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That's because there are no consequences for bad behavior, only reward. Game theory dictates that if bad behavior is a winning strategy it will be adopted and p

That's because there are no consequences for bad behavior, only reward. Game theory dictates that if bad behavior is a winning strategy it will be adopted and propagate until it is the dominant strategy. The only way it stops becoming a winning strategy is if we provide consequences, but that requires taking personal responsibility for the state of the world, which was a core American value, but doesn't seem to be anymore.

whaleofatw2022 1y ago
I will dare say, it's a question of what happens to Mario's brother. Jury nullification in that is the best message that could be sent to the populace.
- mminer237 1y ago
  I'm pretty sure giving everyone the belief that they can murder with impunity as long as the victim is undesirable enough would be the absolute worst thing that could happen right now.
  - krapp 1y ago
    That belief is already commonplace, and has been vigorously tested among the sex worker, queer, Black and Native communities and proven correct. I don't see why we should be any more concerned about adding "rich white men" to the pile than we are about any of the other disposable demographics in our society.
  - Der_Einzige 1y ago
    The purge movies are the relevant ones for this idea…
  - slg 1y ago
    One of the dystopian traits I was hinting at in my original comment is the acceptance of mass murder as long as it occurs in the boardroom and nets an extra few cents for the shareholders. I won't defend or justify what "Mario's brother" supposedly did, but he has inflicted much less pain and death on the world than the man he is accused of shooting and I don't really think there is any room to debate that.
    - zmgsabst 1y ago
      This is precisely why as a law-and-order type, I don’t care about this particular incident. A rookie gangster shot a high-tier gangster — why is that a me problem? Gang-on-gang violence is a daily occurrence.
      - wqaatwt 1y ago
        Hypothetically if laws lose their legitimacy because nobody is willing to enforce them (at least some people have that perception) and the political system is designed in such a way as to make any meaningful change near impossible what is there left to do?
        somenameforme 1y ago
        And more generally the fundamental reason we agree to operate under laws is because these laws are expected to improve society as a whole. But if those laws instead start enabling and protecting bad behavior then they're doing the exact opposite. It's fairly obvious that much of what the more sociopathic corporations do today will be illegal in the future, but changes in social opinions tend to predate changes in the law by quite some time. For the obvious extreme there - slavery was completely legal. Society began to believe that such a thing was no longer fit for society, and consequently acting against it, long before it was outlawed.
        s1artibartfast 1y ago
        The way to change this is to build consensus and update the law, not go out and shoot whoever you disagree with.
        somenameforme 1y ago
        There are pretty much 0 people who think healthcare insurance providers should be intentionally engaging in delay, deny, defend as a means of maximizing profit. Passing a law against stands essentially 0 chance of happening. If it was passed, it would intentionally have loopholes aplenty buried in a hundred page document that essentially 0 people, including those who wrote it, could understand. Modern democracy mostly just doesn't seem to work how it ought.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    We can already murder with impunity. Just get a few people together, form a company, and you can do whatever. Even crimes against humanity won’t get you in prison, probably. At worst you’ll lose some cash and be demoted to “normal person”. How many people has UHC killed? I don’t know, it’s really hard to measure. Besides the people killed because they didn’t receive funding for care, there’s also the plethora of practices insurers enforce. Some, maybe most, of those practices are non-optimal, so some subset of people are dying that shouldn’t. Oh well.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    The fact that such behavior might become acceptable (at least amongst a significant section of society) indicates a systemic failure in the socio-economic system. IMHO its more a of symptom. Like labor and anarchist related political violence back in the first Gilded Age back in the late 1800s. Massively increasing inequality and giving too much political power to corporate robber barons has its costs. If nobody is willing to keep them in check the appearance of some sort of “vigilantism” seems hard to avoid. Not implying that its a good thing or that political violence really ever led to positive change historically..
