5 ms·

How is this not literally just a threat to rob people if they don't give up their stuff, and why would anyone take it as anything less?

AlecSchueler 4y ago
If you abuse someone to the point that they break then it's hard to blame them for their actions against you. It's tragic to see someone feel that they have no other avenue than violence.
- Paul-Craft 4y ago
  Once you've reached that point, it's not just "violence." It's self defense.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Wealth & power distributions are a little more complex than just 'having stuff.' In biological bodies, excess concentrations of resources in a single organ is associated with illness, exacerbation and proliferation of other conditions, and eventually failure and death. Intense wealth concentration strikes me as the social equivalent of diabetes.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rf15 4y ago
  You can draw a similar parallel with cancer, including the whole "the more you have the more you get" feature of wealth.
Volundr 4y ago
I'm sure many aristocrats would have framed the revolutions against them this way. And if you are willing to look at it from the right angle a great many revolutions throughout history come down to more or less this. You can claim it's not right, but there's right and there's the reality of human nature. Push the populace hard enough they WILL push back.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  Soon the elite will have amassed enough power through technology that they could put down any revolution. This terrifies me tbh. The most dangerous innovation in this regard is advances in brain scanning is it could make it trivially easy to find the resistance. But robots and AI are factors too. If the rich don't need the labor of the poor it will certainly shift the balance of power.
  - darrenringstadt 4y ago
    Even one where we just unplug the machines we have? There are only 1 million sworn LEO in the US, and they work for a paycheck, not loyalty to Jamie Dimon and company. You think those cops are going to bat for former oligarchs versus a population with 3 guns per adult at ready?
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    > most dangerous innovation in this regard is advances in brain scanning What terrifies me more than the idea of brain scanning that works is the (IMO more likely) deployment of "brain scanning" that doesn't work (but is used anyway) and creating a 21st century witch hunt. AI is very impressive, but people are getting so used to it performing magic that they believe it can do anything while preserving the veneer of objectivity that algorithms earned in the pre-ML days.
    - revolvingocelot 4y ago
      It won't matter if the "brain scanning" actually works or not. Examining the history and effectiveness of polygraphs is enlightening -- even now, polygraphs are used as though they are effective, and in a different light, are an example of an intimidation tactic.
    - nickfromseattle 4y ago
      LLMs have led to significant advancements in brain scanning. [0] [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1354ju1/scientists_use_gpt_llm_to_passively_decode_human/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1354ju1/scientists...
tysam_and 4y ago
The KL divergence (number of bits needed to encode one message with the coding scheme of another) is extremely high here between perspectives, so communicating the shared values here may be hard. You might appreciate taking an opportunity to just listen a bit to where some more downtrodden people are if you have that opportunity come up organically. I've lived in the perspective that you share, and I've lived in others, and it just took me cumulatively a lot of traveling and talking and listening to people to hear and develop other opinions and ways of seeing things (not just how other people in my in-group said how they saw things -- perhaps one of the fronts of some of the most toxic assumptions that I've ever made about people in the end). I ended up changing my opinions to different models as a result. If the parent message appears to mostly fit within the "I'm angry, so I'm going to burn down the world and do what I want and get my revenge and just take my anger out, including on people who have no control whether or not I get to hurt them in my selfishness" kind of category, I'd encourage you to look a bit deeper at the core of it. It's really hard to summarize lives in bullet points, but having lived within one category of oppression and knowing many people who are oppressed, it's hard to fully communicate what it's like, why people feel like it's the only option, and how it's a way that people are trying to enact change while still minimizing damage on the whole (strange as it may seem. the silent story of people being pushed down in civilly trying to change things is horrifying. i don't pine for violence myself, but i understand it for those who have been downtrodden in the ways that they have). I know that's not really directly answering it, but walking a mile is really the best solution that I know of that we have in all of the crazy division that there is today.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  Yet, still robbing me. This KL difference idea is absolutely interesting though, as I think the view I have is a normal and pretty conventional liberal view. Don't steal from people, don't extort, don't be a bandit, etc. I think compassionate distance is probably the only way to coexist with people who couldn't agree on those things, as to me it's really alien. Sort of interesting to view an idea from the ouside like that though.
  - tysam_and 4y ago
cool_dude85 4y ago
Who's being robbed: a citizen of the developing world without health care or clean drinking water, or a wealthy computer programmer trying to make online ads 1% more effective?
- alphanullmeric 4y ago
  Theft is defined as the seizure of private property without the consent of the owner, the victim is irrelevant. Leftists always have to make this strange argument where definitions are bent to label an action one way when it happens to a group they support, and another way when it happens to one they don’t. Why can’t you just say “I believe stealing is justified if it would benefit society” instead of “it’s not stealing when we do it to you”?
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    >Theft is defined as the seizure of private property without the consent of the owner This is a very contentious definition and central to the question being asked. You can't pass it off as already decided without any debate. Two situations for your definition, you tell me whether something is stolen: 1) You sell me a Ford Pinto that you know is likely to explode in a crash due to a design defect. I sue you after I'm burned up and win. I seize your private property by court judgement. Have I stolen from you? 2) A slave takes an apple from his master's orchard without permission and eats it. Has he stolen?
