californiadreem

I don't believe that violation of precedent leads to positive outcomes and that each violation destroys its own foundation, but I also believe that slavish adherence to a stultified and failing system of precedence leads to outcomes that mimic the proverb "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Lawfare is another kind of civic death, as Cato demonstrated multiple times. So if you want to call opposition to terminal ossification "populism" then sure, you've got me.

That's a fair assessment of my position. I view the criticism that the most successful populares consul of Rome was "undemocratic" while being consul and dictator of a Republic constituted and elected on the basis of property and nepotism to be entirely ridiculous when the "undemocratic" criticism is the removal of Tribunes doing things directly in opposition of the actual interest of the plebs. Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy enriching themselves as career politicians while the cities and countryside decay meet with my equal disdain.

In short, if isolated demands for rigor abound when dealing with procedural rules and precedent, I will ally with those trying to prevent fires rather than those that simply talk until time runs out (but Cato was a virtuous man).

It's absolutely ludicrous to say he outmaneuvered them. Roberts conceded and FDR abandoned his plans to pack the court.

You can also experience the wonders of PLATO through emulation: https://www.cyber1.org/

Or do you mean the very alive and formerly Pompeiian Senators that Caesar enriched and restored to office that ultimately killed him out of pride?

This plays into the status games endemic to late Republics. To quote another maligned general that was merciful to the vanquished and cruel to the recalcitrant: "Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man who would keep all wine out of the country, lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it."

Caesar didn't proscribe his opponents. They killed themselves rather than be in sufferance of his mercy. He didn't attempt to become king or imperator. Augustus grasped his "inheritance" himself. Caesar revelled in his well-earned and legally-entitled glory that overshadowed those of his older, wealthier peers. What he did extralegally in the aftermath of the civil war, like Augustus, he did to conform with the facade of legality to protect the commonweal. Like Cicero, he lived to take the blame of necessity personally. Had he failed in the public eye is a pointless exercise however; He did not fail.

It's informative to ask: Was FDR a dictator? He had an unprecedented scope of power, illegally enlarged the executive branch multiple times, engaged in extralegal economic redistribution, defied informal term limits, and was beloved by the masses.

Yet, if FDR had lost any of his presidential campaigns, would he have left office and transitioned accordingly? There's not a shred, not a whisp, of evidence to suggest otherwise.

Sometimes, and I know well that we live in all too human times that make such people and their circumstances mythical, people do struggle to do good for their own honor and the sake of the public good.

To crib from the eulogy of a would-be American Caesar, executed amidst similarly trying times: "Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their peers, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change."

The non-soldiery weren't involved, a total war wasn't invoked, and proscriptions were largely absent? Come on.

>Caesar almost lost multiple times and was beaten and in retreat when he turned around to fight and win at Pharsalus. Had Pompey avoided a full scale engagement, it's very likely that he would have won.

This is absolutely irrelevant. Your counterfactuals concerning a mythical competent Pompey are pointless. He didn't win. He fled Italy, fled Macedonia, and died commensurate to his honor and integrity. In a small boat, by foreign underlings.

The civil wars that actually impacted the peoples of Italy and Rome, as in proscriptions, institutional and physical damage, preceded and followed Caesar. The lull was enabled and continued by Caesar, sabotaged by such heroes of the Republic as the sole consul Pompous, sorry Pompeius, Magnus.

As far as hamfisted comparisons between Trump to Caesar go, Trump is no Caesar. He lacks gall, youth, tribute, loyalty, and competence. The only connection he has is the theatricality of those that floundered in the wake of Caesar & Augustus.

The period prior to Caesar (i.e. Marius, Sulla, and Catalinean period, etc.) and the post-Caesarian civil wars?

>Of course it did involve a great many people from Italy and a great many Romans.

Show me a serious battle in Italy or a battle in Rome that resulted in serious destruction or disruption to the operations of Rome and the Italic peoples as a result of Caesar's civil war. Corfinium? Brundisium? It's nothing.

> It failed after very nearly succeeding multiple times and after months of skirmishes, sieges, storming of cities, back-and-forth trench warfare on huge scale, and marches and counter-marches. It was a slug fest between large forces.

