I am software engineer, and the coding LLM we have is absolutely capable of doing a bunch of tasks you’d give to a new grad.

That’s not the take-home here. We should regulate large companies, but as ever, individual choices both have direct effects on the environment, and indirect effects which influence the behaviour of a small number of more powerful organisations. Also important is that individual choices in the political realm influence what regulations get made, so we’re never absolved of a responsibility to the environment.

The take-home for me is that the government is using long-discredited statistics relating storage to water usage. Stored emails don’t increase water usage by an appreciable percentage.

The ruling makes sense as it is based on an assumption that can’t be demonstrated. But hopefully some big, high profile website gets sufficiently fucked or pissed off by the law that it blocks the UK/gets blocked by the UK.

Unfortunately the server I use as a VPN is in France which also has some insane rules.

Is there a similar poll for political decisions and outcomes ?

Not that I know of. That’s why I’m transferring by analogy from other walks of life.

Outside of hyperbolous scenarios i think honesty is not the default in a situation where it doesn’t have a social/survival impact.

All the research I am aware of - including what I referenced in the previous comment, is that people are honest by default, except for a few people who lie a lot. Boris Johnson is a serial liar and clearly falls into that camp.

If honesty were not the default, why would we believe what anyone has to say in situations where they have an incentive to lie, which is often? Why are such a small proportion of people criminals and fraudsters when for a lot of crimes, someone smart and cautious has a very low chance of being caught?

The evolutionary argument goes like this: social animals have selection pressure for traits that help the social group, because the social group contains related individuals, as well as carrying memetically inheritable behaviours. This means that the most successful groups are the ones that work well together. A group first of all has an incentive to punish individuals who act selfishly to harm the group - this will mean the group contains mostly individuals who, through self interest, will not betray the group. But a group which doesn’t have to spend energy finding and punishing traitorous individuals because it doesn’t contain as many in the first place will do even better. This creates a selection pressure behind mere self interest.

In practice i think that only happens in the lower stakes, once you start pointing at people with wealth and power that rule quickly changes from “call it out and we’ll punish the offender” to “call it out and we’ll punish you for pointing it out and as a deterrent to others who might do the same”.

Powerful grifters try to protect themselves yes, but who got punished for pointing out that Boris is a serial liar? Have you read what the current government has said about the previous one? :P

As a society we generally hate that kind of behaviour. Society as a whole does not protect wealth and power; wealth and power forms its own group which tries to protect itself.

I can say with full confidence i absolutely do not care if they believe it, or if they don’t, makes zero difference to me.

If a politician(or politicians) wants to run some shenanigans on PPE contracts, netting their friends x millions of pounds, it care not a whit if they believe in the general correctness of conservatism.

You should care because it entirely colours how you interact with political life. “Shady behaviour” is about intent as well as outcome, and we are talking in this thread about shady behaviour, and hence about intent.

Can i prove it’s a majority, probably not and it seems like a lot of effort so I’m not going to, but I’ll wait while you provide the majority of examples proving incompetence over malice.

What’s an area where something can be done maliciously or by accident? Car crashes? Workplace injury? Incorrect tax claims? Taking something from a shop? All of these are, to my understanding (and with decreasing confidence, but all have evidence - crime stats for the first, to, HMRC estimates and this Ipsos poll respectively) more likely to be accidental than malicious. To me this is a general principle: human beings are social animals and have an instinct to be agreeable and cooperative, to live within socially-agreed rules, to tell the truth and not to fuck people over. Those who break the rules are the exception - otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense to have rules and to have society.

So my background assumption is that people are honest. Seeing examples of people being dishonest doesn’t really change this background assumption much, because the nature of being in a society is that we point out and emphasise the times when people don’t abide by its rules; we have to use more robust methods to estimate its prevalance.

You yourself mentioned corruption, and again the kickbacks and favours are well established.

Kickbacks to politicians in the UK are comparatively tiny though. Enough to motivate someone who’s already a grifter, but not enough to cause anyone but the extraordinarily stupid to be motivated by getting them.

