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Comment by JoshCole | Hacker News Reader

Tautologically, yes, they are different. Also, in terms of game theory, yes. The expected outcomes of cooperative games versus competitive games are very different.

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Do explain more then. Malice that hides under the guise of incompetence is definitely something a malicious actor would want.

If a pattern of incompetence is malice then it follows we should be treating people who are physically or mentally disabled, in a hostile manner as if they are malicious adversaries. Depending on the length of time you use you might also need to treat all babies as enemies as well. It takes many years for them to stop displaying the pattern of incompetence. This isn't really that theoretical. There are people who are disabled who are killed or locked up by police. There are also people who abuse their children on account of them not meeting expectations. According to the implications of your logic this would be justice, because they should be treated adversarially, since you've ascribed intent to their failures. In a world in which sustained incompetence is malice, people shouldn't take on hard tasks. Failure is not a lesson; it is an opportunity for judgement to be leveled against the one who failed. This decreases learning, because it reduces risk taking by penalizing it. In a cooperative setting someone failing in a sustained way is extremely valuable. Rather than being an example of someone to be punished their failures are lessons that others can learn from. Things done to help them, help all. It implies different programs. Instead of beating the children for being stupid, you set up schools. Instead of attacking the infirm, you develop technologies to enable them to overcome their physical limitations.

I like the energy you are trying to give off, but mentally disabled people don't typically have anti-satellite ballistics. Its a shame that most disabled people are considered scary. I worked with autistic children as as school requirement some years back. In many ways, they are not nearly as scary as intelligent people, but there was still cause for concern if they picked up a sharp knife, just from the unpredictability.

Regardless, this case with Russia is like your very technologically advanced friend who is destroying your art project with his reckless movement of his project around the shop. Its not cool, because if you have the ability to build a hyper-ballistic missile, you have the ability to predict the debris scatter.

You're scoping it to Russia, but I feel the conversation expanded in scope to cover additional instances because the conversation now includes 'never attribute' in the parent chain. In the expanded scope the answer is yes they are different. In the limited scope the question trivially goes the other way, because it is defined to go the other way. It could still be that it went that way because of incompetence though, or not, we don't really know. Which makes doing so intellectually dishonest. It is begging the question of whether there was malice. In this case, seeing as there haven't been regular examples of the intentional creation of space debris, it is also skipping past the other condition that was supposed: a history of incompetence. Moreover, in this particular case, there would seem to be some probability of cosmonauts dying after a breach of the space station leads to the loss of life. So it would be more like you're technologically advanced friend killed one of his friends and destroyed an art project in expectation. Which, actually, is the sort of thing that happens more often because of poor weapon handling. We see this kind of thing happen often because of poor trigger safety in terrestrial weapon use which we are more familiar with.

This feels like a motte and bailey.

It proves that not all sustained incompetence is malice.

But you need to prove a stronger claim: That sustained incompetence, by an actor capable of competence, and who would gain from incompetence, is not malice. But this is a case that can only be resolved in specific contexts, not in general. Because of course it's possible all the incompetence was accidental. Likewise it's possible the incompetence is being used as cover. However, it's reasonable to be suspicious in these cases.

I don't need to prove a stronger claim. Equality requires showing that all cases are the same. He is the one who asked if they were always the same. In other words, if they were equal. Inequality doesn't require that all cases are shown to be the same. It only requires that there is a single difference. Consider that 110 is different to 111 despite the fact that they both share a common prefix. If you're correct and I must prove that 11 and 11 are not equal to each other in order for these numbers to be different then it must be the case that 1 != 1 for the very concept of differences to exist. If that is true then the entire of mathematics breaks down because the identity function no longer holds.

It feels like a motte and balley because you're getting confused about what his question was. You seem to think his question was whether a malicious actor can pretend to be incompetent. That wasn't his original question. That was the situation he presented later when asking me for more detail. The existence of that claim doesn't have any bearing on his actual question. It shows an instance in which the union of the two sets isn't the empty set not that the two sets are equal. There exists a disjoint. Therefore they are not equal.

QED.

