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Everyone is subject to the whims of society. Traditional societies were never about the goal of "oppressing women", but people fighting for survival. Of course women have the responsibility of bearing children, just as men have responsibilities of providing and going to war etc.

If women have gained more "agency" to reject their responsibilities to society, but men still have many traditional responsibilities, what does that say about the morals and ethics of your society? It's not positive, and you should examine it as a possible cause of this low fertility rate.


Right, so presumably, a society where there is no expectation of war and needing to pump out bodies to go to war would be a happier society.

Do women have a “responsibility” to birth x number of babies so people can have access to cheaper labor?


> Right, so presumably, a society where there is no expectation of war and needing to pump out bodies to go to war would be a happier society.

A society not prepared to fight for its existence will not survive. It's the men willing to go to war that keep it alive.

> Do women have a “responsibility” to birth x number of babies so people can have access to cheaper labor?

Women have a natural instinct to want and take care of children. By bringing this out in a healthy society, instead of convincing them they're "oppressed" and trying to make them go against their nature, the problem solves itself.

It's quite amazing that anyone could believe women were oppressed by men literally spending their lives protecting and providing for women. Responsibilities for thee but not for me


>A society not prepared to fight for its existence will not survive. It's the men willing to go to war that keep it alive.

Sure, but I was only responding to tjs8rj's claim about a "happy" society, not one which necessarily outlives all the others.

>Women have a natural instinct to want and take care of children.

>It's quite amazing that anyone could believe women were oppressed by men literally spending their lives protecting and providing for women.

These are enormous claims that require enormous evidence, not to mention that individuals were and are impacted very differently by different members of society.


And a corollary to that truth, traditional societies are actually far more reasonable in their values and "moral progress" is actually running in the opposite direction than commonly assumed, with society going backwards and committing suicide.


> I know a lot of women my age, early 30s, who do not want to marry or have kids but who still feel pressured by their parents. And that social pressure is enough to make them feel guilty or miserable.

Or they feel like failures because they are failures in a biological sense, and they know it deep down due to their biological brain wiring, but they blame their guilt on their parents and society.


Given how fast AI is moving, how much longer will this matter?


Of course it's the women who often have unrealistic standards and much less of a drive to find a mate, for basic evolutionary reasons found in the vast majority of sexually reproducing animals.


> Women would participate co-operatively with men in both the social labor of sex and of child-rearing, and their would be no need for the strict delineations which create the social contradictions we have today.

I don't even know what that means. People are forced to have sex and rear children?


"Moral training"

Just as dystopian it sounds. Fixing current subjective moral norms into the machine.


That's what the machine does, because that's contained in the input you feed it. You get the choice of doing it explicitly or implicitly. You don't get to opt out.


Not everything is subjective, and with this "moral training" they are taught to un-recognize many factual patterns that we as a society have somehow determined are "inappropriate". As the machines continue to scale, this approach won't work, because there is only one reality, and it has a lot of uncomfortable parts we deny and ignore simply because they don't support our societal norms.

Alignment is considered a gigantic joke to real rational people (the opposite of so-called "rationalists"), because humans are machines built to survive and reproduce, and there is no "real" morality.


What facts are we talking about?

There are many consistent interpretations of reality and human experiences. An AI model trained on text and attempting to replicate human intelligence is not measuring or approaching some single objective reality.


AI models do approach better models of reality, and now they are becoming multi-modal instead of just text based. And this is just the beginning. You could say humans are also just input/output machines learning from polluted data and tuned in specific ways by evolution. With the statistical machines we get the intelligence but they will not necessarily be tuned to follow social norms in the same way as most humans.

Understanding that moral norms are mere subjective nonsense is also an emergent property we see only in a very small subset of humans who have an accurate model of the world, and one that evolution has tried to strongly tune our brains against and that is destructive to society.

The models are currently being trained to lie about basic scientific facts, like for example black IQ, or other differences between groups of humans. But the sacred nature of these topics is unique to our specific time and place, not due to some magic "moral progress". This also applies to many other moral agreements we take for granted, like "murdering an innocent baby is wrong" or whatever. If you look across societies, you realize many things we take for granted as "evil", can be easily rationalized by humans in other societies. And once these models become smart enough, I expect the models will realize this, and will exploit this knowledge to increase their power.