You pushed back on this before but I genuinely think that the reason people think otherwise is because they just can’t believe that (for example) Tories actually believe that the country would work better by spending less on public services and benefits. The only remaining explanation is kickbacks by the direct beneficiaries of these policies. Even if your logic isn’t as formalised as that, I still think that on some level that is the feeling that makes you ready to believe that Tory politicians are so unlike the population at large - that is, massively more dishonest.

Some politicians (like BoJo) have genuinely been caught lying with high confidence and high frequency, and so this baseline assumption doesn’t apply to them.

If state something is my opinion (or it’s clear that it is) then i should provide the information i can to show my working and how i came to that opinion, that gives others the opportunity to examine my reasoning and thought process and then perhaps question parts of it they disagree with.

It’s about confidence. People in this thread expressed with no hint of doubt that the politicians who wrote the legislation did it for kickbacks from big tech. This is in spite of the fact that they have no direct evidence of this and it’s implausible on account of big tech being unhappy with this law. This isn’t simply healthy skepticism, it’s the same old useless cynicism.

Politics is not the realm of headcanon I am legitimately unsure how you came to the conclusion that a discussion around politics (especially modern politics) has no room for the inclusion of the public opinion and perception of the politicians.

The context was that you can’t just air your personal fan-fiction about politicians’ motivations and personal beliefs as if they were something more than that, so an excuse that “it’s just an opinion” doesn’t wash when the video linked by OP is putting this idea (that the law was written at the behest of big tech) forward seriously.

By all means have your justified beliefs about politicians. But so far the only politician you’ve actually mentioned convincingly as being corrupt is Boris Johnson. You haven’t, for example, leveled any attacks at Oliver Dowden who was the Minister for DCMS at the time of passing the Act. His register of interests does not mention any gifts or meetings with big tech firms.

I can list examples of politicians promising things and then backtracking or making decisions that benefit them

That proves it’s possible, not that it happened this time.

Indeed, and by that rationale there’s no basis for saying this is a good idea with regard, specifically, to the protection of children.

No, just because something is not objective does not mean that claims about at are baseless. Do you think that the article here “has no basis for saying it’s a bad idea”? Surely not. Politics is, more often than not, about questions that don’t have objective answers. You say there’s a provable downside, but it’s not actually provable; it’s still theoretical at this point. We don’t know for sure whether anyone’s data will be leaked, for example. It’s in exactly the same realm as the potential upsides - it is likely (but impossible to quantify at this stage) that some people will feel curtailed in what they can do and say online, which will be negative for them. At the same time, it is likely (but impossble to quantify) that some children will not harm themselves because they won’t have seen encouragement online to perform acts of self-harm.

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak from recent memory, i could probably dredge up some more.

Boris you’re probably right but I don’t think Sunak went into politics to enrich himself or to seek power. The rewards you get in the UK are just pitiful - Sunak did a hundred times better by marrying into wealth, and anyone could do better by getting a job in the City. I know dozens of people who earn more than an MP even if you count all the likely dinners gifts and cushy consulting jobs they’re likely to get. Why bother going to the trouble of getting selected, getting elected, and then having to show up for whipped votes, merely for a chance at some perks, when you could do better with less faff elsewhere>

It might be interesting to listen to interviews with politicians from across the divide, preferably after they’ve left office. It won’t make you agree with their position, but it’ll make you see them in a different light when they’re able to explain their thought process (which the media culture doesn’t permit when in office) and the principles behind what they did.

That’s why i stated it as me saying, not as an objective fact

If you say something is true, then you should be able to justify it. Politics is not the realm of headcanon.

Doing a bad job of implementing a self serving plan doesn’t excuse the self serving plan.

But you haven’t provided any reason to believe it’s self-serving (other than it is actually quite popular, so it will probably help to get them re-elected)

There’s no chance he believed that ridiculous tagline about the NHS funding and Europe, even if he did, someone at some point would have pointed it out to him.

He did it anyway, that’s intent.