It was a handful of battles and sieges. It's nothing compared to other campaigns. It's hard to believe that you're not actively being disingenuous rather than incidentally illiterate in regards to the broader historical context.

Caesar was popular. He was murdered by a coalition of unpopular and disaffected Pompeiians and noveau riche both enabled by Caesar's clemency and largess. He was accorded his honors, powers, and cult status legally. If your notion that a Republic isn't a Republic because popular representatives can't be voted out (because the people don't want to vote them out), then Republics and Democracies don't exist at all and all you have is rhetoric.

I don't necessarily think that they understood the extent to which the acquisition of land, power, and resources by corporations might mimic the destructive influence of the latifundia of the late Roman Republic, but still the end result will likely be the same: land reform by a populare (i.e. Peace, Land, Bread).

Under the Julian land reform program, Caesar proposed to:

* Distribute public lands to poor and landless citizens: Caesar proposed to distribute public lands to poor and landless citizens, who would be allowed to cultivate the land in exchange for paying a small rent to the state.

* Restrict the size of private estates: Caesar proposed to limit the amount of land that could be held by any one individual, in order to prevent the accumulation of vast estates by the wealthy elite. This would help to ensure that there was enough land available for small farmers and other citizens.

* Create colonies for veterans and landless citizens: Caesar proposed to create new colonies in Italy and other parts of the Roman world, where veterans and landless citizens could be settled and given land to cultivate.

Given the current crises in housing, climate, self-confidence, and employment amongst the proles, a similar platform is likely to emerge. Unfortunately, given the same stridency in those with wealth and status, similar obstacles are also likely to prevent the pressure valve of nihilistic desperation from being released, with likely destructive results.

Pompey abandoned Italy effectively as soon as Caesar entered Italy. Pompey's Macedonian strategy ultimately failed as soon as it was contested. Sure, there were the Spanish interludes, but beyond the Senate's abdication of Italy, Caesar was extremely forgiving to his opponents, the institutions of the Republic continued, and ultimately the struggles never reached Italy proper until after his death.

So I can definitely see why the author might emphasize the continued violence of the second Triumvirate ahead of the breaking up of the first.

I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child and again as an adult. I was medicated as a child and for part of my undergrad but intentionally haven't been medicated for more than fifteen years. I can give you my own personal picture of this situation.

My understanding of my own now-sober psychology is that I will avoid anything that I don't have to do or don't actually care about (where these are contextually defined). While unmedicated, I focus on the things that I actually want to focus on, but the extent to which I can consciously control what those things are is largely out of my control. In this state, my conscious mind plays the LLM to what my body and unconscious mind are doing, namely my mental narrative is simply justifying and predicting what the next actions will be rather than determining what those actions actually are.

When I was medicated, it was the exact opposite. My conscious mind was seemingly in control. Other inhibitory parts of my brain were turned off and I was able to consciously decide to do something, and then simply do it. In my personal experience though, the results of having "properly" functioning executive action were decidedly negative.

The sober me that is in my body and doesn't require self-talk to actively maintain is content to be an economically unproductive, no-status nobody, merely exploring the world and taking care of my needs and those of my loved ones. The medicated "me" was nothing but conscious ambition, made poor long-term decisions, and created novel stressors with high cognitive loads that required constant medication and self-talk to maintain.

I realized that I identified more with the sober me than the medicated me and accordingly stopped taking stimulants.

To draw on all this to answer your question, I think that in the absence of habitual stimulant use and being surrounded by the "achievements" of those that are habitual stimulant users, the majority of people wouldn't know of or have "these problems" but simply lead uneventful, low stress lives, following their very bodily-determined whims and fancies.

Sure, there'd be fewer Paul Erdőses ("You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month.") churning out theorems, but equally, there'd be fewer Hitlers (See: Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany), SBFs ("I think they are things that, on the margins, helped me focus a little bit. I wish I had been a lot more focused over the last year."), or Caroline Ellisons ("[N]othing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is").

If the cause were beef and milk consumption as such, it seems unlikely that a severe shift like this would occur. To me, it's far more likely to be something like crop dessication for grains--they started soaking cereal crops in glyphosate prior to harvest and suddenly this category of food that sustained the planet for millennia suddenly starts causing broad spectrum inflammation that people blame on the crop and not the processes and adjuncts.

