This can be said about many conflicts between the individual and society, though. In many ways we are prevented from just taking what we want and “keep us in shape” because if everyone did the same it would be a problem.
Consequentialism is not the only option. It invaded the mainstream thanks to effective altruism and friends, but deontological ethics is alive and well.
Quitting your job instead of blowing up the office is well aligned with the latter.
The moment there are no more unconfirmed hypotheses you can assume something is wrong with sciences. All provable models (theories, explanations) that we have, or could have, are by definition wrong or incomplete.
I'm guessing you're alluding to Goedel's incompleteness theorem, but that really doesn't apply to physics. It's a statement about certain properties of formal systems - basically it tells us that for any formal system that's at least as powerful as arithmetic, it's impossible to prove every statement that is true in that system.
This doesn't in any way mean that you can't in principle describe with perfect accuracy with such a system, in a provable way, every aspect of physics. Sure, you might need a theorem that can't be proved and be stuck because of that, but it's not a given. Physics certainly doesn't depend on all possible statements in that formal system to accurately model the real world, and so Goedel's theorem can't prove that the subset that physics needs might not be all probable.
I don't think Gödel is necessarily what is meant here, there are very good information theoretical(and other) reasons you can never describe a system with truly perfect accuracy. The map has to be become the territory for genuinely perfect accuracy.
Makes sense, but is it relevant to the upthread claim that "All provable models (theories, explanations) that we have, or could have, are by definition wrong or incomplete"? (Not being rhetorical and snide here, I'm curious and aware I may be missing something.)
If reality has irreducible randomness (an open question afaik), and we're talking about theories and explanations (so we're not necessarily trying to describe the actual state of every particle in the universe, but only the rules governing their interactions), couldn't we have a complete, correct theory that was much smaller than the universe and contained terms for the random elements?
There would always be the possibility that it would turn out to be wrong, but it could be complete and correct, so it seems like the original claim must depend heavily on the word 'provable' and not on the impossibility of describing a system via a map smaller than the territory.
edit: but also, surely 'the territory is randomized' is a contingent physical fact, and not a necessary truth of information theory. Until we know for sure that there is irreducible randomness, we can't know that the information content of the universe (including the actual state of all particles at all times) isn't losslessly compressible, right?
The “elements for randomness” are carve-outs for the parts of territory the map can’t contain. The more granular the map, the larger relative proportion that falls into that set. Nobody can predict the layout of my basement from a globe of the world.
We know with a high degree of certainty the universe contains things we can’t predict or observe, see Bell’s Theorem.
“Truth” doesn’t exist outside reality. There’s no substrate to hang it in. Information theory is likewise a subset of the territory, part of the universe, not apart from it. For these things to exist independently, you need something other than or bigger than the universe to put them in. If such a thing existed, sure, from that perspective maybe a lossless compression could exist. But that’s a metaphysical argument.
That, and the very idea of direct access to the territory (needed for any sort of “lossless compression”, among other things) is moot since we only perceive it indirectly through the lens of our consciousness, which is anything but objective.
There’s a difference between enabling another individual with free will and agency, and enabling an automated tool (as a bonus, then giving it to the masses & profiting from its use).
There are certainly some differences but is one really more ethical than the other? If anything I feel that (for example) manufacturing a gun is much less likely to carry any ethical implications than training someone to use it might.
I did a cursory search and it seems to be as regulated as restaurants are. There's an application process and on site inspections, but that's about it. The only thing notable is background checks.
And at least in the US if you're a hobbyist at home then there's ~no regulation whatsoever beyond the requirement to permanently affix a serial number and to keep accurate records.
I don't see the difference when it comes to the ethics of making a tool available to the world or teaching someone something. Like who cares if it was a hobbyist versus a professional tutoring outfit that taught someone expressing an open interest in committing terrorism about the chemistry of explosives? The two hypothetical teachers are equally at fault as far as I'm concerned.
Because an individual has free will and agency, and scale matters.
If you teach someone chemistry, that someone probably has sense to not use it for criminal purposes. If you have a track record of teaching future terrorists specifically, you will be shut down. Crucially, before you educate them en masse.
If you’re comparing that to a tool that essentially educates thousands, millions of people, with no KYC, you bet budding terrorists are going to be disproportionately represented within that group.
