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This is probably the best thing I’ve read by a world leader on AI. It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics. Catholic
by thepasswordis 3y ago
This is probably the best thing I’ve read by a world leader on AI.
It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics. Catholicism is an institution implementing and developing a religious philosophy that has a profound love of humanity, creativity, and understanding.
> The inherent dignity of each human being and the fraternity that binds us together as members of the one human family must undergird the development of new technologies and serve as indisputable criteria for evaluating them before they are employed, so that digital progress can occur with due respect for justice and contribute to the cause of peace. Technological developments that do not lead to an improvement in the quality of life of all humanity, but on the contrary aggravate inequalities and conflicts, can never count as true progress. [8]
The entire thing is worth reading, but this particularly summarizes my feelings.
AI is good, but only insofar as it advances and centers the beauty of humanity.
- monkeynotes 3y ago> It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics. What are these misconceptions? Catholicism uses shame to induce conformity, has had numerous priests abuse children (and protecting the offenders), has a long history of violence against non-adherents, historically deeply homophobic, and so on. All of that is factual. Edit: Oh! And now I remember, they killed and buried hundreds of children in Canada at their "schools" for indigenous people. Graves unmarked, families never knew what happened to the kids. But it's OK! Pope here said sorry, sort of, after being pressured, for decades. Also they found graves. Canadian govt. couldn't give a rats ass because the church is as powerful as governments. But remember! We love all of God's children.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago[flagged]
- monkeynotes 3y agoSo what if it's not unique to Catholicism? I was asking specifically what the misconceptions are. You've redirected.
- ben_w 3y ago> So what if it's not unique to Catholicism? I was asking specifically what the misconceptions are. You've redirected. As someone who left Catholicism for Wicca and then eventually gave up on religion in general, I think it's valid to point out that these flaws are not unique to Catholicism. I would say that in pointing at all those things it has done wrong, you are implicitly saying that that these traits are unusual — but we're all a bunch of monkeys, it's really hard to get us to be nice to each other, and it's really easy for Machiavellian sadists to rise to power in every institution.
- monkeynotes 3y ago> I think it's valid to point out that these flaws are not unique to Catholicism. In what way? Does pointing it out change the facts? Why can't we have a discussion about how Catholicism is objectively hypocritical and not have to discuss all of the other things that are wrong in the world?
- ben_w 3y agoIn the specific way I wrote in the very next sentence. You're welcome to point out the flaws and hypocrisies all you like, though I know from my experience as an angry bisexual Wiccan teenager that had to go to a Catholic school and study the bible as part of my education, that it does little good unless you have the goal of looking pompous — especially when the very line you were quoting was > It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics. rather than > It makes me immensely sad that people don't realise Catholics are uniquely perfect. The former does not imply perfection, nor even an absence of hypocrisy.
- vkou 3y ago> None of that is unique to Catholicism. Correct. Organizations besides the Catholic church also get criticized for that kind of behaviour. (To various degrees, due to public awareness, religious or media or political or national or personal bias, or the fact that nobody outside the West Nowhere Parish in Nowhere cares about a regional, 800-member church scandal.) The Catholic church is a big organization. As in any big organization, there are aspects of it that are good, aspects of it that are OK, and aspects of it that are utterly, irredeemably rotten. And it's up to the church to figure out how to navigate that complexity. Given how hard it's been fighting accountability in this space, even very recently, I can't say they are doing a great job of navigating it, but that's just my opinion.
- dang 3y agoPlease don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar, regardless of which religious group you have a problem with. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- philwelch 3y agoThe rate of child sexual abuse among Catholic priests is lower than that of Protestant pastors, which in turn is even lower than that of public schoolteachers.
- monkeynotes 3y agoSo what??? If my neighbour murdered children would that be mitigated by a serial killer in the next town over? Do people really have this much cognitive dissonance that they lose the ability to think? Like how much delusion do you have to be under to even say the above and think it makes it better for Catholics. Even one priest raping a child under the protection of the church is entirely unacceptable.