- pembrook 1y ago
  The fact that rich engineers on hacker news would be flirting with bolshevism as their ideology is just endlessly funny to me. I know it’s just people parroting the emotional “vibe” of their political tribe on any given day, but it’s so ironic. Beyond the obvious moral decay of cheering on murder at all, and the fact you’re in the privileged class of the richest nation on earth, the idea of targeting the replaceable middle managers of said system is so silly. As if committing random acts of terrorism will somehow force Americans to democratically design a better system? Fear is just another recipe for more ballooning costs (see the TSA). I guess I find this so amusing because leftists love to fetishize European healthcare without understanding in European countries the government is much more aggressive about denying care than any US insurer. They actually have to keep costs sane for their system to continue existing.
  - lobal 1y ago
    > They actually have to keep costs sane for their system to continue existing. That is also the case for US insurers. The only difference is if the government denies life saving treatments, people protest. If private insurers do so, people have no recourse.
    - pembrook 1y ago
      In both situations you have zero recourse. In fact the US Government is less responsive to protest than US businesses are. US healthcare is one of the most complicated systems of adverse incentives and tangled byzantine public/private spiderwebs ever created. To kill random people involved at 15 layers of abstraction away from the actual root causes thinking that will somehow make it better is probably the dumbest idea I've ever heard.
  - justinrubek 1y ago
    I work in software in the US, but I am not rich, nor would I consider myself close to "the privileged class" at all. Yes, I do better than a lot of the people I know. However, this is more that they are in a poor situation. Despite being somewhat frugal and not spending (I've never been on a vacation, I cook at home, I rarely do anything that requires money), I don't have a huge disposable income. If I lost my job, I'd be on the street in less than a year. The privileged class is significantly higher up than this. I've clawed every bit of everything I have from this world despite many efforts to keep me down. I don't find your comment genuine at all. You're just trying to be dismissive.
moralestapia 1y ago
100%. "Smaht"[1] people learn to game the system and scam others for momentary benefit. The worse side that is that we're all guilty of that system, to some degree, even if only by enabling it. I'm also 100% sure that this is what drives civilizations to the ground. 1. Smaht is a term I use to describe people who think they're smart but they're actually extremely stupid. A lot of smaht people have degrees and diplomas which further fuels their delusion of intelligence.
jillyboel 1y ago
The only way out is to hold executives personally responsible for the actions of their companies, and politicians for the results of their policy. Sam Altman should receive the same treatment as Aaron Swartz. Actually, he should be punished much more severely since the scope of his copyright infringement makes Aaron's seem like child's play.
- carterschonwald 1y ago
  Darn, that’s a brutal but quite fair and honest assessment
kubb 1y ago
How do you reconcile the belief that personal responsibility is the solution with game theoretical analysis? It seems contradictory to me. In order to change the game theoretic outcomes, we‘d need a systemic change that affects the rewards, not a personal attitude change that will become a losing strategy in the game. Also, do you remember how tobacco companies were invited to the table to discuss whether smoking is bad for you? Were those the days of personal responsibility or was it even before that?
- achrono 1y ago
  The point is, the self-policing is needed because there isn't a better policing mechanism outside of oneself for something so fundamental, so much at the frontier. As the AI leaders themselves admit [1], they are doing what they're doing (i.e. capability-maxxing without caring deeply about actual risks this opens up for humanity) because they can and because the other guy's doing it, so why should they be left behind? They're asking for some external force to bring the morality that they agree on paper ought to exist. There is a segment among them that are even okay with millions of people dying before the risk of AI gets taken seriously. [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrESBnPYoZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrESBnPYoZU, seek to 2:45 [2] same as above, seek to 3:25
  - kubb 1y ago
    If the leaders won’t self-police, is there something else we can do? Or do we just pack up and go home?

