One of them is blue and the other one is red. Umm… anything else?

Right, they’re asking to cut taxes because the purpose of taxes is to redistribute wealth.

I’m saying WoD failed to stop drugs. Failed, as in, was supposed to and didn’t. Was there a secondary purpose of incarcerating black people? Sure, could be. Is it racist to want to get rid of drugs? Nah.

Redistributing wealth by printing money is pretty stupid. The wealthy don’t have money, because there are better investments. This is all based on the myth that inflation is necessary for society to function; that you need to push people to get rid of their money. Japan went like 20 years without inflation – not saying they don’t have problems, but to my eyes none of those problems are caused by a lack of inflation, and the typical person did not complain that inflation was too low. Redistributing wealth by taxing the rich is based.

My Occam’s Razor is, “problems are hard.” Besides, if you believe the US empire is failing overall, that doesn’t seem compatible with every individual system within it operating as intended despite appearing to be failing by all observable metrics.

You can’t print money to pay for everything. Who’s going to accept that money in exchange for goods and services? Aquaman? If somebody told you that the government can print money forever, they were lying (or at least had never heard of Zimbabwe).

Perhaps we can split “purpose” into “intended purpose” and “emergent purpose,” that is, the purpose that can be derived retroarctively from observing its function and modelling the system as an agent unto itself. For instance, I think you’re conflating the intended purpose of the War on Drugs with its emergent purpose – can you really deny that it was created with the intention of obliterating drugs? Seems conspiratorial to me, given the breadth of support the program had. But I could say that its emergent purpose became incarcerating black people due to flawed design and lack of oversight. And of course, this flawed design and lack of oversight was permitted to exist due to institutional racism in the meta layer (society and the government overall).

Can you think of any system that is failing in its purpose?

In terms of ability to draw a horse though, I’m more like the right side and AI is more like the left lol

So tempted to send this to my gf but I’m going to get roasted alive. 🏳️‍🌈

(Sorry for the wall of text!)

Yes, printing more money for hospitals would liquefy the whole economy into jello. We can’t solve our problems by printing more money. Inflation is very bad, in particular it’s bad for the working class who don’t have the luxury of having non-monetary assets.

“Why fund this and not that”

This is the very thing I raised as an argument against TPOASIWID. If a hospital isn’t saving enough cancer patients, it’s because it doesn’t have enough money. Now, money doesn’t explain everything of course – perhaps there are some racially-linked diseases that are underfunded, and here “TPOASIWID” serves an explanation, but a rather bad one because it doesn’t actually explain anything. A better explanation might be “it’s due to institutional racism,” or “it’s simply an oversight,” or “the technology to cure this disease doesn’t exist yet” – and then you might look at why it doesn’t exist and you’ll be looking at something other than the hospital. “The purpose of the hospital is to have institutional racism” doesn’t make sense at all – it’s the purpose of institutional racism to infect the hospital, and the purpose of leftists to purge institutional racism.

“why do we collect taxes instead of letting inflation do the exact same thing?”

This presents the best case for TPOASIWID in my opinion. That’s an interesting question too. (I suppose the answer is that taxes benefit the working class of course, whereas inflation benefits the wealthy, who hardly have any money when compared to their investments.) But I don’t see how saying “The purpose of taxes is what they do” leads one to querying about inflation. I’m not an expert about the economy, but taxes seem to me like they more or less do the thing they’re supposed to be doing so TPOASIWID does seem to match here, at least when compared to “why not just use inflation for taxation.” (Neither of these methods will touch tax-averse autocrats of course.)

Does it match because TPOASIWID is good at prediction? No – it simply discounts the possibility that a system could be failing, so of course it looks accurate when a system is apparently not failing. It’s a brazen assertion that whoever is running the world is doing things exactly right and simply can’t fail. This seems insane to me because things are hard. Take the USA’s “War on Drugs” – in my view and probably that of most people, it was a spectacular failure in retrospect. What was the purpose of the war on drugs? Well to answer that we should look at who wanted it to happen and why. In my opinion, it was spurred on by many people who just really wanted to eradicate drugs, and didn’t have ulterior motives. But TPOASIWID just leads one to conspiracy theories: since the War on Drugs basically just got a lot of black people thrown in jail, then surely all those people who claim to hate drugs must actually just hate black people, and not drugs at all! After all, if they actually hated drugs, then WoD would have been successful.

But I’ll admit that if you don’t know the purpose of a system, figuring out what it does is a good place to start.

The government can actually fund everything and just print more dollars to make up the difference.

That is simply not true. The government may print arbitrarily much money, but due to inflation that will not necessarily fund everything. Who would accept worthless money in exchange for services?