- ImJamal 3y agoNobody is saying it is acceptable. The problem is every time the Church is brought up somebody has to talk about the abuse/cover up regardless of the topic. It is completely irrelevant to this thread. Nobody does this with public schools. If people always brought up the abuse and cover ups by teachers and unions regardless of the topic they would be down voted and told it is not relevant to the topic. If people actually cared about making abuse and coverups known they would bring it up every thread schools are brought up. Instead they only do it with the Church. It is almost as if they just want to attack the Church and ignore it in their own preferred abusive institutions.
- monkeynotes 3y agoCheck the comment this is spawned from. The comment elicited all of this by saying there are misconceptions about the church. I still don't get what the problem is. What does the asymmetric treatment between schools and church abuse have to do with the facts? > If people actually cared about making abuse and coverups known they would bring it up every thread schools are brought up. So you are saying I don't actually care about the abuse coverups? You think I have another agenda? You have a sick mind. > It is almost as if they just want to attack the Church and ignore it in their own preferred abusive institutions. It's not that, at all. Shame on you for trying to reframe it as such.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jimbob45 3y agoAll of that is factual You're sort of singling out Catholicism though. Islam does all those things much much worse than Catholicism ever has - in the present day too! I'm not Catholic and I don't care to defend them. Still, I don't want them singled out when Islam is demonstrably worse in every way.
- monkeynotes 3y ago> You're sort of singling out Catholicism though. Yes, because church is the context of this post, and the OP opened the door. What does your comment have to do with the facts?
- philwelch 3y ago[flagged]
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoCitation needed.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y agoIt is absolutely not a hoax. These graves are well documented.
- semigroupoid 3y agoThat may be a bit strong. What can be said is that a lot of the initial media outrage regarding the residential schools in the last few years were based on possible gravesites, discovered using ground-penetrating radar. However, multiple excavations have so far been unable to confirm those gravesites at the scales predicted, some of them even turned out to contain no human remains at all [0]. That does not excuse anything, but I find it troubling how many fairly strong claims are made in this thread with zero citations/evidence to back them up. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_gravesites https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_...
- MeImCounting 3y agoThe article linked does not support the thrust of your comment. "In total there are presently 4,126 children within the national student memorial register.[15] Research efforts by the NCTR are ongoing, and this number will increase over time." There are clearly more gravesites than we currently know about. The scale of this atrocity is beyond what was predicted.
- semigroupoid 3y agoI was referring specifically to the media coverage in 2021 and later that presented fairly large numbers (in the hundreds) of possible graves. However, per the article, none of them have been confirmed yet and a number of them even debunked. I am not denying that there are large gravesites or that terrible things happened at those schools.
- prefer_to_ask 3y ago[flagged]
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoNot only nation states and churches. All hierarchical organizations of any kind should be abolished.
- s_tec 3y agoJust because some people do bad things does not mean you get to paint the whole group with those crimes. Imagine if you had said, "Black people are criminals, because a black person robbed the liquor store down the street last week." We all (hopefully) recognize the deep racism in this statement! Unfortunately, there are parts of the country where this type of racism is acceptable and even common. There as similar attitudes towards Catholics, due to America's history as a predominately protestant country. The formula is the same both way - pick a heinous crime from a few members, blame it on the group as a whole, and feel smug about yourself.
- monkeynotes 3y agoI'm attacking an institution, not individuals.
- dang 3y agoNo religious flamewar on HN please. I realize the parent more or less started it but it's quite against the HN guidelines to take the bait this vigorously. "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: yikes, you posted 16 times in this thread! That's egregious. I'm going to assume that you hadn't seen this comment before posting any of those.
- mistermann 3y agoA modest proposal: perhaps if you were to teach your userbase why their thinking is objectively incorrect the frequency of these spectacles would decrease over time.