    - alphanullmeric 4y ago
      Arguably, both cases are theft. We simply decide whether or not it is acceptable with the principle that force is only and always justified in response to force. See how easy it is to be consistent?
      - herbstein 4y ago
        > See how easy it is to be consistent? Consistent on the definition of "theft", yes indeed. However, it's way harder to be consistent on the definition of "theft" while you also consider theft to be inherently immoral. And that's the center of this subthread. motohagiography asked.. > How is this not literally just a threat to rob people if they don't give up their stuff, and why would anyone take it as anything less? .. as a clear argument against the base morality of the original comment. This being seen as such hinges singularly on the fact that theft, in all forms, is inherently immoral. If you define theft as any time private property is taken, irrespective of circumstances, then you also have to concede that theft isn't always immoral. Thus, the whole original argument would have to make not only the case that the original suggestion of wealth redistribution is theft, but that it's immoral theft. That consistent, broad definition of theft thus becomes much less useful as a qualifier.
darrenringstadt 4y ago
Because we can point to a record of recent history where the elites collide with the politicians to create this situation. IBM refused to divest from give vacuum tube based computer business so government funded silicon and transistors based computers then gifted the technology to IBM. There’s story after story of the public having its wealth expropriated.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
In the same way that a chargeback is not a theft from the merchant--a higher authority steps in and corrects the record. Property rights exist because the people consent to them. If there's sufficient consensus, they can be revoked in the same way.
- logicchains 4y ago
  >Property rights exist because the people consent to them. You clearly have absolutely no understanding of what "rights" mean. They're based on deontological arguments, that's why they're called "inherent" rights, not based on some weird utilitarian notion that anything can be morally right if enough people believe it is. By your view of rights raping someone would be okay if enough people want to do it.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    > They're based on deontological arguments You clearly have absolutely no understanding of how "rights" work in the real world. There is no divine force enforcing your god-given right. There's only power. The reason the current "rights" even exist, is because they are enforced through power - if I steal from you, police comes over to my place and beats the shit out of me. Remove the police (and all other forms of power) from the equation, and you can wipe your ass with your "rights". Or in other words, deontology is just glorified astrology, a bunch of mumbo-jumbo poppycock. > By your view of rights raping someone would be okay if enough people want to do it. You're trying to reduce this argument to absurdity, but in many ancient civilizations, rape, in some contexts, was considered okay.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    I'm not an arbiter of what's right and wrong. I'm just some guy who gets to decide which rights I'll stand up and defend, and which ones I'll allow to lapse. My reasons are irrelevant to whether my behavior contributes to the emergence or dissolution of rights (but I think they happen to be deontological arguments anyway). Bodily autonomy, I'll defend in all cases, no need to argue that one here. Property, not so much. It's part of a bargain. If the people with an outsized share of the property don't exercise their control over surpluses to ensure some degree of decency for all (which they haven't) then they're in breach of the social contract, and is time for a discontinuity in property rights that gives us a different set of people to try out the same contact on.
AlexandrB 4y ago
It seems very convenient that "rob" doesn't include things like wage theft, destroying "the commons" for the sake of personal profit, or whatever the fuck happened in 2008. With a more expansive view of what "rob" means, one could argue that people have been getting robbed for years.
faeriechangling 4y ago
Define robbery. Taking the US as an illustrative example: How about legalising corruption in politics through Citizens United and having laws systemically rewritten to favor the rich? Or the government subsequently effectively pumping investors portfolios with the poor's money through QE (especially using the slap in the face "too big to fall" justification which essentially says the wealthy are more important to the economy than the poor)? How about raising taxes on the poor by not adjusting tax brackets for inflation while corporate taxes have trended down? How about Exxon making record profits by getting government subsidies and further subsidising its own profits by making the world poorer with its pollution? Paying taxes is not a voluntary choice. Subjecting yourself to inflation is not a voluntary choice. Having your environment polluted is not a voluntary choice. You have no political alternative to this system, no vote you can make to say no to it. The rich taking from the poor is only not considered robbery since the wealthy both (legally) bribe the lawmakers and are the lawmakers. Just look at Clarence Thomas. Only the poor taking from the rich is robbery. The semantics of what constitutes robbery aside, the world is experiencing a totally unsustainable concentration of wealth which will eventually cause markets for goods & services, consumerism, and the engine of world economics to collapse toppling the entire wealth pyramid. On top of that, global warming and the fact that oil supply seems to be plateauing (So we can't kick the true costs of energy down the road again) is suddenly going to make being poor much more expensive. At some point sheer practicality will prevail and redistribution to the poor will need to happen, and if it doesn't happen voluntarily, it is likely to result in an eventual revolution. If a revolution happens, it's likely that suddenly lawmakers will change the semantic definition of robbery.
- 27fingies 4y ago
  it’s robbery because the users here, myself included, would be on the losing end of wealth redistribution. If it’s the other way round it’s good business.
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    Of course, it's only robbery when those wealthier than me have gotten ahead. The fact that I make dramatically more than some random African Worker for ChatGPT obviously doesn't mean I have to give up any of my money. It's the 1% who need to forfeit their money - to me!
SiempreViernes 4y ago
Yo, this is some really good bait!

