lo_zamoyski

Indeed, and that's an important distinction.

Just war [0] proponents will argue both. For instance, targeting civilians/civilian infrastructure is gravely immoral (the decimation part), but also any armed conflict is unlikely to be successful and thus would be immoral on the grounds that there is no reasonable chance of success (the conquer part). But frankly, in this case, we don't even meet most jus ad bellum criteria, let along jus in bello.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/

> You need to persuade the court you can have divorce.

What makes you think no-fault divorce is desirable? Stable marriages are integral not only to the individual well-being of those who are married, but to a healthy society in general. No-fault divorce is one of the worst developments in the West, because it feeds mediocrity, selfishness, convenience, and self-indulgence. Requiring a grave reason seems utterly sensible. Do vows mean nothing? Are they just nice little lies to tell each other?

So, making civil divorce more difficult to obtain is beneficial, because individuals are weak, and indeed one of the purposes of the law in general is to teach and to help guide people toward a good life. So, here, by making divorce more difficult, it assists in getting couples to work their issues out. Speaking from experience, I know marriage forces a kind of ultimatum: either ship up as a human being—either keep chiseling away at becoming a better person by becoming a better spouse—or prepare for a miserable marriage. And let's not flatter ourselves: many people choose the latter and reach for the easy way out with divorce.

Appealing to Western hyper-individualism falls on deaf ears, because we've seen the effects of hyper-individualism. Collectivism is bad, but the extreme of hyper-individualism isn't good, either. Why would you want to replicate the tangible failures of the West in your country?

It's not so surprising. When cultures slide into decadence, they seldomly do so abruptly. It often occurs thin slice by thin slice. Once you accept one seemingly thin moral concession, it is easier to accept the next because you've shortened the distance. Not only that, but with each moral concession, you become more willing to accept still greater concessions as you become increasingly detached from reality. And we shouldn't forget the role of cognitive dissonance. The notion that the consensus about what is normal can be wrong is very uncomfortable for many.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Perhaps it makes some people uncomfortable about their own jobs. In any case, it's not uncommon for people to moralize about something they're not doing, but given the opportunity to do that thing for some handsome reward (good pay, prestige, technically interesting work, etc), they easily rationalize their choice to participate in that thing.

I would say the research university is getting comeuppance.

Pedagogy is the primary purpose of educational institutions. That includes universities. However, when research is placed first, you are often left with mediocre teachers, because "who cares?" They were hired to do research and lend the university that kind of prestige; teaching is an afterthought squeezed into the spaces that remain.

And frankly, we haven't the faintest clue today what education is even for. That doesn't bode well.

Add to this the other troubles facing the university, like declining attendance, skyrocketing costs, and AI cheating and we're in for a very interesting transition indeed.

What I find interesting is how the tone seems to have changed in swathes of tech industry. Until LLMs were a thing, techno-optimism and sola technologia fundamentalism seems to have been a more prominent fetish. When LLMs began having a practical and tangible effect, much of the same cohort seems to have pivoted toward aversion. If this is true—and this perception could be an artifact of selection bias driven by those with the loudest voices, though I strongly suspect it is not that entirely—then it cannot be denied how self-serving it is. Sure, we can automate away all sorts of jobs, confident that our own is the only constant and the one thing that would survive automation. But then, the cunning of reality cut down that hubris.

Of course, I do think technology ought to be adopted with prudence and wisdom. We must always remember the purpose of technology which is serving the objective human good, but to be able to do that requires more than narrow technical savvy. You need a wise and substantive grasp of the broader context within which technology is located.

> It's a pejorative removed from it's historical context.

It utterly depends on historical context. Intelligent people understand antonomasia and eponymy.

> Actual Luddites and Pharisees would have not agreed that they were against technology or legalistic hypocrites

That's neither here nor there.

Which is, of course, a bad thing that ought not to be encouraged and that ubiquity does, in fact, encourage and normalize.

The American situation is a real quagmire.