If “TPOASIWID” actually raised further questions, that would be very useful! But it does not raise further questions. When I see somebody say that phrase, I assume they have no interest in learning more about the system as they already have the only answer they ever need. Who would say “TPOASIWID” and then go on to do a cost-benefit analysis? It is not the first basic step toward a critique – it’s the last.

I think you’re describing an heuristic for predicting how the hospital behaves as part of a larger dynamic system. For instance, the Canadian government makes the trade-off on where to reduce funding; it can pull tax dollars from hospitals and put it towards something else if it appears that doing so would increase the likelihood of re-election. So I assume you’re saying, the hospital saves just enough lives that it doesn’t create outrage that we’re not funding the hospital enough. (Or, perhaps, that the expected marginal cost:outrage tradeoff is not lower than any other place the government can sink tax dollars.) I think we ought at least agree here.

What I don’t get is why you describe this as “the purpose of the hospital.” I would say it like this: it’s the purpose of the government to identify the pareto frontier of where to put tax dollars (this may benefit some members of society more than others, and you could perhaps even convince me that’s its purpose); but it’s the purpose of the hospital to provide the best reduction in public outrage per dollar tax money received as possible – or in other words, to save as many lives as it can.

After the revolution, should we really tear down the hospital because it can’t meet our new government’s demands? Or is the hospital perfunctory and the system that it’s part of to blame? This is what is muddled, IMO, by “the purpose of the system is what it does.”

Wow! An easy answer to every problem. I think you might actually have a semantic stop-sign; an answer to everything that suppresses curiosity. Why isn’t the hospital curing more patients? “That’s not its purpose!”

The purpose of the hospital is to cure patients as cost-effectively as it can. We don’t have enough doctors in Canada, not because that is by design, but because we are failing as a country and could do better.

The internet was obviously not created with that intention, but social media may have that purpose.

Anyway, what I love about this phrase, the purpose of a system is what it does, is that it implies there’s no point in trying to fix anything. There’s no point in even checking if there is anything that can be fixed or improved; there is no point in separating the good stuff from the bad when we burn everything down; the only way to improve anything is revolution. That’s different of course from my perspective – revolution can fix the worst problems but there still exist other problems that can be solved without such a dicy method.

Seems fatalist to me. Take your preferred system of government, introduce on flaw, and critics will say the flaw is intentional rather than proposing ways to fix it. Also, the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.

it must be there for a reason

This is why I can’t take “The purpose of a system is what it does” seriously

Well I’m not claiming that an AI-apocalypse is inevitable, just that it’s possible enough we should start worrying about it now. As for the reason to believe it would happen – isn’t that covered by (2)? If you believe that (2) will occur with near-100% certainty, then that would be the impetus.

Ah – I was being sarcastic when I said “if we bully him enough, the genocide will stop.” Perhaps I should have added /s.

is that relevant

If we bully him enough, the genocide will stop.

Well, the probability you have for the AI apocalypse should ultimately be the product of those three numbers. I’m curious which of those is the one you think is so unlikely.

Please assign probabilities to the following (for the next 3 decades):

1. probability an AI smarter than any human on any intellectual task a human can do might come to exist (superintelligence);
2. given (1), probability it decides to kill all humans to achieve its goals (misaligned);
3. given (2), probability it is successful at killing all humans;

bonus: given 1 and 2, probability that we don’t even notice it wants to kill us, e.g. because we don’t know how to understand what it’s thinking.

Since the AI is smarter than me, I only need to propose one plausible method by which it could exterminate all humans. It can come up with a method at least as good as me, most likely something much better though. The typical answer here would be that it bio-engineers a lethal virus which is initially harmless (to avoid detection), but responds to some trigger like the introduction of a certain chemical or maybe a strong radio signal. If it’s very smart, and has a very good understanding of bioengineering, it should be able to produce a virus like this by paying a laboratory to e.g. perform some CRISPR operations on some existing bacteria strain (or even just mix some chemicals together if Sagan turns out to be right about bioengineering) and mail a sample somewhere. It can wait until everyone is infected before triggering the strain.

The reason it’s always just around the corner is because there is very strong evidence we’re approaching the singularity. Why do you sound sarcastic saying this? What probability would you assign to an AI apocalypse in the next three decades?

Geoff Hinton absolutely kicked things off. Everybody else had given up on neural nets for image recognition, but his breakthrough renewed interest throughout the world. We wouldn’t have deepdreaming slugdogs without him.

It should not be surprising that most people in the field of AI are not predicting armageddon, since it would be harmful to their careers to do so. Hinton is also not predicting the apocalypse – he’s saying 10-20% chance, which is actually a prediction that it won’t happen.