AlecSchueler 4y ago

If you abuse someone to the point that they break then it's hard to blame them for their actions against you. It's tragic to see someone feel that they have no other avenue than violence.

Paul-Craft 4y ago
Once you've reached that point, it's not just "violence." It's self defense.

anigbrowl 4y ago

Wealth & power distributions are a little more complex than just 'having stuff.' In biological bodies, excess concentrations of resources in a single organ is associated with illness, exacerbation and proliferation of other conditions, and eventually failure and death. Intense wealth concentration strikes me as the social equivalent of diabetes.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rf15 4y ago
You can draw a similar parallel with cancer, including the whole "the more you have the more you get" feature of wealth.

Volundr 4y ago

I'm sure many aristocrats would have framed the revolutions against them this way. And if you are willing to look at it from the right angle a great many revolutions throughout history come down to more or less this. You can claim it's not right, but there's right and there's the reality of human nature. Push the populace hard enough they WILL push back.

im3w1l 4y ago
Soon the elite will have amassed enough power through technology that they could put down any revolution. This terrifies me tbh. The most dangerous innovation in this regard is advances in brain scanning is it could make it trivially easy to find the resistance. But robots and AI are factors too. If the rich don't need the labor of the poor it will certainly shift the balance of power.
- darrenringstadt 4y ago
  Even one where we just unplug the machines we have? There are only 1 million sworn LEO in the US, and they work for a paycheck, not loyalty to Jamie Dimon and company. You think those cops are going to bat for former oligarchs versus a population with 3 guns per adult at ready?
- jrumbut 4y ago
  > most dangerous innovation in this regard is advances in brain scanning What terrifies me more than the idea of brain scanning that works is the (IMO more likely) deployment of "brain scanning" that doesn't work (but is used anyway) and creating a 21st century witch hunt. AI is very impressive, but people are getting so used to it performing magic that they believe it can do anything while preserving the veneer of objectivity that algorithms earned in the pre-ML days.
  - revolvingocelot 4y ago
    It won't matter if the "brain scanning" actually works or not. Examining the history and effectiveness of polygraphs is enlightening -- even now, polygraphs are used as though they are effective, and in a different light, are an example of an intimidation tactic.
  - nickfromseattle 4y ago
    LLMs have led to significant advancements in brain scanning. [0] [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1354ju1/scientists_use_gpt_llm_to_passively_decode_human/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1354ju1/scientists...