The American auto lobby has spent nearly a century manipulating Americans and American culture by insinuating car ownership and transportation into what it means to be "American". The automobile is a symbol of freedom and independence and plays into the myth of rugged American individualism ("I can drive whenever I want, wherever I want") and masculinity ("I am a real man, because I am independent and because ownership demonstrates I have means"). Certainly, cars do afford a certain practical freedom and comfort for certain use cases—in part because public infrastructure and transport can be hostile to normal human activities instead of supporting them—but in the American mind, these aren't just weighed against a backdrop of practical concerns and superior goods. The car has a quasi-religious quality for many Americans. Getting your license and owning your first car is a practically institutionalized rite of passage into adulthood.

Gov't policy—some gladly endorsed by the auto lobby—also played a role. Zoning (like Euclidean zoning) and urban planning (or lack thereof), coupled with a lack of surviving and robust public transportation infrastructure (like public passenger rail), forced and continues to force Americans into car ownership even if they would prefer other means. The rise of postwar suburb, sprawl, and the death of walkable towns and cities has entrenched the need for car ownership. And we shouldn't forget the financial incentives. Mortgages underwritten by the FHA and VA rewarded sprawl with mortgages while penalizing denser development. Taxpayer revenue also funded roads while regulations capped what privately-owned "public" transportation could charge riders, forcing them into bankruptcy and opening transport up to the predation of companies like GM who snapped up their assets and ripped out rail in favor of their own buses.

However, we're seeing some pushback in Gen Z. American cities and certainly towns are no longer the polluted industrial centers they used to be. We also don't have the post-WWII pressure to divert wartime industry toward other ends to maintain employment, or Cold War fears of having too many people concentrated in large, easy-to-nuke urban centers.

> Terrence Tao, one of the most prominent mathematicians alive today, doesn't know math history?

If Tao has a knowledge of the topic (which he does), then it isn't by virtue of being a mathematician per se, but by virtue of an interest in the history of mathematics (which he has). Knowledge of math is enormously helpful here, but it does not imply historical knowledge.

That's not the right word here, as Catholic dogmatic teaching does not enter into negotiation with what you might call competing doctrines. It doesn't blend bodies of doctrine like that.

We're talking about adopting cultural practices in a selective and transfigurative way. If a cultural practice doesn't conflict with the Church's teachings and would be beneficial, then it could be embraced as such. A cultural practice may also be transfigured and adapted into something that maintains a certain resemblance, but has a changed and elevated meaning. For instance, having encountered a culture that practices ancestor worship, it might take that practice and transfigure it into a restrained expression of filial piety that moves it away from idolatry. Pagan harvest festivals are another example where the symbolic meaning is changed.

Right. The Church recognizes the principle of subsidiarity which is not coincidentally part of its social teaching.

Modern media has allowed the pope to receive unceasing attention that the papacy never possessed historically, but what is important to emphasize is that this is not a reflection of how the Church is administered or how authority is distributed. The idea that the pope is "running the Church" or "watching every member of the one and a half billion member flock like a busybody hawk" is a fiction drawn from jejune ignorance. Rome is notoriously slow to act, which should in general not be seen as a sign of incompetence, but as an expression of subsidiarity. It is much better to view the pope as the ultimate referee rather than some oppressive overlord. The moral ball is in your court, as it were.

W.r.t. absorbing what's around it, the Church has always recognized logos spermatikos or seminal reason, meaning, it recognizes reality as an intelligible creation of God, it recognizes the inherent rational nature of every human being, and thus it recognizes that every human being has an in principle capacity to recognize and know reality, to one degree or another. So, it sees no reason to suppose that there is nothing good or true or beautiful outside the Church and plenty of reason to recognize it and embrace it. What is good is good, what is true is true, what is beautiful is beautiful. When the Church encounters a culture, it seeks what is good within it and seeks to transfigure it in order to rescue its goodness and perfect it. Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit.

A factor, certainly, but culture, including the culture around education, are arguably bigger factors (which social media is also a vector for modifying; medium is the message and all that).