- mistermann 3y agoThat this (a comment containing this particular content) is [flagged] is interesting.
- dang 3y agoThat's impossible.
- mistermann 3y agoI don't see why. Consider the enlightenment, the rise of science subordinating religion, the fact that humans who have attended school are smarter on average than those who have not, the theory that you scolding people for violating the rules improves behavior, etc. It certainly isn't physically impossible, but I acknowledge that it may be metaphysically impossible.
- gdcbe 3y agoI’m from Belgium, traditionally a catholic country, and from that POV pretty certain that the biggest issue is that the catholic church as an institution has a pretty bad historical rep (still going on today) of abuse of power, and covering up where they see fit. So might help if they clean house, change policies and find ways to amend the victims. Just to say that I don’t agree that it’s always about misconceptions but more often about mistrust or not feeling accepted. That said there have been signs of a more open environment and their ceremonial texts can often be an interesting read.
- InCityDreams 3y agoTheir 'apologies" are often fun to read, too.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MeImCounting 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ugleer 3y ago[flagged]
- monkeynotes 3y agoLet's not forget about the abortion.
- DagsEoress 3y agoKilling babies is love for humanity?
- monkeynotes 3y ago[flagged]
- ugleer 3y ago[flagged]
- svieira 3y agoSed contra ruah (breath) meaning that people are not of concern to God before they take their first breath - "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" (Jeremiah 1:5). So even if people were not people before they were born, God cares about them before they are people. But then we have "Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" (Luke 1:43), said to a pregnant Mary by St. Elizabeth. If Christ is fully man and Mary is already "the mother of God" when she holds Christ in her womb then people are people before they are born. So we must be misunderstanding something about what Genesis 2:7 means. As for drinking dirty water from the floor of the temple (literally, sweep up some dust and put it in a cup with water - not an abortifacient) - the trial is asking God to reveal the truth or falsity of the woman's claim that she is virtuous (much in the same way as asking someone to take an oath in court - the bad outcome in both cases is falling under the judgement of God and receiving in some measure justice for the offense of blaspheming by asking God to witness to your lie before men).
- more_corn 3y ago[flagged]
- philwelch 3y ago[flagged]
- monkeynotes 3y ago[flagged]
- ImJamal 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't post religious flamewar comments, or any flamewar comments, to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We've had to warn you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561153. Eventually we have to ban accounts that post like this and I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please stick to the rules from now on, we'd be grateful: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- ImJamal 3y agoCould you explain why my comment is a flamewar comment but the comment I was responding to is not?
- dang 3y agoIt certainly was, but I'd already responded to that user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39220614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39220614. When someone is breaking the site guidelines 16 times in a single thread, I can't post 16 responses, nor would readers want me to.
- skynet305 3y ago[flagged]
- monkeynotes 3y ago[flagged]
- yieldcrv 3y agoeveryone else thats been accused, indicted or convicted of pedophilia and child molestation were multifaceted people that contributed to society and had love and understanding for someone else its not a misconception to focus on the totally cancellable, ostracizable, things that institution is known for
- c54 3y ago[flagged]
- geye1234 3y agoYour challenge (and everybody else's in this subthread) is showing that it is belief in the Catholic religion as such that brings these evils. I say it's human beings doing what human beings do; the fact that they're Catholic is incidental to the crimes. Murder is the deliberate killing of an innocent person regardless of circumstances or perceived consequences. The Church has always condemned murder. Same for rape, theft, etc etc. So those arguing that Catholics qua Catholics, rather than human beings who happen to be Catholic, are responsible for these evil acts have a tough case to argue. Edit: what's more, the atheist regimes of the 20th century shed orders of magnitude more blood than Catholics of the previous 19, and explicitly appealed to their ideology to justify their evil.