tysam_and 4y ago

The KL divergence (number of bits needed to encode one message with the coding scheme of another) is extremely high here between perspectives, so communicating the shared values here may be hard. You might appreciate taking an opportunity to just listen a bit to where some more downtrodden people are if you have that opportunity come up organically. I've lived in the perspective that you share, and I've lived in others, and it just took me cumulatively a lot of traveling and talking and listening to people to hear and develop other opinions and ways of seeing things (not just how other people in my in-group said how they saw things -- perhaps one of the fronts of some of the most toxic assumptions that I've ever made about people in the end). I ended up changing my opinions to different models as a result. If the parent message appears to mostly fit within the "I'm angry, so I'm going to burn down the world and do what I want and get my revenge and just take my anger out, including on people who have no control whether or not I get to hurt them in my selfishness" kind of category, I'd encourage you to look a bit deeper at the core of it. It's really hard to summarize lives in bullet points, but having lived within one category of oppression and knowing many people who are oppressed, it's hard to fully communicate what it's like, why people feel like it's the only option, and how it's a way that people are trying to enact change while still minimizing damage on the whole (strange as it may seem. the silent story of people being pushed down in civilly trying to change things is horrifying. i don't pine for violence myself, but i understand it for those who have been downtrodden in the ways that they have). I know that's not really directly answering it, but walking a mile is really the best solution that I know of that we have in all of the crazy division that there is today.

motohagiography 4y ago
Yet, still robbing me. This KL difference idea is absolutely interesting though, as I think the view I have is a normal and pretty conventional liberal view. Don't steal from people, don't extort, don't be a bandit, etc. I think compassionate distance is probably the only way to coexist with people who couldn't agree on those things, as to me it's really alien. Sort of interesting to view an idea from the ouside like that though.
- tysam_and 4y ago

cool_dude85 4y ago

Who's being robbed: a citizen of the developing world without health care or clean drinking water, or a wealthy computer programmer trying to make online ads 1% more effective?

alphanullmeric 4y ago
Theft is defined as the seizure of private property without the consent of the owner, the victim is irrelevant. Leftists always have to make this strange argument where definitions are bent to label an action one way when it happens to a group they support, and another way when it happens to one they don’t. Why can’t you just say “I believe stealing is justified if it would benefit society” instead of “it’s not stealing when we do it to you”?
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  >Theft is defined as the seizure of private property without the consent of the owner This is a very contentious definition and central to the question being asked. You can't pass it off as already decided without any debate. Two situations for your definition, you tell me whether something is stolen: 1) You sell me a Ford Pinto that you know is likely to explode in a crash due to a design defect. I sue you after I'm burned up and win. I seize your private property by court judgement. Have I stolen from you? 2) A slave takes an apple from his master's orchard without permission and eats it. Has he stolen?
  - alphanullmeric 4y ago
    Arguably, both cases are theft. We simply decide whether or not it is acceptable with the principle that force is only and always justified in response to force. See how easy it is to be consistent?
    - herbstein 4y ago
      > See how easy it is to be consistent? Consistent on the definition of "theft", yes indeed. However, it's way harder to be consistent on the definition of "theft" while you also consider theft to be inherently immoral. And that's the center of this subthread. motohagiography asked.. > How is this not literally just a threat to rob people if they don't give up their stuff, and why would anyone take it as anything less? .. as a clear argument against the base morality of the original comment. This being seen as such hinges singularly on the fact that theft, in all forms, is inherently immoral. If you define theft as any time private property is taken, irrespective of circumstances, then you also have to concede that theft isn't always immoral. Thus, the whole original argument would have to make not only the case that the original suggestion of wealth redistribution is theft, but that it's immoral theft. That consistent, broad definition of theft thus becomes much less useful as a qualifier.

