Or maybe they are? I'm not an expert in this and reading through some of the government literature there's no mention of this.
Then at least you would know that a given price marker is a good empirical index of how other prices are changing also, at least for a given dimension/component.
The thing about arts and AI is that it's one place where the stochastic parrot criticism has never really stopped being accurate to me.
I think backlash against the stochastic parrot idea has always been based on a bit of a strawman — what's being parroted can be pretty abstract and broad in scope, down to reasoning strategies and personality. But with art in particular, I always feel like it's broadly imitating something from elsewhere.
In those AB tests in the linked essay for example, the options are all pretty prototypical genre music samples being compared against one another. Even the fact that they have pretty accurate prototypical labels says something about how prototypical they are, and you can always find something pretty stereotypical of a genre to compare against to play "gotcha" or make it more difficult. It's just not interesting or relevant to me to test whether you can tell the difference between cliched music samples from a human or cliched music samples from AI.
Real art is often like that — you have writers and musicians who follow genre conventions for a variety of reasons — but the most interesting art happens in the margins in ways that are unexpected.
The essay is worth reading for its argument that music is fundamentally a participatory activity — this is something else on my mind lately about live performance art in general, and the implications of that for understanding certain societal trends. But sometimes I think the discussion of AI and art is really missing the boat in other ways as well, ways that apply to AI in general.
I agree that there's a lack of awareness of what happens in other countries with ID, but I think it is also a different situation in the US.
States in the US in a lot of ways are more comparable to countries in the EU. It's not exactly like that but in many ways it is. So it would be like requiring an EU ID on top of a national ID.
I also don't think privacy per se is the real issue of concern, it's concern about consolidation of federalized power. Privacy is one criterion by which you judge the extent to which power has been consolidated or can be consolidated.
The question isn't "can this be federalized safely in theory", it's "is it necessary to federalize this" or "what is the worse possible outcome of this if abused?"
As we are seeing recently, whatever can be abused in terms of consolidated power will be eventually, given enough time.
I guess discussions of whether or not you can have cryptographic verification with anonymity kind of miss the point at some level. It's good to be mindful of in case we go down the dystopian surveillance route, but it ignores the bigger picture issues about freedom of speech, government control over access (cryptographic guarantees of credential verfication don't guarantee issuance of the id appropriately, nor do they guarantee that the card will be issued with that cryptographic system implemented in good faith), and so forth.
The rationalization aspect of their model can't be overstated enough in my opinion. It never starts with something clearly unethical; it starts with something more complicated. Something that is uncomfortable and morally suboptimal, but has some justification being appealed to — it benefits the group, it's otherwise unfair for some members to have to bear some small temporary cost for the benefits of others, or something of that sort. The level of the corrupt behavior becomes more and more extreme though, such that justification becomes more and more questionable, until you're left with something more seriously problematic. In the meantime, the people who questioned the slippery slope might have left, and you're left with people who aren't in a position of power for whatever reason (they're junior, or in small numbers) to question what has become clearly unethical cultural norms.
I think the article is overlooking an important category of corruption where social norms treat certain acts as theoretically immoral but in practice impose little to no social sanction for such acts.
In places like India, for example, taking bribes is just standard practice. It carries so little social sanction that it’s like jaywalking here in the US. People acknowledge it’s technically illegal, but it carries so little social sanction that people don’t consciously need to rationalize it. The same thing with cheating in schools, which is normalized in India and has become almost as normalized in the U.S.
The “power” focus for corruption is not useful. Corruption by people without power is more harmful to society than high level corruption. People skimming off the top is undesirable, but survivable. But ordinary people taking bribes and cheating grinds society to a halt and makes it impossible to develop societal wealth.
This is well evidenced in the development of asian countries in the 20th century. South Korea has plenty of corruption at a high level. But it’s clean at the lower level, and as a result it’s been able to become a rich society. By contrast, India has crippling corruption at lowest levels of society that imposes a huge drag on routine transactions and daily life.
That's a good point, although I think it depends on how you define "power". I think in a lot of ethical discourse, power is defined more broadly in terms of who has more leverage in a situation. It doesn't have to correspond to a political position or position of physical authority necessarily.
In the US at least I think the power distinction is dangerously becoming lost. Traditionally, there was a trade that was made for power: you have more power, you give up privacy to maintain transparency, and you are held to a higher standard. Frequently it seems arguments are made that people in power should enjoy the same standards as others with less power, which was not part of the trade.
I agree with you that there is an importance of cultural norms at every level, but I do think power matters, as it is key to understanding conflicts of interest and permeates every level of society.
I enjoyed this paper, and there's innumerable things that could be said about ingroup-outgroup dynamics and corruption.