- ImJamal 3y ago[flagged]
- geye1234 3y agoYou're going to have serious trouble showing me that the crimes of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot (a disciple of Sartre's existentialism), and other explicitly and deliberately atheist regimes, is incidental to their ideology. Even if I were to grant, for argument's sake, that their atheist beliefs were incidental to their crimes, it's pretty trivial to show that such beliefs present no obstacle to said crimes. You will also have serious trouble showing me that the crimes of Catholics are not incidental to their ideology. On the contrary: Catholicism explicitly condemns murder, pillage, rape and all the rest of it, under any and all circumstances and for any and all motives.
- ImJamal 3y agoI put a /s at the end of my comment. That means sarcasm. I should have been more clear, sorry about that.
- DagsEoress 3y agoMany people forget (or never knew) that Catholicism / Christianity basically kickstarted modern science. A large misconception is that Christianity and Science can't coexist. When in reality they amplify each other.
- geye1234 3y agoThere is a wonderful (if lengthy) takedown of the "Brave scientist Galileo vs Catholic Church" myth here: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-from.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smackd...
- tim333 3y agoThey didn't do very well by Giordano Bruno though who proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets and got burned at the stake.
- geye1234 3y agoI'm a bit late responding to this, but I believe this is false, and that his cosmological beliefs had nothing to do with his fate: https://www.ncregister.com/blog/the-truth-about-giordano-bruno https://www.ncregister.com/blog/the-truth-about-giordano-bru...
- sapientiae3 3y agoOne of my favourite stories is of George Lemaître who came up with the Big Bang theory, and predicted the Higgs Boson - while Steven Hawkins bet against it, and was proved wrong. George Lemaître was a Catholic Priest.
- tptacek 3y agoI agree that it's good, but I was struck by how much of it could have been written in the 1970s about the coming revolution in databases. It's probably good to have a refresher!
- ysofunny 3y agoit is amazing how all computers do could be done in paper, but not as fast which means that computer technology since the 70s is really just "faster paper", faster by more then a single order of magnitue... but ultimately paper-equivalent to this day maybe LLMs, once their computational characteristics are better understood, will finally move computing beyond paper so fast it can write on itself over 2,000,000,000 times per second
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pvg 3y ago‘universal control mechanism for other machines’ is not something you can do with faster paper and that’s the job of a gigantic pile of computers.
- itishappy 3y agoIsn't it? The universal control mechanism for other machines used to be punchcards.
- pvg 3y agoa mechanical mechanism which isn’t and wasn’t particularly universal and where the use of paper is incidental and often limiting. the point is that just making computation faster (what gp was talking about) is not why computers are everywhere.
- spyder 3y agocomputer technology since the 70s is really just "faster paper" Huh... "paper" is just storage, the whole point of "computer technology" is to have a tool to do computation not just storage. So no, computers are not just faster paper.
- danans 3y ago> This is probably the best thing I’ve read by a world leader on AI. > It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics. Catholicism is an institution implementing and developing a religious philosophy that has a profound love of humanity, creativity, and understanding. Just because the Pope released this statement doesn't change how the Catholic church got its reputation, both good and bad. The magnitude of history of the Catholic Church up to the present defines its reputation far more than a single statement about AI. That said, it's good that they are adding their humanistic perspective to the debate. They are not the only ones saying these things - but their members, from developing country farmers to Supreme Court justices - need to be informed and aware since AI will probably affect everyone. I think it would be negligent if they didn't.
- woah 3y agoIs Catholicism still relevant once we create a new AI god to rule over us and it kills the old god? Could Catholics utilize their expertise in worshipping omnipotent deities to appease Roko's Basilisk?
- jamil7 3y ago> It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics. I’d like to know if anything else about Catholics and the Catholic church makes you sad? And what do you believe are “misconceptions”?
- thepasswordis 3y ago[flagged]
- ugleer 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoWe've banned this account because religious flamewar isn't allowed on HN. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 3y agoPlease don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 3y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jamil7 3y agoSorry, shouldn't have engaged there.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]