darrenringstadt 4y ago

Because we can point to a record of recent history where the elites collide with the politicians to create this situation. IBM refused to divest from give vacuum tube based computer business so government funded silicon and transistors based computers then gifted the technology to IBM. There’s story after story of the public having its wealth expropriated.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

In the same way that a chargeback is not a theft from the merchant--a higher authority steps in and corrects the record. Property rights exist because the people consent to them. If there's sufficient consensus, they can be revoked in the same way.

logicchains 4y ago
>Property rights exist because the people consent to them. You clearly have absolutely no understanding of what "rights" mean. They're based on deontological arguments, that's why they're called "inherent" rights, not based on some weird utilitarian notion that anything can be morally right if enough people believe it is. By your view of rights raping someone would be okay if enough people want to do it.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  > They're based on deontological arguments You clearly have absolutely no understanding of how "rights" work in the real world. There is no divine force enforcing your god-given right. There's only power. The reason the current "rights" even exist, is because they are enforced through power - if I steal from you, police comes over to my place and beats the shit out of me. Remove the police (and all other forms of power) from the equation, and you can wipe your ass with your "rights". Or in other words, deontology is just glorified astrology, a bunch of mumbo-jumbo poppycock. > By your view of rights raping someone would be okay if enough people want to do it. You're trying to reduce this argument to absurdity, but in many ancient civilizations, rape, in some contexts, was considered okay.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  I'm not an arbiter of what's right and wrong. I'm just some guy who gets to decide which rights I'll stand up and defend, and which ones I'll allow to lapse. My reasons are irrelevant to whether my behavior contributes to the emergence or dissolution of rights (but I think they happen to be deontological arguments anyway). Bodily autonomy, I'll defend in all cases, no need to argue that one here. Property, not so much. It's part of a bargain. If the people with an outsized share of the property don't exercise their control over surpluses to ensure some degree of decency for all (which they haven't) then they're in breach of the social contract, and is time for a discontinuity in property rights that gives us a different set of people to try out the same contact on.

AlexandrB 4y ago

It seems very convenient that "rob" doesn't include things like wage theft, destroying "the commons" for the sake of personal profit, or whatever the fuck happened in 2008. With a more expansive view of what "rob" means, one could argue that people have been getting robbed for years.

faeriechangling 4y ago

Define robbery. Taking the US as an illustrative example: How about legalising corruption in politics through Citizens United and having laws systemically rewritten to favor the rich? Or the government subsequently effectively pumping investors portfolios with the poor's money through QE (especially using the slap in the face "too big to fall" justification which essentially says the wealthy are more important to the economy than the poor)? How about raising taxes on the poor by not adjusting tax brackets for inflation while corporate taxes have trended down? How about Exxon making record profits by getting government subsidies and further subsidising its own profits by making the world poorer with its pollution? Paying taxes is not a voluntary choice. Subjecting yourself to inflation is not a voluntary choice. Having your environment polluted is not a voluntary choice. You have no political alternative to this system, no vote you can make to say no to it. The rich taking from the poor is only not considered robbery since the wealthy both (legally) bribe the lawmakers and are the lawmakers. Just look at Clarence Thomas. Only the poor taking from the rich is robbery. The semantics of what constitutes robbery aside, the world is experiencing a totally unsustainable concentration of wealth which will eventually cause markets for goods & services, consumerism, and the engine of world economics to collapse toppling the entire wealth pyramid. On top of that, global warming and the fact that oil supply seems to be plateauing (So we can't kick the true costs of energy down the road again) is suddenly going to make being poor much more expensive. At some point sheer practicality will prevail and redistribution to the poor will need to happen, and if it doesn't happen voluntarily, it is likely to result in an eventual revolution. If a revolution happens, it's likely that suddenly lawmakers will change the semantic definition of robbery.

27fingies 4y ago
it’s robbery because the users here, myself included, would be on the losing end of wealth redistribution. If it’s the other way round it’s good business.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  Of course, it's only robbery when those wealthier than me have gotten ahead. The fact that I make dramatically more than some random African Worker for ChatGPT obviously doesn't mean I have to give up any of my money. It's the 1% who need to forfeit their money - to me!

SiempreViernes 4y ago

Yo, this is some really good bait!