Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

War is a mere continuation of policy by other means[1]. When policy through legislation is empirically impotent[2], calls to continue attempts at a failed strategy are indistinguishable from being told, "continue losing."

There is a real, undeniable, build up of political tension. When it fails to be released in the legislative arena, it doesn't dissapate. When we point out that, "the quality of life right now is the best it's ever been," it doesn't dissapate. When we try to crush it, it doesn't dissapate. The last remaining pressure release is violence however condemnable it may be. Perhaps we should, you know, fix participatory democracy rather than pontificating on a natural outcome of machine we created yet refuse to fix. If fixing it continues to be more difficult than eliminating violence we should continue to expect violence.

1. https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/clausewitz-war-as-politics...

2. https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...

> "fix participatory democracy"

Ah yes, a popular codeword for "I did not get my way".

There is no electoral majority behind the AI doomer cult. It is not a failure of "democracy" that they haven't gotten what they want. It is a failure of their activism, or just the general unpalatability of their wild ideas, or both. They don't get to throw Molotovs just because they lose.

Maybe democracy is fundamentally flawed because the demos is? How should one act in such a situation?

Who gets to say that the demos is fundamentally flawed? Each in-group have their own opinions on what's a flaw.

Society evolves through epiphenomena caused by the behaviour of the majority; the fact that some minorities view that evolution as 'flawed' cannot change that evolution, unless they're able to influence the majority to also see it that way.

Now, democracy is essentially a way for everybody to broadcast their views on society's flaws on non-violent ways. The alternative is that some groups broadcast their opinions in violent ways, and we have learned to see that situation as undesirable.

> Society evolves through epiphenomena caused by the behaviour of the majority

I would argue plenty of significant societal changes were caused by the behavior of relatively small number of people. Even more so when you include instances of masterful use of the butterfly effect.

> I would argue plenty of significant societal changes were caused by the behavior of relatively small number of people

Specific breaking points in history yeah, maybe. But that's possible because they're well connected people near the center of the network.

Those breakpoints are possible because either those few people share a viewpoint held by a large number of their peers, or benefit from knowledge accumulated throughout their civilization. Think how every dictator needs support from a huge following to get their power (and how easy it is to find another dictator to replace them if they die), or how often some breakthrough discoveries are made by multiple people at the same time. There's always a last straw that breaks the camel's back, but the lone wolf hardly ever gets a significant impact on society at large; they need a receptive audience to get any impact. Humans are herd animals.

Following the metaphor, the butterfly effect is only possible because a storm was brewing in the first place; the butterfly wings only decide where it will appear. Butterfly wings just don't have that much energy.

History is told from the perspective of kings, but kings can reign only within a society that believes in their divine right to rule.

Nah, think of Lenin or Mao as direct counterexamples.

You think Lenin and Mao didn't have behind them an ideology in their societies that supported them? Why did people follow their orders then, mind control?

They created the conditions through agitprop. You're inverting cause and effect.

No, I'm saying that they are not cause and effect but coevolution. Their agitprop could have such huge impact because of the conditions of workers in Zarist Russia and the Republic of China respectively. They wouldn't have worked in a different society; so no, they didn't single-handedly create the conditions for their own power, there was a previous substrate they could work on.

Ah yes, "continue losing."

Go ahead and read Gilens and Page and tell me participatory democracy is working. Until then, expect more of the same impotent condemnations and a refusal to understand the social mechanics producing acts of violence.

I am aware of their arguments, yes, but what I'm objecting to is that you're bringing this irrelevant hobbyhorse into a discussion of a truly fringe ideology. We're not talking about a classic G&P-style issue where the voters and the elites disagree. Nobody cares for the AI doomers -- not elites, not voters, nobody.

When you talk about "participatory democracy" in a thread like this, you are enabling them in their delusion that people do care. The AI safetyist think tanks put out these pushpolls trying to convince themselves that voters care about AI doom. They seal up the walls of their echo chamber, and they believe themselves to be heroes. Then one day, one of them throws a Molotov, and nobody is surprised.

> Nobody cares for the AI doomers

Which is precisely why they've resorted to violence.

We can do better than denigrating positions as "hobbyhorse." HN deserves better than that.

Fair enough. Retry: What I'm objecting to is your brilliant, insightful point, to which you are attached enough that you've injected it into this thread where it is, by your own admission, irrelevant. They're resorting to violence because they're unpopular, not because democracy failed to do its job here.

My dear friend, this is a discussion board where people share their takes. It's simply a take.

We can attempt to deduce the root cause, but please don't assume we're on different epistemic footing. It's speculation and that's fine.

> There is no electoral majority behind the AI doomer cult.

how can you be sure? has anyone polled it? are they too scared to poll it?

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Wealth inequality isn't just about economic wellbeing but political power. Separately, the US legislature is almost entirely crippled, only able to pass one major bill per presidential term, while the dominant political party celebrated this and cedes all power to an executive whose intention is to tear apart the administrative state and bring about techno feudalism.

I once again note that none of the AI leadership has even tried to address government policies to guarantee a baseline of economic wellbeing for our citizens, while they acknowledge AI will likely have massive, disruptive impacts on society and economy. Anthropic is the only one that has shown any public concern for the dangers of AI by insisting on some moral baseline of AI use in the Defense department.

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