However, for the purposes of debate lets say we strictly limit our discussion to the cases in which there is malice. We're now in a competitive context in which our upside is going to be minimized. A lot of people don't seem to realize that the prisoner dillema is actually a condemnation of rational behavior, since it traps us in the worst possible world. It's actually smarter in plenty of real world scenarios to intentionally cooperate, sacrificing your own utility, rather than engaging in tit for tat. Flowing out from this mathematical idea are many teachings in religion from the Lord Jesus Christ like being good to those who are evil to you. You can see the underlying principle in our biology too. We aren't strictly rational, we instead have emotions. In particular people who are angry with other people have health consequences. There is a biological punishment to choosing not to cooperate built into us. This shows that evolution has selected for that quality which implies there is a benefit to this. I say all this because not attributing to malice what is better explained by stupidity isn't a completely foolish idea even in the case that they actually were malicious. The world in which they merely pretended to be incompetent is less severe than the nuclear war of tit for tat that wipes out all life on Earth and leaves it an irradiated wasteland.

> Instead of beating the children for being stupid, you set up schools. Instead of attacking the infirm, you develop technologies to enable them to overcome their physical limitations.

So what do we do with apparently malicious governments?

I can tell you what we have done historically when governments were malicious by consulting a history book, but I can't tell you what we will do in the future. The halting problem makes it formerly provable that it is impossible for me to tell you what we will do. To borrow a term from Wolfram, the problem is computationally irreducible. You're asking me for prophecy. I won't give you one.

Also, as a minor point: I said the true statement that sustained incompetence is not the same thing as malice. You quoted me giving examples of sustained incompetence being met with judgement. However, you asked me about situations pertaining to apparent malice rather than sustained incompetence. The situations you quoted aren't alike to the situation you asked about.

Even if they were alike they have no bearing on my claim that sustained incompetence is not equal to malice. Equality doesn't exist when there is a union. Equality exists when there is no disjoint.

There is one potentially valid interpretation of your question: instead of what do we do you could mean what ought we to do with apparently malicious governments. I admit I'm not an expert on this topic. You would be better off asking people who have studied political science, especially in the context of warfare wherein malice is more common.

I think the person you're replying to is implying the use of the second amendment as what some would characterize as a 'teachable moment'.

> Tautologically

Did you mean this word? I can't make sense of it in this sentence.

It seems tautological to me because they are asking the question are two different things different. So the definition of the question gives the questions answer. So the question is answered by its logical form alone. I was trying to get across that it was a trivial result. Just think about the definitions. Malice involves intent, but incompetence doesn't. So the sets as defined don't capture the same scenarios. They are different sets.

A lot of times people use language to convince rather than express raw truth. To an extent, I also used the term tautologically in order to express triviality in order to convince. I believed that the result was so trivial and obvious that people should use their slow and precise reasoning to analyze the question rather than their fast and vague reasoning to answer the question. By expressing the triviality of the result, I lower the expected cost of them evaluating the query, and since I'm actually just correct if they evaluate the query they'll find that I'm correct. So having them do that is convincing.

This isn't like, bragging. It's like someone claiming that two plus two is four. It's not this big reaching claim. So a more interesting question is maybe why people don't notice that I'm correct? I find it so fascinating, I'll try to give my answer. What I think is happening with a lot of people in the replies is they're using their fast and vague minds to process things instead of doing what I tried to encourage. But they're hitting on the pattern of rhetorical question leading to argument. Their fast mind doesn't notice the real question was as simple as two plus two or if it does it edits the question for them to something more interested. That is why you see one person hallucinating that I'm talking about second amendment gun rights. The fast and vague processing is basically trapping them in a hallucination of a conversation in which people are arguing with each other about politics. They can't see reality, because they're so used to debating that their mind sees debate even when it shouldn't be there. I can actually produce this hallucination in myself by skimming the conversation, it makes me seem like I'm veering off topic. Really, I'm just short-circuiting to raw logic rather than vague reasoning, but it feels weird. It feels like I'm talking past other people or something, because my replies don't align with what you would expect in the imaginary conversation. But look really closely. I'm not actually the one who is babbling like GPT. Look closely at their reply and notice they are talking about a Russia that is showing sustained incompetence. Then ask yourself how many satellites Russia blew up. Did they show sustained incompetence in the blowing up of satellites? Look closely at how they bring in the second amendment. How does that have any bearing on whether the two sets are the same? How does it relate to the core question? Notice they are asking about how to properly respond to malicious governments: war policy and political policy. Were we discussing policy questions: no, we were evaluating a predicate function: are two sets different.

And they're different.

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