the USA sounds like The Onion headlines on steroids. Looks like the alternate reality movies from the Man in the High Castle. Unreal.
McCain could have saved something in the party back then, but the party chose otherwise…
And seeing how a conversation is not even possible anymore…
How does one rationalize electing these people? How does one get radicalized to that point? The very same playbook is run, again, and again. And it never resulted in peace and harmony through history. Never.
I find it exceedingly unlikely that if the US got rid of all its nukes, that China would too. I also find the inverse unlikely. This is not how state power (or even humans) have ever worked. Ever.
Nukes are in control of the ruling class in perpetuity. AGI has the potential to overturn the current political order and remake it into something entirely unpredictable. Why the hell would an authoritarian regime want that? I strongly suspect China would take a way out of the AGI race if a legitimate one was offered.
I agree. Westerners, particularly Americans and Brits, are comfortable or at least reconciled with drastic societal change. China and Russia have seen too many invasions, revolutions, peasant rebellions and ethnic-autonomy rebellions (each of which taking millions of lives) to have anything like the same comfort level that Westerners have.
Oh, I agree that neither power wants the peasants to have them. But make no mistake -- both governments want them, and desperately. There is no universe where there is a multi-lateral agreement to actually eliminate these tools. With loitering munitions and drone swarms, they are ALREADY key components of nation-state force projection.
I'm old enough to remember the public debate about human cloning and human germ-line engineering. In the 1970s some argued like you are arguing here, but those technologies have been stopped world-wide for about 5 decades now and counting because no researcher is willing to work in the field and no one is willing to fund the work because of reputational, legal and criminal-prosecution risk.
> those technologies have been stopped world-wide for about 5 decades now and counting because no researcher is willing to work in the field
That's not true. I worked in the field of DNA analysis for 6.5 years and there is definitely a consensus that DNA editing is closer than the horizon. Just look at CRISPR gene editor [0]. Crude, but "works".
Your DNA, even if you've never submitted it, is already available using shadow data (think Facebook style shadow profiles but for DNA) from the people related to you who have.
Engineering humans strikes me as something different than engineering weapons systems. Maybe as evidence, my cousin works in the field for one of the major defense contractors. Please trust that there are already thousands of engineers working on these problems in the US. Almost certainly hundreds of thousands more world-wide. This is definitely not a genie you put back in the bottle. AI clone wars sound "sci-fi" -- they are decidedly now just "sci."
Given the compute and energy requirements to train & run current SOTA models, I think the current political rulers are more likely to have control of the first AGI.
AGI would then be a very effective tool for maintaining the current authoritative regime.
There is a strain of AI research and development that is focused on helping governments surveil and spy, but that is not the strain being pursued by OpenAI, Anthropic, et al and is not the strain that presents the big risk of human non-survival.
What bearing does that have on China's interest in developing AGI? Does the risk posed by OpenAI et al. mean that China would not use AI as a tool to advance their self interest?
Or are you saying that the risks from OpenAI et al. will come to fruition before we need to worry about China's AI use? That still wouldn't prevent China from pursuing AI up until that happens.
I am still not convinced that there is a policy which can prevent AI from developing outside of the US with high probability.
> I am still not convinced that there is a policy which can prevent AI from developing outside of the US with high probability.
Suppose, hypothetically, there was a very simple as-yet-unknown action, doable by anyone who has common unrestricted household chemicals, that would destroy the world. Suppose we know the general type of action, but not the specific action, yet. Suppose that people are actively researching trying actions in that family, and going "welp, world not destroyed yet, let's keep going".
How do you proceed? What do you do to stop that from happening? I'm hoping your answer isn't "decide there's no policy that can prevent this, give up".
- there were a range of expert opinions that P(destroy-the-world) < 100 AND
- the chemical could turn lead into gold AND
- the chemical would give you a militaristic advantage over your adversaries AND
- the US were in the race and could use the chemical to keep other people from making / using the the chemical
Then I think we'd be in the same situation as we are with AI: stopping it isn't really a choice, we need to do the best we can with the hand we've been dealt.
> there were a range of expert opinions that P(destroy-the-world) < 100
I would hope that it would not suffice to say "not a 100% chance of destroying the world". Because there's a wide range of expert opinions saying values in the 1-99% range (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P(doom) for sample values), and none of those values are even slightly acceptable.
But sure, by all means stipulate all the things you said; they're roughly accurate, and comparably discouraging. I think it's completely, deadly wrong to think that "race to find it" is safer than "stop everyone from finding it".
Right now, at least, the hardware necessary to do training runs is very expensive and produced in very few places. And the amount of power needed is large on an industrial-data-center scale. Let's start there. We're not yet at the point where someone in their basement can train a new frontier model. (They can run one, but not train one.)
Ok, I can imagine a domestic policy like you describe. Through the might and force of the US government, I can see this happening in the US (after considerable effort).
But how do you enforce something like that globally? When I say "not really possible" I am leaving out "except by excessive force, up to and including outright war".
For the reasons I've mentioned above, lots of people around the world will want this technology. I haven't seen an argument for how we can guarantee that everyone will agree with your level of "acceptable" P(doom). So all we are left with is "bombing the datacenters", which, if your P(doom) is high enough, is internally consistent.
I guess what it comes down to is: my P(doom) for AI developed by the US is less than my P(doom) from the war we'd need to stop AI development globally.
OK, it sounds like we've reached a useful crux. And, also, much appreciation for having a consistent argument that actually seriously considers the matter and seems to share the premise of "minimize P(doom)" (albeit by different means), rather than dismissing it; thank you. I think your conclusion follows from your premises, and I think your premises are incorrect. It sounds like you agree that my conclusion follows from my premises, and you think my premises are incorrect.
I don't consider the P(destruction of humanity) of stopping larger-than-current-state-of-the-art frontier model training (not all AI) to be higher than that of stopping the enrichment of uranium. (That does lead to conflict, but not the destruction of humanity.) In fact, I would argue that it could potentially be made lower, because enriched uranium is restricted on a hypocritical "we can have it but you can't" basis, while frontier AI training should be restricted on a "we're being extremely transparent about how we're making sure nobody's doing it here either" basis.
(There are also other communication steps that would be useful to take to make that more effective and easier, but those seem likely to be far less controversial.)
If I understand your argument correctly, it sounds like any one of three things would change your mind: either becoming convinced that P(destruction of humanity) from AI is higher than you think it is, or becoming convinced that P(destruction of humanity) from stopping larger-than-current-state-of-the-art frontier model training is lower than you think it is, or becoming convinced that nothing the US is doing is particularly more likely to be aligned (at the "don't destroy humanity" level) than anyone else.
I think all three of those things are, independently, true. I suspect that one notable point of disagreement might be the definition of "destruction of humanity", because I would argue it's much harder to do that with any standard conflict, whereas it's a default outcome of unaligned AGI. (I also think there are many, many, many levers available in international diplomacy before you get to open conflict.)
(And, vice versa, if I agreed that all three of those things were false, I'd agree with your conclusion.)
That's just not true, though. LLMs are the perfect spies and censors, and any totalitarian state worth its salt is going to want them just for this reason alone.