whaleofatw2022 1y ago

I will dare say, it's a question of what happens to Mario's brother. Jury nullification in that is the best message that could be sent to the populace.

mminer237 1y ago
I'm pretty sure giving everyone the belief that they can murder with impunity as long as the victim is undesirable enough would be the absolute worst thing that could happen right now.
- krapp 1y ago
  That belief is already commonplace, and has been vigorously tested among the sex worker, queer, Black and Native communities and proven correct. I don't see why we should be any more concerned about adding "rich white men" to the pile than we are about any of the other disposable demographics in our society.
- Der_Einzige 1y ago
  The purge movies are the relevant ones for this idea…
- slg 1y ago
  One of the dystopian traits I was hinting at in my original comment is the acceptance of mass murder as long as it occurs in the boardroom and nets an extra few cents for the shareholders. I won't defend or justify what "Mario's brother" supposedly did, but he has inflicted much less pain and death on the world than the man he is accused of shooting and I don't really think there is any room to debate that.
  - zmgsabst 1y ago
    This is precisely why as a law-and-order type, I don’t care about this particular incident. A rookie gangster shot a high-tier gangster — why is that a me problem? Gang-on-gang violence is a daily occurrence.
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      Hypothetically if laws lose their legitimacy because nobody is willing to enforce them (at least some people have that perception) and the political system is designed in such a way as to make any meaningful change near impossible what is there left to do?
      - somenameforme 1y ago
        And more generally the fundamental reason we agree to operate under laws is because these laws are expected to improve society as a whole. But if those laws instead start enabling and protecting bad behavior then they're doing the exact opposite. It's fairly obvious that much of what the more sociopathic corporations do today will be illegal in the future, but changes in social opinions tend to predate changes in the law by quite some time. For the obvious extreme there - slavery was completely legal. Society began to believe that such a thing was no longer fit for society, and consequently acting against it, long before it was outlawed.
        s1artibartfast 1y ago
        The way to change this is to build consensus and update the law, not go out and shoot whoever you disagree with.
        somenameforme 1y ago
        There are pretty much 0 people who think healthcare insurance providers should be intentionally engaging in delay, deny, defend as a means of maximizing profit. Passing a law against stands essentially 0 chance of happening. If it was passed, it would intentionally have loopholes aplenty buried in a hundred page document that essentially 0 people, including those who wrote it, could understand. Modern democracy mostly just doesn't seem to work how it ought.
- const_cast 1y ago
  We can already murder with impunity. Just get a few people together, form a company, and you can do whatever. Even crimes against humanity won’t get you in prison, probably. At worst you’ll lose some cash and be demoted to “normal person”. How many people has UHC killed? I don’t know, it’s really hard to measure. Besides the people killed because they didn’t receive funding for care, there’s also the plethora of practices insurers enforce. Some, maybe most, of those practices are non-optimal, so some subset of people are dying that shouldn’t. Oh well.
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  The fact that such behavior might become acceptable (at least amongst a significant section of society) indicates a systemic failure in the socio-economic system. IMHO its more a of symptom. Like labor and anarchist related political violence back in the first Gilded Age back in the late 1800s. Massively increasing inequality and giving too much political power to corporate robber barons has its costs. If nobody is willing to keep them in check the appearance of some sort of “vigilantism” seems hard to avoid. Not implying that its a good thing or that political violence really ever led to positive change historically..
pembrook 1y ago
The fact that rich engineers on hacker news would be flirting with bolshevism as their ideology is just endlessly funny to me. I know it’s just people parroting the emotional “vibe” of their political tribe on any given day, but it’s so ironic. Beyond the obvious moral decay of cheering on murder at all, and the fact you’re in the privileged class of the richest nation on earth, the idea of targeting the replaceable middle managers of said system is so silly. As if committing random acts of terrorism will somehow force Americans to democratically design a better system? Fear is just another recipe for more ballooning costs (see the TSA). I guess I find this so amusing because leftists love to fetishize European healthcare without understanding in European countries the government is much more aggressive about denying care than any US insurer. They actually have to keep costs sane for their system to continue existing.
- lobal 1y ago
  > They actually have to keep costs sane for their system to continue existing. That is also the case for US insurers. The only difference is if the government denies life saving treatments, people protest. If private insurers do so, people have no recourse.
  - pembrook 1y ago
    In both situations you have zero recourse. In fact the US Government is less responsive to protest than US businesses are. US healthcare is one of the most complicated systems of adverse incentives and tangled byzantine public/private spiderwebs ever created. To kill random people involved at 15 layers of abstraction away from the actual root causes thinking that will somehow make it better is probably the dumbest idea I've ever heard.
- justinrubek 1y ago
  I work in software in the US, but I am not rich, nor would I consider myself close to "the privileged class" at all. Yes, I do better than a lot of the people I know. However, this is more that they are in a poor situation. Despite being somewhat frugal and not spending (I've never been on a vacation, I cook at home, I rarely do anything that requires money), I don't have a huge disposable income. If I lost my job, I'd be on the street in less than a year. The privileged class is significantly higher up than this. I've clawed every bit of everything I have from this world despite many efforts to keep me down. I don't find your comment genuine at all. You're just trying to be dismissive.

moralestapia 1y ago

100%. "Smaht"[1] people learn to game the system and scam others for momentary benefit. The worse side that is that we're all guilty of that system, to some degree, even if only by enabling it. I'm also 100% sure that this is what drives civilizations to the ground. 1. Smaht is a term I use to describe people who think they're smart but they're actually extremely stupid. A lot of smaht people have degrees and diplomas which further fuels their delusion of intelligence.

jillyboel 1y ago

The only way out is to hold executives personally responsible for the actions of their companies, and politicians for the results of their policy. Sam Altman should receive the same treatment as Aaron Swartz. Actually, he should be punished much more severely since the scope of his copyright infringement makes Aaron's seem like child's play.

carterschonwald 1y ago
Darn, that’s a brutal but quite fair and honest assessment

kubb 1y ago

How do you reconcile the belief that personal responsibility is the solution with game theoretical analysis? It seems contradictory to me. In order to change the game theoretic outcomes, we‘d need a systemic change that affects the rewards, not a personal attitude change that will become a losing strategy in the game. Also, do you remember how tobacco companies were invited to the table to discuss whether smoking is bad for you? Were those the days of personal responsibility or was it even before that?

achrono 1y ago
The point is, the self-policing is needed because there isn't a better policing mechanism outside of oneself for something so fundamental, so much at the frontier. As the AI leaders themselves admit [1], they are doing what they're doing (i.e. capability-maxxing without caring deeply about actual risks this opens up for humanity) because they can and because the other guy's doing it, so why should they be left behind? They're asking for some external force to bring the morality that they agree on paper ought to exist. There is a segment among them that are even okay with millions of people dying before the risk of AI gets taken seriously. [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrESBnPYoZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrESBnPYoZU, seek to 2:45 [2] same as above, seek to 3:25
- kubb 1y ago
  If the leaders won’t self-police, is there something else we can do? Or do we just pack up and go home?