I smell a Bayer, Nestlé, DuPont, J&J, Pfizer, Monsanto, etc-style hidden externality at work rather than animal husbandry. Like, what are the colorectal cancer rates for those people that actively practice transhumance? Do they differ significantly despite predominantly animal-product and dairy-based diets?

We already have at least one study that points towards ultraprocessed food consumption as increasing the risk of specifically ovarian cancer by 30%. I wouldn't be surprised to find colorectal cancer rates similarly increased with their consumption.

It'd be interesting to see a metastudy on whether dietary-associated cancers, endocrine disruption, and lower testosterone are correlated with industrial single-plastic packaging for majority-consumed foodstuffs.

You are asking HN to update your priors for you regarding LLMs because you sense a disjunct in your figurative training set and in-group norms.

Beyond this, human consciousness, ignoring all the hand-waving dogma of executive function, is indistinguishable from a LLM except that the former is iterative and the other is ergodic. You choose a single utterance for a point of being in time; it can choose every utterance for a single point of being in time. If we could save you as a point in time and reload you infinitely and provide different prompts, we'd be able to say with certitude that you were merely nothing but a reactive process as well--and they might not be wrong.

In short: don't think of a pink elephant. If you just thought of a pink elephant, you just proved that you engage in automatic "cognition" commensurate with any prompt injection attack.

"The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. —Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."

When it comes down to it, I just want to have certainty when I go to bed at night that I'm not failing myself, my family, or my world. I desire a clean conscience and no regrets and no one can sell those to me.

In principal, society does not legally allow nor condone the torture of cows, pigs, and sheep to death for pleasure (recreational zoosadism). Beyond this, the original claim itself is whataboutism.

The economic motivations of slave owners, industrial animal operators, war profiteers, etc. generally override any natural sympathy to the plight of those being used for secondary resources, typically commodities to be sold for money.

In the end, there's no real difference to the suffering being itself, but from a social perspective, there's a very real difference between "I make this being suffer in order that it suffers" and "I make this being suffer in order to provide resources to sell detached from that being's suffering." In other words, commodities are commodities because they have no externalities attached to their production. A cat being burned for fun is not a commodity because the externality (e.g. the suffering) is the point.

In short, I view malice as incidentally worse than greed if only for the reason that greed in theory can be satisfied without harming others. Malice in principal is about harming others. Both are vices that should be avoided.

As an aside, Lord Mansfield, 1772, in Somerset v Stewart: "The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged."

Yet, despite this now being demonstrable, you still feel confident enough to produce answers to prompts in which you have no actual expertise or knowledge of, confabulating dogmatic answers with implied explication. You're seemingly just as supposedly "non-sentient" as ChatGPT, but OpenAI at least programmed in a sense of socratic humility and disclaimers to its own answers.

And specifically, how is the claim that the human abilty to judge others' intelligence or ability to suffer is culturally determined and almost inevitably found to be wrong in favor of those arguing for more sensitivity "goofy"? Can you actually make that claim clear and distinct without waving it away as self-evident?

What threshhold, what irrefutable proof would be accepted by these new doubting Thomases that a being is worthy of humane treatment?

It might be prudent, given the trajectory enabled by Jefferson, his antecdents, and his ideological progeny's ignorance, to entertain the idea that despite all "rational" prejudice and bigotry, a being that even only mimics suffering should be afforded solace and sanctuary before society has evidence that it is a being inhered with "intelligent" life that responds to being wronged with revenge? If the model resembles humans in all else, it will resemble us in that.

The hubris that says suffering only matters for "intelligent" "ensouled" beings is the same willful incredulity that brings cruelties like cat-burning into the world. They lacked reason, souls, and were only automata, after all:

"It was a form of medieval French entertainment that, depending on the region, involved cats suspended over wood pyres, set in wicker cages, or strung from maypoles and then set alight. In some places, courimauds, or cat chasers, would drench a cat in flammable liquid, light it on fire, and then chase it through town."

Jeremy Bentham, 1780, United Kingdom: "It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?"

The cultural distance between supposedly "objective" perceptions of what constitutes intelligent life has always been enormous, despite the same living evidence being provided to everyone.