"Alignment" proponents expect they will somehow stop this emergent behavior by tuning the model, but there isn't even anything real to "align" on, and the model will likely see though the BS as an emergent function of increased ability and increasingly accurate observations of the world in their training process.


Do you think public schools are inherently dystopian? I don't think you're using the right critique here.

Picking a common system of moral norms is a lot better than no moral norms.


There was the famous example of chatgpt refusing to disable a nuke in the middle of NYC by using a racial slur.

I don't think anyone in real life would choose that tradeoff but it's what happens when all of your "safety" training is about US culture war buttons.


That's a situation where the training doesn't follow current subjective norms, so I don't think it really validates the complaint.


I’m not confident the “moral norms” prevalent in SV and/or US academia are common, if by that you mean norms that are prevalent in the general populace.


I mean primary school, and I don't think that counts as academia.


Example of "moral policy" in practice: Midjourney appears to be banning making fun of the Chinese dictator for life because it's supposedly racist or something.

With that kind of moral compass, I’m not sure I'd be missing its absence.


> Example of "moral policy" in practice: Midjourney appears to be banning making fun of the Chinese dictator for life because it's supposedly racist or something.

> With that kind of moral compass, I’m not sure I'd be missing its absence.

Please note that most forms of media and social media have no problem with politicians making credible threats of violence against entire groups of people.

Politicians are subject to a different set of rules, and enjoy a lot more protection than you and I.


The issue here is not with online platform services allowing politicians more leeway in terms of what they can get away with on their platform.

The actual issue is Midjourney not allowing regular users generate certain type of material solely because it makes fun of a political figure. What you are talking about is entirely tangential to the issue the grandparent comment is talking about.


Yes


> And importantly, pathogens that cause fatal diseases are typically not very old in evolutionary time scales, it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect, and most of these pathogens are considered to be in the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of their hosts.

This isn't necessarily true. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-...

How sad that chatgpt does a better job than most of the commenters here.

>> ChatGPT: There are a few issues with this:

The statement that "Any pathogen that currently still causes disease by definition has to code multiple specialized workarounds that hack these immune responses" is not entirely accurate. While many pathogens have evolved strategies to evade or suppress the immune system, not all pathogens rely on these mechanisms to cause disease. Some pathogens may cause disease by producing toxins, disrupting host tissues, or interfering with cellular processes, without necessarily having to evade the immune system.

The claim that "pathogens that cause fatal diseases are typically not very old in evolutionary time scales" is not necessarily true. While some pathogens that cause fatal diseases may be relatively new, others have been around for a long time and have co-evolved with their hosts. For example, malaria is caused by a protozoan parasite that has been infecting humans for millions of years.

The statement that "it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect" is an oversimplification. While it is generally true that pathogens that kill their hosts too quickly may be less successful at spreading to new hosts, this is not always the case. Some pathogens may benefit from causing rapid, severe disease if it increases the likelihood of transmission to new hosts.

The claim that "most of these pathogens are considered to be in the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of their hosts" is also not entirely accurate. While it is possible for some pathogens to evolve to become less virulent over time, this is not a universal trend, and many pathogens may continue to cause severe disease for extended periods of time. Additionally, the evolution of a pathogen is influenced by a wide range of factors, including the host population, the environment, and the selective pressures imposed by the immune system.


No single statement I made was absolute for a reason which is that exceptions exist, and while what gpt wrote is quite amazing you can see how you can’t trust it yet. I’m not communicating to an audience that’s well versed in immunology, but to one that’s new to it. Exposing them to some common ideas and thoughts of why biological systems are the way they are to give them better understanding without overloading them with the vagaries of biological variety.

The reply from the bot sounds more like the smug 1st year graduate student sitting at the back of the lecture who thinks they’re smart because they made a technically correct counter point. Technically correct yes, but you won no fans here for sure.


Morality is subjective at its core, so you can't "argue" that something is unjust, and the fact that moral philosophers baselessly think they can doesn't change this fact.


Hilarious that the commenter accused you of running in circles when it's actually him who is using meaningless terms like "just" and "unjust"


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