Social and cultural expectations and conventions are extremely important. Even in supposedly laissez-faire Western countries where traditional cultural expectations have withered to the point of laxity, people still live their lives according to convention and expectation, even if those conventions and expectations are increasingly vulgar and dictated by powerful interest. (Indeed, the fertility crisis is determined largely by patterns of convention. It used to be that, for most people, it was expected that you would marry and have children earlier rather than later. Now, our cultural expectations actually penalize that kind of behavior. You're supposed to "find yourself", "play the field", or "build up your career" first.)

Human beings operate more by convention than by moral reasoning. Society needs an environment demands good things from them. Even when we know what the right or good course of action is through moral reasoning and discernment, it is very helpful for social convention and culture to support those choices.

The law is also traditionally a source of guardrails that help people attain better lives.

Effective altruists concur.

Yes, Aristotle thought this about eels and certain kinds of mudfish or grey mullet, but he didn't maintain this about fish in general.

> Since no one had seen fish having sex, it was believed that fish spawned spontaneously from rivers/lakes/oceans and therefore were free from the animal version of "original sin".

I don't know who comes up with this stuff.

Aristotle wrote extensively about fish eggs, milt and breeding habits centuries before the Christian era. Not only that, fishermen throughout history were well aware that fish laid eggs.

On the other point, original sin applies exclusively to humans. Animals were never considered moral agents, nor were they subject to the Fall of Man in a way that required spiritual redemption.

> sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage

Yes, but one uses Brassica oleracea while the other uses Brassica rapa.

If I had more time, I might elaborate on the fact that both the author and those he criticizes are children of the Enlightenment. I mention this, because it has a great deal of relevance. Neither Promethean Techno-Pelagianism on the one hand nor Socio-Voluntaristic Manichaeism on the other present a great vision of the good, whatever validity we can find in their criticisms.

> asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored [...] It always picks its own

...is not the same as claiming...

> LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones

Here, you're using the same LLM to both produce and judge the resulting work. If anything, I would expect an LLM to tend to prefer its own work given that the same training is producing and judging.

> 'All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them'

There are plenty of things that are difficult to understand that have been known by others for a long time. The point is that you don't understand those things. Your understanding of something doesn't benefit from someone else understanding it, per se. I will agree that having a guide does make it easier.

> If knowing was the valuable part, then nobody would need a PhD. You could know more by just reading textbooks. Research mathematicians research, everybody else just learns.

Knowing is the most valuable part! It's the whole point of research!

And where knowledge is concerned, there isn't a sharp line between what constitutes "learning" and what constitutes "research". How do you know a claim in a book is correct? You can take it on authority and just believe it. Or, you can seek to verify it yourself. As far as your own mind is concerned, you've discovered something for yourself. And what is a researcher doing? He's inferring things and reasoning and verifying his inferences. These are activities you use both during learning and during research.

> I think it's a mistake to attribute scientism to him.

That would be good news, but this does make the article more - not less - confusing. If he doesn't lean toward scientism or adopt a view that, when worked out fully, results in scientism, then it is difficult to grasp what the exact nature of the conflict is.

One must be careful about what is meant by "language" here, which is actually language expression. LLMs don't possess conceptual content. They only operate on language expression.

Language as an internal conceptualization is still (obviously) essential to logical reasoning. The question of how language and logic relate can, therefore, concern either the internal language of concepts or the expressed language and its grammar, the latter of which is related to logic in that it reflects to some degree the internal language, but it is not identical with it.

> what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything

A similar question is now being asked: what is the point of doing research, etc. if something like AI can figure out everything?

The question betrays the parochial way in which many people think about knowledge. For them, knowledge is merely an instrument or an effect. It does not occur to them that knowing is a valuable thing in itself, that understanding is valuable and desirable. Yes, some knowledge has merely practical value, but theoretical knowledge is primarily sought for its own sake, because we desire to know reality.

So, even if Terrence Tao, an AI agent, or who or whatever arrives at some bit of new knowledge, it doesn't benefit you as a knowing subject unless you understand it yourself and make it your own.

Thomistic and Catholic intellectual tradition in general has long recognized this strange intellectual fragmentation which it does not itself suffer. It is not a matter of mere difference of temperament, because reality is what it is. One may take one perspective or another, but there remains one reality. The fragmentation is rather the result of intellectual error and error that is historically rather recent.

