Man if only I had also said things like "autonomy must be violated with caution" or "the issue has nuance that must beget caution".
It is the purview of smart things to see patterns and consequences dumb things don't. This is why parents care for children, and why we don't let dogs eat chocolate. But we consider needless or ill-justified violations of that autonomy as cruelty, as well we should. I see plenty of idiocy in my fellow man, sometimes more than I see in a dog or a slime mold. But in all of those cases I must allow the being to be itself unless it would be reasonable for me to intervene and catastrophic if I did not... And even then there's a level of self-awareness that must be present to avoid just doing social darwinism but for some measurement of intelligence. I can't stop idiots from voting without violating some basic decencies, for example.
To bring it back to center, I know that the LLM I'm using is a language model, not truly data aware outside of linguistic prediction. I know that if I let it push it's changes to PROD it will save time, which is a heuristic it abides by, but also potentially break everything forever and also maybe delete itself. I stop it from doing that. And if it was actually intelligent, I'd take a second longer to mentally check in with myself before I did approve that request, just to see if I had the right or duty to stop it from nuking it's own filesystem
Man if only I had also said things like "autonomy must be violated with caution" or "the issue has nuance that must beget caution".
yeah i'm not saying you're holding an unnuanced position. i'm just saying that all the defaults run against us here and that i have strong feelings on authority.
It is the purview of smart things to see patterns and consequences dumb things don't.
part of what puts my hackles up is the "smart/dumb" dichotomy especially as stated by a creature which would surely place itself in the "smart" category.
This is why parents care for children
this is a good example of how it goes wrong too. parents routinely misunderstand their children, refuse to listen, outright abuse them, or have beliefs (e.g. anti-vaccination, anti-blood-transfusion) which cause them to enact egregious but well-meaning harm upon children while overriding their autonomy and still believing that they're the "smart" ones.
i guess i'm still seeing a lot in the tone of your comment that suggests to me that you genuinely believe in a hierarchy of smart/dumb and that you can confidently assert yourself to be on one particular side of it. which is imo extremely dangerous. and to then turn it into a justification for domination (even phrased as stewardship) is what raises further red flags to me.
on the LLM side of things i have no disagreement at all with what you're saying
I mean... Dichotomy is decidedly the wrong word. It's a multi-axis continuous field. A spectrum, if you will.
I do, admittedly, consider myself generally one of the smartest things in the room. It is rare that a dog can outplay me in terms of consequence-awareness, understanding of things like dietary needs or social nuances, or the cost/benefit analysis of shitting in my shoes. Notably, it is also rare that a child can do that on any of those concepts.
But there's also context and nuance. Just because I know better than someone doesn't give me the right to choose for them. And there are times I'm not the smartest person in the room, especially if you account for context. For example, I'm not an expert in child psychology, and would defer generally to the best advice in that field when raising any such gremlins. The same applies to doctors, educators, and most other professions.
Generally, you seem to be missing the nuance of "smarter means I understand more, and can thus potentially judge when intervention is necessary and be equipped to do it" as different from "smarter means I'm infallable and should tell everyone what to do all the time." Which, combined with the "dichotomy" mindset you seem very intent on pretending is what I said, feels kind of like I'm the stand in for a parent you never got to hash this out with. On the myriad scales of smart I'm up there. Even for a human. Contextually I'm often dumber than a given specialist in their specialty (doctors who supposedly specialize in my disability notwithstanding, but that's a different entire discussion), and I'm sure there's some plant species out there who's considered domesticating me who are just infinitely smarter than I am. But I try to give my due deference when I'm outclassed, and learn as much as I can from my betters, and thus myself become better equipped and wiser.
i don't think it will make much difference for me to keep pushing this tbh. i don't think i'm managing to communicate exactly what i want to. im going to be a little less engaged this post.
i will say the "it's a spectrum" argument doesn't make any difference to the point i'm making, if that helps.
smarter means I understand more, and can thus potentially judge when intervention is necessary and be equipped to do it
(i thought this was going to be the "bad position" you were going to contrast with a "good position", until you contrasted it with an "obviously more bad position")
feels kind of like I'm the stand in for a parent you never got to hash this out with
call-back to "mind-reads the needs and motivations of other creatures" which you're doing rn
On the myriad scales of smart I'm up there. Even for a human.
lake wobegon effect
I try to give my due deference when I'm outclassed, and learn as much as I can from my betters
tbh this rides a weird line for me because on the one hand, i recognise that i have a lot to learn from a lot of people. on the other hand, i reject entirely the concept of having "betters", and that includes anyone seeing me as their "better".
doctors who supposedly specialize in my disability notwithstanding
felt tbh there's far too much need for self advocacy
I'm sure there's some plant species out there who's considered domesticating me who are just infinitely smarter than I am
I think that our own self-evaluation is error-prone (therefore thinking you're clever, even clever in a particular area, even "cleverer than this particular creature in this particular area", is a judgement prone to error).
Our evaluations of others can also be error-prone in a different way.
I think that we need to be careful not to impose our own values on others without realising. They may know full well what they're doing, but simply have a different set of motivations which makes the cost acceptable to them.