In my personal experiences with corruption with organizations, ingroup membership often becomes increasingly narrowly defined, and defined in such a way as to benefit a certain group of individuals at the expense of others. The underlying rationale is a narcissistic entitlement or rationalization for why one person or small group of people is deserving of disproportiate benefits or flexibility at the expense of others. It starts with some kind of distorted egocentric schema about others in a more distal way, and then becomes increasingly strict and more proximal. Narcissistic egocentrism is at the core; it only manifests more weakly at first, and then becomes stronger. The ingroup boundaries never stop shrinking, because there always has to be some justification for why that particular group — which was never really defined by the initial ingroup boundaries, the ingroup was only a proxy for themselves — is more deserving than others.
I think this is one reason it is important to cast unethical behavior in terms of lack of competency — that someone has to break the rules to get ahead because they're not competent enough to do things fairly or ethically.
Empathy, while important in my opinion personally, often doesn't matter to certain people. So you have to decrease the prestige associated with unethical behavior, above and beyond it being unethical per se.
This. I think so much of the fascism and corruption afoot in the world comes from people who believe they deserve things they are incompetent to get. Their sense of entitlement is in conflict with their competence and unrestrained by concern for others. To soothe their ego wound they project their faults onto the person who has what they want. "It isn't my failure; it's your trickery!" Now instead of shame and impotence they feel righteous anger.
I think you are correct. I've spent extended time in uber wealth circles, and this describes the offspring mindset of the generations after wealth acquisition. Their incompetence matches their entitlement, and then they walk into nepotism.
You may be supremely competent but unlucky enough to be born at the wrong time, to the wrong family, competing with the wrong people, to rise to the level that you feel you deserve.
I look at this re-occurring overproduction of elites concept, and feel like it has good points but seems to be welded like a weapon, soon followed by statements like "you're just unlucky, get over it."
We must begin with the presuppositions. Begin with the questions:
1. What are elites?
2. What are elites for? Why do they exist?
We can't really talk about "overproduction" of elites without knowing the answers to these questions.
Elites are meant to be guardians and servants of the common good. This is why traditionally, we spoke of the nobility: they were supposed to protect the common good for the good of society and model virtue so that others had a point of tangible reference. In order to do that, you needed to be properly educated. Not technically trained, but educated, which is something relatively rare in proportion to the vast numbers who are pushed through compulsory schooling and even university.
So, are we "overproducing elites"? Given how mediocre our "elites" generally are, I would suspect that we have rather an underproduction of them, and instead an overproduction of the vacuously credentialed.
One obstacle, of course, is that in a modern liberal culture, we are forced into a kind of impotence when speaking about the common good. On the one hand, modern liberalism imposes its own measure of the good life that elevates liberty for its own sake - divorced from any tradition and any objective measure - as the end of human life. Indeed, tradition is caricatured as an obstacle that impedes liberty rather than as a liberating dialogue spanning centuries and millennia that helps us orient our lives by sharing with us the wisdom of out predecessors.
On the other, this very hostility toward tradition or any objective normative claims (which are unavoidable; see first point) acts as a corrosive agent that impoverishes and constrains the scope of legitimate political discussion. Over time, this scope has been whittled down to economics. Everything else is privatized. Of course, the inevitable effect is that economics them begins to swallow up everything else. Everything is recast as an economic issue, and the human good is confined to economic categories. This explains the rise of consumerism, because a society whose common good can only be a matter of economics, and one that recasts all of life and reduces it to economics, can only comprehend the good life as a matter of consumption. This is a recipe for misery and delusion, of course, but the is the necessary result.
In such a culture, wisdom and what counts as elite are measured in economic terms. Universities become institutions not for liberating human beings by developing reason, virtue, and understanding, but ostensibly tickets to "economic success". Billionaires are our aristocracy, not because they are excellent or virtuous or duty-bound to serve in that capacity by virtue of their rank, but because in a consumerist society, money is magical. This is interesting, because traditionally, the nobility was often prohibited from engaging in trade and commerce. It was seen as beneath their position. If an aristocrat was wealthy, his wealth was not what conferred onto him his rank.
An elite only exists in order to serve the common good. That is its only legitimate reason for being.
Well, of course there would be a range, just like today. It seems like 1/3 will always be skeptical of authority, 1/3 will always literally worship authority, and then there's the spectrum between. I saw some "computational anthropology" paper some months ago saying that same ratio appears fairly consistent going back to the Greeks and the initial ratios of their early Democracy.
> I think this is one reason it is important to cast unethical behavior in terms of lack of competency
That will result in feigned virtue and Pharisaical letter-of-the-law sophistry. You can't secure morality by system and incentive alone, as important as these may be (the law is a teacher). Indeed, if you try to attain virtue by appealing to crooked desires, then you've already subverted the very preconditions of the moral life.
