Comment by exprez135 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exprez135 | Hacker News Reader

Anastasia Berg and Jon Baskin wrote a piece in August called “On Radical Preservation,” [1] in which they use the example of the shared concept of 'merit' to warn about the dangers of an AI-filled present and future. They anecdotally compare our situation to that of the Crow people, through the testimony of Plenty Coups, who described the fall of the buffalo and the end of the practices, rituals, concepts, and way of life that his people understood as making up what it was to live an excellent life (or not).

Likewise, they point to merit (which I think we consider very much like expertise) as one such fundamental concept in our society, which is very much undermined by unchecked use of LLMs. This coming not just via "cheating," but by the way in which we so quickly are willing to claim, and ourselves believe, that we deserve praise for that which the machine has created. On a wide scale, their use will not just compete with those who may not use the machine, but will destroy even our shared idea of personal merit.

Beyond merit alone, AI might lead generally to our "own cultural values becom[ing] not just decadent or debatable but unintelligible." At the end, Berg and Baskin basically say that hope is not sufficient (hope that the old concepts will be replaced with new ones); the proper attitude is to do everything in our power to preserve them in the present.

[1]: https://thepointmag.com/letter/on-radical-preservation

Serious question - what's so special about personal merit anyway? In hunter gatherers it was might, in current age it's brain, but either are equally arbitrary.

I prefer a world that's equalocracy, with a focus on specific personal-freedoms (live and let live principle).

Isolated Hunter-Gatherers tended to (and still) coalesce around the person whose opinions were correct more often then not. Violence was not a default until populations grew. The measures may be arbitrary, but can always be defined as “born with the right attributes in the right place at the right time.”

Do you have any solid evidence to back up anything you’re asserting here?

In my understanding of history (pre-enlightenment), people didn’t gather around ideas that were “correct more often” but gathered around ideas and personalities that reinforced their own ignorance, superstitions and biases and were openly hostile to “correct” ideas and truth, especially if those ideas upset tradition or dogma.

I also don’t understand how you’re getting to “violence was not a default until populations grew” since, perhaps, “default” violence was only properly recorded after populations grew and education/writing became more widespread. It’s very likely everyday violence in small groups was simply accepted as “the way things are”and simply ignored, as it often is even to this day.

Yes I do. In anthropology the surviving “undiscovered” indigenous tribes of the 20th century showed a diverse range of social configurations - matriarchies, patriarchies, everything!

Systemic violence came with the agricultural revolution, food and population stores, the ages of Bronze and Iron. Life was too precious in small bands for intense violence, even against rivals.

[Edit: 100 men armed with wooden clubs is an extremely bloody rugby match. Things generally did not start getting very-very bad until metal weapons were combined with boats or horses.]

Hobbes was a bit wrong it turns out.

This still feels more like an opinion than facts/proof. I was hoping for actual cited papers or studies, it feels like you just reiterated what you said above but adding "In anthropology..."

I'd like to see the studies which confirm that kingship (i.e. rule by the most mighty hunter or warrior) and violence is universal and did not explode about 5000 years ago, because that all seems to me like a mere extrapolation of the 19th century imagination of the default human condition as being "nasty, brutish, short." =)

Some interesting texts: * The Harmless People (a classic) * Hierarchy in the Forest * Hunter-Gatherers of the Congo Basin * The Foraging Spectrum

I appreciate the references but I'm guessing they don't fully support the claims you made above, at least not as strongly as you're making them seem.

While they talk about egalitarianism and resisting domineering members, and various organizational structures, they don't establish that people followed "correct" individuals or that violence increases with increased population growth/agriculture/weapons.

I think I'm safe to say that there is plenty of evidence for violence that predates agriculture and modern society, even if agriculture and nation-states increased the scale and visibility of such violence overall.

I think replacing "nasty, brutish, and short" with its opposite "noble savage" ideal is probably just as mistaken of a projection from literature. Human nature doesn't seem to change much throughout history, tools might just make that violence more efficient and more visible.

I don't think your thesis is fully wrong, but I don't think it is fully right either, which was my point in pushing back against the earlier statements you made.

Don’t worry, there is nothing inherently “noble” at all about a matriarchy which enforces compliance through liberal permission for rape. Maybe more a matter of scale, a tribal raid versus the siege, sack, and rape of an entire city. The individualist warfare of The Illiad; then later the Roman Legions, then later Mongol Horde.

The hints of egalitarian structures are found deep in enthographic interviews of tribes which have no visible hierarchy: it is invisible, if so how does it operate?

A lot of the people squawking about this are in the midst of a personal identity crisis because they're not longer "special" - that is to say they no longer get special treatment because they know some arcane knowledge that only the smartest can access or some other such lie we tell ourselves.

These people are trying to be John Henry, but forget about the part of that story where he dies trying to out compete the machine.

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