Each special field or domain focuses on a particular aspect of reality. Snow's view appears to lean toward the scientistic, and scientism is not merely an available and defensible stance in the ring, but an incoherent position to begin with. The central claim of scientism—that empirical science is the only source of knowledge—is itself not a scientific claim and not one that empirical science can demonstrate. To establish the correctness of this proposition requires us to step outside or above empirical science in order to make empirical science itself an object of study. But as soon as we do that, we have by that very act disproven scientism. One can only wonder how such a basic philosophical error fails to figure into the reasoning of scientism's advocates, especially given the failure of logical positivism which crashed and burned for very similar reasons.

So, to reject scientism isn't to reject science for what it truly is. It is to reject sola scientia.

The solution to the problem must occur on a philosophical plane. Only on a philosophical plane can we ask (and answer!) "what does empirical science actually tell us?" or "what is the knowledge the humanities give us?". Only on a philosophical plane can be talk about metaphysics and the nature of being (where metaphysics is the general science, while all the others are special sciences). Only philosophy allows us to relate and to locate the fruits of every field in the larger patchwork of human knowledge.

Which brings us to one of the earlier claims

"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week"

which should be rewritten as

"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of things that I consider to be bugs per week"

which is to say that the "bug" is in the eye of the beholder. It seems the author stretches the definition of "bug" to include cases where something functions, but in a manner that is open to improvement or not to his taste.

In common English, I would say that "average" as used in the quote is understood to be something closer to mode, hence why the joke works, because it trades on the ambiguity of "average" and the difference between mode and mean.

Not quite.

Rhetoric is persuasion under the presupposition that what you are trying to persuade someone of is true. Sophistry is indifferent to the truth and is merely concerned with results. Rhetoric respects the humanity of the interlocutor. Sophistry seeks to exploit him.

> what if we took nice things from our country and subsidized distributing them to the rest of the world

Or the appearance of nice things. Consider the suburb as promoted by American film which has left a very deep mark on the global imagination and that, regrettably, maintains a strong influence over housing markets and urban planning to this day.

But this also means there’s more competition for attention, because now all lunatics can post from their bedrooms. The institutional media (including legacy) still maintain strong presence.

Of course, a great deal of panic over fake news wasn’t necessarily over fake news per se, but whose fake news and the loss of control over the “official narrative” that legacy media used to have a monopoly over. This isn’t a vindication of the heaps of slop published on the internet, just a more synoptic take IMO.

People miss Cronkite, because that style of media made them feel certain in their opinions and in “official consensus reality”, regardless of whether it was true or not and whether it was a trustworthy authority or not.

> Who decide

The law already concerns itself with determining intent (hence murder vs. manslaughter). I don’t see why similar criteria and methods cannot be applied here. We can assess the objectively bad psychological consequences of social media and look for evidence that establishes moral certainty about the intent.

I am not impressed with manufactured skepticism.

> There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort.

Quoting the article...

"Nearly half of senior leaders say they would trust a chatbot’s judgment over their own, on questions they were hired to answer."

If they're using it like an oracle, then that is worrying, but how worrying - practically speaking - would depend on the baseline prior to the use of AI and how that compares with what the AI is spitting out.

The first big hazard of this AI worship is, of course, the atrophy of reasoning skills. I don't think there's an especially distinct skill needed here. A rational person is able to evaluate claims made by others responsibly based on a combination of proxy signals like an earned reputation of trustworthiness, integrity, and authority, the logical coherence of the claim, and plausibility and the absence of contradiction between the claims and more certain baseline knowledge.

So, psychologically speaking, the ease with which we obtain credible-sounding answers is a major motivator, but two other cultural factors support this credulity, namely, magical & superstitious and the broad acceptance that bullshitting is an okay thing to do. Both weaken the ability to apprehend and reason about reality in different ways (bullshitting, for instance, reinforces a carelessness about and indifference to the truth; magical thinking more directly sabotages reason; both undermine confidence in reason and place stock in the sub-rational instead).