So then you acknowledge my point and our discussion does include homegrown LLMs?
But you raise an interesting point. It seems the ethics of LLM manufacturing is somewhat different than that of weapons (or other tool) manufacturing due to the ability of the LLM to convey knowledge. Still, I'm unconvinced of your position. Consider that we regulate neither the publishing nor dissemination of chemistry textbooks. Surely an LLM teaching someone chemistry falls into the same general category?
Homegrown LLMs seem unlikely to be used by a significant fraction of LLM users, but yeah, there’s a blurred line.
> Surely an LLM teaching someone chemistry falls into the same general category?
I think the scale and the effort might break the analogy. Teaching yourself means a degree of patience and certain personality traits that would be rarer in a malicious person (along the lines of “a sufficiently smart person wouldn’t need to be a criminal to succeed”), with exceptions of course. Being taught by a teacher implies a degree of KYC and care about who you are. Being served on a plate the specific information on how to manufacture something dangerous bypasses those barriers, which I think changes the equation.
All we can say is that the universe has been consistent so far, during the brief time we observed a small part of it given the instruments we have.
We update our model(s) so that it keeps being consistent and predictable to us (that’s human nature), but no model can be probably correct and complete.
You are not grappling with the full consequences of the universe being inconsistent. If the universe is inconsistent, science is dead. Why the fuck on HN of all places do I need to defend the idea that science is possible? Back to philosophy class, all of you.
Because you're being too narrow minded. Hubble Tension exists, the universe is not consistent. We take cosmological homogeneity as an axiomatic assumption and we keep being proved wrong.
The only thing we can say with confidence is that the base laws of physics appear to be mostly consistent everywhere we've looked in the last hundred or two years. But also only across relatively recent history. The laws of physics were very different early on. The electic and magnetic field used to be separate things and now they aren't.
None of this is incompatible with science as a concept.
Finding consistency goes hand in hand with modeling reality, and every model by definition 1) is wrong (incomplete/incorrect/unprovable) and 2) exists in your head only.
Django allowing queries to be anywhere is more or less in line with Python’s overarching “we’re all consenting adults here” ethos. There’s probably one correct way to do it, but if you want to shoot yourself in the foot then here’s your gun.
It definitely takes a bit of discipline. The key layers are somewhat easy to manage—middleware, context processors, views, template tags—but I’ve seen some hairy lasagne further obscuring where the queries happen on top of that. A well-documented abstraction can be useful, but if it is possible to keep it simple and obvious then that’s the way to go.
(Third-party dependencies can further complicate things, but at least you can expect a library using ORM to be in the installed apps list.)
When we give everyone a computer and want to restrict a group of people from some of its capabilities (for their own good), the consequence is a restricted computer. Not giving everyone that computer in the first place could help ensure it stays a true general purpose computer.
If tech is disrupting X, that’s a problem with X” tends to be said by people who have X comfortably sorted themselves (e.g., already have a PhD that counts as it’s from the pre-LLM days).
In the end it depends on whether one considers technological progress or human flourishing to be the end goal. Surprise—they are not always aligned, and sometimes are at odds with each other.
Agreed. It can also be people who have problems with X for other reasons and like to see X “disrupted” (e.g. a disgruntled grad student who got screwed over by a bad advisor or a hard working and capable office employee who got passed over for a less capable, less hardworking PhD holder).
Like I had many bad experiences in cabs in my younger years. It was just bad luck really, but I hated cabs for the longest time because of that and completely dreaded needing them. When Uber was first coming on the scene and cab drivers were protesting against it, I did think to my self something along the lines of “if an app can destroy your business, the problem was in your business” but I really just didn’t like cabs for other reasons. And the irony is now Uber is the same. When I land in my airport, I see crazy lines for rideshare with people waiting on cars to come pick them up, while there is a cab on the other side that is ~$15 cheaper somehow and ready to go with no lines. And I get to tip the driver those saved 15 bucks
Reducing your worth to mere productivity is myopic. Your worth is what you bring others, and while for some people it can include literal production for others it doesn’t have to. There’s wisdom, emotional support, and many other things.
A healthy amount of inflation keeps the economy going.
reply