But I will say this: today, we often view morality as some made-up "rules" and artificial constraints that usually don't have anything to do with much of life. Being intelligent is often seen as opposed to being good: the good man is imagined as a chump, while the intelligent man is crafty. But that's just an expression of ignorance, including ignorance of what is actually good for human beings. It is not good for a man to be immoral. Immorality is self-harm.
Morality is a matter of every decision we make. Ethics is practical philosophy concerned with how one lives. Every decision is a matter of morality. When making a decision, why choose one way or another? Well, at the very least, we make what we take to be a good or the best choice. Of course, the immoral man presents something bad or worse as good or better in his own mind in order to be able to choose it. That's why people rationalize the evil choices they intend to make. But the aim and orientation of the will is the good, and so the evil man must first bullshit himself.
In that sense, to choose the good is to choose wisely which is indeed a kind of competence that requires knowledge, wisdom, and humility (which is to say, a sober view of reality, and that includes oneself). Indeed, the first classical cardinal virtue is prudence, which is the habit (as in possessed and actualized excellence) of being able to determine the right decision in a situation. And the right decision is always a moral one.
Prudence itself is the cornerstone of the remaining cardinal virtues: one cannot be just without first being prudent; one cannot be courageous without first being just; and one cannot be temperate without first being courageous. You need to know what is right before you can be just, as what is wrong is never just; you need to be just before you can be courageous, as bravado or recklessness are not courage; and you need courage to be temperate, as you cannot act as you ought if you don't have the courage to do so.
So, what we really need is an authentic moral education and a culture that ceases to fear a robust and sound morality rooted in the objectively real, because it sees it as a threat to its misguided notion of "liberty". We must reconnect with classical tradition so that we can profit from its insights and its wisdom and return to a dialogue spanning centuries and millennia. We cannot do it alone, and things will never be perfect, but this will give us strength to face the immorality of the world - and above all, in ourselves - and a foundation for a healthier culture.
I agree with the fundamentals of what you're saying.
I don't mean to suggest that corruption should only be cast in terms of lack of competency, or that there aren't other issues of importance. But I also think sometimes the lack of competency perspective on corruption is overlooked, and people forget that appeals to empathy and similar values are of no relevance to certain individuals, for whatever reason.
Corruption is problematic for a number of reasons; I think it's important to keep all of those reasons in mind.
Or not. Or what is in the flourishing of all living things, and especially in our species of ape, is evil. That only what is called "good" is the accident of there being a boundary up against you to stop you; or the imposition of a boundary which will destroy or constrain your living too much.
Perhaps morality is just the playpen boundaries of enfeebled apes, playing amongst themselves in luxury, thinking they've overcome some aspect of their nature since they barely need to move around at all.
Meh to this misanthropic disregard for other's experience. If you need external alignment to prevent you being evil your internal alignment is f'ed. Considering morality an arbitrary boundary is a major red flag for antisocial behaviors.
Structured interactions lead to better results, chaotic actions lead to chaos. Ethics/morality is part of that structure that lets us achieve more together than individually.
if you think living in that structure is enfeebling: I highly question what you desire to do that results in that feeling.
This will just make fraud by skilled people more likely. Having skill will insulate them from the accusation - they cant be unethical, because unethical people dont have skill and they provably do.
My guess is this will garner attention for use of AI — that's where my attention went as well initially. But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not.
My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means; I doubt AI could do better, and even if it could, I'm not sure I'd want that to be the determining factor about whether it would get funded. To the extent it was, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing.
> But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not.
Another layer?
I think it's the same level of stupidity/shadiness.
I remember (the one time I snuck into NIPS) a buuunch of papers on "fairness", and it was basically: "We have decided that this input should not affect the outcome. Does it? If so, how?"
So that seems like a pretty good actual "what's DEI?" - Does race/gender/sexuality/etc affect some outcome? Should it? If it does affect it and shouldn't, what we can we do about it?
That said... yeah, not gonna get a room full of anyone to agree on that. Starting with that "should".
If you can use a criteria to finance academia [1] you can use the reverse to define what DEI is. Every major corporation had DEI departments and yet it doesn't exist, it's a ghost.
I really hope the backlash to this bullshit finally reaches europe.
Same song and dance for 14 years straight, there is no SJW you're just imagining them, it's just called being a decent human being, they say as they kick me repeatedly in the face.
Reading through them, I wonder why CPIs aren't based on empirical correlational patterns between prices over time? Sort of like in these articles:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1796/1/... https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1011.pdf
Or maybe they are? I'm not an expert in this and reading through some of the government literature there's no mention of this.
Then at least you would know that a given price marker is a good empirical index of how other prices are changing also, at least for a given dimension/component.
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