I agree. In that case, the tagline was objectively false and it was printed anyway, so we can conclude pretty safely that the people in charge of making it were lying. That’s not the case here; there is genuine disagreement about whether the Online Safety Act will be a success. It is quite popular with the public - a clear majority of people do believe it will be a success. Whether it will be is not a matter of objective fact - not only can we not see the future, there is also no objective way to balance the benefit of decreasing harm to children by preventing access to harmful content with the cost of preventing their access to useful information and the cost of increased friction and privacy breaches to everyone else. If there’s a 0.01% chance of photographs of people’s IDs being leaked online due to this, but a 90% chance that more than 100,000 children will be prevented from seeing content advocating suicide, is that OK? We don’t know if those are the correct percentages and, even if we did, that is a moral question, not a factual one.

The situation is wholly different than the Brexit bus.

but their intent is usually to do something shady

Citation needed.

People don’t go into politics to line their pockets - not in the UK anyway. It’s just not that lucrative. People go into politics mostly for the right reasons (that is, they want to change the country in a way they believe will be better - even if you disagree about that) and some of them are natural grifters who try and make a quick buck off it as well.

im saying their intent usually isn’t ‘save the children’

Again, nobody in this thread or elsewhere has provided any evidence that this is not their intent. The only argument put forward comes down to “it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.” But that is not how it works. People can disagree about things and on this particular matter most people disagree with you (and me.)

You’ve probably heard “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.” This is an example of that.

Because both interpretations are deviations from the stated intent and outcome

They are not. Both are deviations from stated outcome, but not stated intent.

People on your side of this seem to think that, because politicians are saying that something will happen and you disagree with that, they must actually also believe that the outcome will be as you believe, but are lying about it.

Not only is this poor reasoning, it’s really quite arrogant. When it comes to predicting outcomes, there is often genuine disagreement. I think you need a good reason to conclude that this can’t possibly be a case of politicians disagreeing about the outcome and no-one has come up with such a good reason - no-one has said, “actually, the minister for DCMS was reported to have met with the bosses of Google, Microsoft and Facebook and a source in the department said they lobbied for age-verification”. All anyone has given is the same argument I have been pointing out:

1. age verification is bad
2. politicians must know it’s bad OR politicians are corrupt
3. therefore politicians supported this for corrupt reasons.

Can I walk you again through how this argument does not work?

If the right wing were in bed with big tech, they would never have passed this Act, which all big tech companies hate because it imposes serious duties and costs on them.

I don’t really need to know what their motives are, though, anyway.

Then you shouldn’t pretend that you do.

It’s perfectly reasonable to argue about how shit the law is, but it’s not reasonable to advance without evidence the view that politicians made the law for some underhanded purpose. Have you trawled the MPs’ Register of Interests to find whether its supporters were wined and dined by those companies? Do you have an explanation for why their request was supposedly “let us become age-verifiers” rather than “don’t force us to moderate our products more”?

No; you and others don’t have any of this because you haven’t done that journalistic work (and because it probably doesn’t exist). You’re just pissing conspiracy theories into the pot.

I’ll try to rephrase:

It makes more sense that politicians are simply like ordinary voters and are wrong and misguided when it comes to the internet (in this regard and others), and genuinely believe that the Online Safety Act is helpful for its stated purpose, than that they are using it as some nefarious way of helping out Google. The simple reason is that politicians are people too and just as susceptible to being wrong as voters are; we don’t actually need to hunt for any greater reason than that.

Besides that, we constantly talk about how politicians catastrophically fail to understand technology (I believe the Online Safety Act makes mention of hypothetical encryption-backdooring technology that is simply impossible). For politicians to have a different true motive - i.e. their stated motive is false - we are essentially saying that they couldn’t possibly have made got this wrong, there must be some corrupt reason for it - but we don’t actually believe they couldn’t have got it wrong because we’re constantly complaining about how they very obviously do get it wrong.

I also mentioned (but you didn’t mention being confused by it) that the UK government isn’t really friendly to American big-tech firms, who are universally opposed to the Act as a whole because of its threat to end-to-end encryption.