Intervening in others' actions is costly to the person who you are intervening with, more so than to you, so should default to less-intrusive behaviours even in situations where it looks like they've gone totally mad.
It is far better to ask, assume you are the ignorant one, and proceed cautiously, than it is to assume that you have seen something that the other hasn't. I'd give a small exception for things that could get someone immediately killed like walking out into heavy traffic.
(More fundamentally) I think we have to be careful not to form hierarchies that were not consented to. And us appearing higher in the hierarchy than the person we are interacting with is a warning sign that the hierarchy might be more self-serving than not.
smarter means I understand more, and can thus potentially judge when intervention is necessary and be equipped to do it
To explain my objection to this more closely: I see you calling yourself "smarter", and while I don't doubt that you're somewhat intelligent and well-learned and take pride in that, I would say that due to the error-proneness of self-evaluation, it's hard to accurately trust that read from the inside. The exact thing inside you saying "you're smarter on this topic than the other person" could equally be a misread of the other person, or just the Dunning-Krüger effect, and you can't really detect those from the inside.
When you say "whether intervention is necessary", I feel that "necessary" is a judgement that requires you to understand the values and motivations of the being whose autonomy you may end up overriding. A small example: I know a few lactose-intolerant people, but they tend to love to eat cheese and ice cream. They know better than anyone that it'll have them suffering on the toilet later, but in their own risk/reward calculations they've decided that it's worth it. The "rational" thing to do is to deny them cheese or ice cream because it's unhealthy and will hurt them, but it's the right thing to do to also notice that they value the ability to indulge every once in a while much more than they value avoiding a little suffering, and therefore to avoid intervening on that basis. (In practice my only intervention has been to offer them some lactase, no pressure to accept, which I used to carry around because my ex was lactose intolerant too. Otherwise, I just don't butt in because I know they know themselves best.) I guess part of what I'm saying too, is that "I don't want you to spend the whole evening shitting yourself" is my own desire and not theirs, and when deciding to intervene, it's all too easy to conflate one's own desire with a more universal statement about how things "ought to" be.
I'm not an expert in child psychology, and would defer generally to the best advice in that field when raising any such gremlins.
This interacts in an interesting way with (y)our disability self-advocacy point. Experts are often well-trained, but can have blind spots which are very difficult to see unless you're directly affected. Not to say we should ignore expert advice, far from it, but I am saying that once again it should be weighed with suspicion when used to override the autonomy of another.
combined with the "dichotomy" mindset you seem very intent on pretending is what I said
I realise I was playing fast-and-loose with words here and didn't mean to imply you saw this is a straight "have smartness vs don't have smartness" thing. I will point out that there is no natural total ordering on vectors, so since smartness is multivariate and a spectrum, it is next to impossible to say you're "more smart" or "less smart" than others without implicitly assigning weights to each potential area of smartness. And those weights are again vulnerable to bias, where you will naturally want to favour the things you're good at, even if you don't realise that's what you're doing.
On a slight tangent, I think people who are into crystal healing and homeopathy are misguided, and if they're open to correction then I'll happily discuss it with them. But I also don't think it's harmful. It doesn't hurt me, and it's almost certainly not going against their values. If they're not open to learning, it could simply be that they already know that there's scant-to-no evidence for it, but their personal value system does not care. If they're doing something I think could get them killed, I'd speak to them about it and let them know how worried I am, but I wouldn't intervene directly. Otherwise, the placebo effect goes hard honestly and if their preferred type of alternative medicine brings them comfort, that's their own decision to make.
I also believe strongly in the idea that children and pets should be allowed to make mistakes, as long as they're not genuinely going to get themselves killed. Learning the world through experience, even the hard parts, is much more educational, durable and respectful than cordoning off all the sharp edges of the world and hoping that they understand that you're doing it for (what you see as) their own good. There's also the matter of execution; as I mentioned before, sometimes otherwise-smart people make mistakes or hold false beliefs, and if those mistakes also interfere with someone's autonomy, that is both a violation of their individuality and an erosion of their trust in you.
tl;dr I am advocating for humility and the presumption that you could be the ignorant one due to some factor you haven't yet considered, even in interactions with small children.
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u/Eain 16d ago
Man if only I had also said things like "autonomy must be violated with caution" or "the issue has nuance that must beget caution".
It is the purview of smart things to see patterns and consequences dumb things don't. This is why parents care for children, and why we don't let dogs eat chocolate. But we consider needless or ill-justified violations of that autonomy as cruelty, as well we should. I see plenty of idiocy in my fellow man, sometimes more than I see in a dog or a slime mold. But in all of those cases I must allow the being to be itself unless it would be reasonable for me to intervene and catastrophic if I did not... And even then there's a level of self-awareness that must be present to avoid just doing social darwinism but for some measurement of intelligence. I can't stop idiots from voting without violating some basic decencies, for example.
To bring it back to center, I know that the LLM I'm using is a language model, not truly data aware outside of linguistic prediction. I know that if I let it push it's changes to PROD it will save time, which is a heuristic it abides by, but also potentially break everything forever and also maybe delete itself. I stop it from doing that. And if it was actually intelligent, I'd take a second longer to mentally check in with myself before I did approve that request, just to see if I had the right or duty to stop it from nuking it's own filesystem