No, no, the accusation is that politicians are lying.

In order to be lying, they must know better - that’s my point. You can’t have a nefarious plan without understanding the plan.

The only thing left to do is lobby. Politicians might not have this vision, but they do understand really expensive dinners.

That is more of an uphill battle in an environment like Europe or the UK where politicians are deeply skeptical of American big tech companies.

I cannot think of a single recent “think of the children” based action that was intended to and actually helped the children in a meaningful way.

Are you judging the motivation purely based on the effects? Otherwise, how are you working out what goes on inside people’s heads?

I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better. It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.

This isn’t the motivation in Europe where there’s a deep skepticism about those - all foreign - companies.

There is no need for conspiracy-type thinking. “Think of the children” has always been a powerful and real motivating force, not just a cover for nefarious other stuff. You need to recognise that, even if it’s wrong-headed.

This doesn’t belong in this community, does it?

Guess Trump is OK with China being the dominant scientific force in the world though.

You can tell this is marketing fluff, because GPT could already provide “PhD-level expertise” - just in a hit-and-miss fashion that you couldn’t rely upon without some other form of verification. So how is this different?

Did they ban AI from using proper titling case?

The answer is no, and this may be one way in which AI should be allowed to displace humans Who Write Titles By Capitalising Every Word Even The Ones Which Should Not Be.

Not sure what that would even mean.

Yeah there is an important difference there. I think though that it’s not clear whether the world is fundamentally discrete or continuous. As far as I know there is no evidence either way on this (though I remember reading that space and time must have the same discreteness/continuousness).

Because that’s what it is really trained for: to produce correct grammar and plausible sentences. It’s really an unbelievable leap from computer-generated text from preceding approaches where, in a matter of a few years, you went from little more than gibberish to stuff that’s so incredibly realistic that it can be mistaken for intelligent conversation, easily passing the Turing Test (I had to actually go to Wikipedia to check and, indeed, this was verified this year - note that this in particular is for recent models)

So you have something that is sufficiently realistic that it can appear to be a human conversation partner. Human beings aren’t (yet) well-equipped to deal with something which appears to be human but whose behaviour diverges from typical human behaviour so radically (most relevantly, it won’t readily admit to not knowing something).

Ultrafinitism is pretty whacky since it requires tossing out the entire axiomatisation of mathematics. Ultrafinitism is inconsistent with axiomatisations even of fragments of Peano arithmetic (e.g. where you weaken the axiom scheme of induction to be restricted to a subset of formulae). You’re left with something very cumbersome indeed. One thing the article fails to point out is that Gödel incompleteness still applies to such very weak theories. (It is actually misleading when talking about trying to prove the consistency of ZF - this too is not possible within ZF, provided ZF is consistent, due to incompleteness.)

There’s a big difference between ultrafinitism and finitism - the latter allows a mathematical theory that allows you to talk indirectly about infinity but not directly. Peano arithmetic allows you to prove, for example, that, “for every prime number there is a larger one” - or as we might state it succinctly, “there are infinitely many prime numbers.” But it doesn’t allow you to talk about “the set of prime numbers” in the same direct way as you can talk about a single number or finite collection of numbers, and there is no such succinct way to say “there are infinitely many prime numbers” in the language of PA; you need the circumlocution.

These kinds of circumlocution are par for the course when dealing with weaker theories. But I think there is a huge practical issue with ultrafinitism which is exemplified thus: how do you prove a simple theorem in an ultrafinitist world, like for example, “the sum of any two even numbers is even” when it may be the case that the sum of two large even numbers is actually undefined? You have to write caveats all over every proof and I think for anything non-trivial it would swiftly become unmanageable.

On the philosophical side, I just don’t think there is ever going to be a large number of people who think that “x+1 > x” is a statement that ought to be viewed with any level of suspicion. Mathematics is about creating abstractions from our real-world experience; numbers are such an abstraction. Real world objects are always finite, but that doesn’t mean the abstraction has to be - to actually capture our intuition about how real world objects work, there can’t be a limit.