The USA is the strongest military power in the world. They are not the underdog. If they resort to war crimes or unfairness, it's not because they are the underdogs; it's because this is what top dogs do. Let's not make excuses for them.
> Why is every political discussion boiled down to a whataboutism?
Unfortunately, just like whataboutism can be a disingenuous rhetorical device, so is anti-whataboutism. Sometimes the comparison is relevant, sometimes it's not. In this case, I think it is.
Great Britain is very directly involved in a whole bunch of relatively recent messes in the Middle East, China, etc.
It's not whataboutism to point up the current messed up situation is not unrelated to the behavior of the UK, and their fingerprints are all over it. Of course things aren't static and new actors have changed the conversation, but this doesn't absolve them and they shouldn't be pointing fingers.
Since it fell from power, the UK does everything the US wants.
However, historically it set up a lot of bad things that happened in the Middle East, China, Africa, etc. The UK cannot untangle itself from it, "it's all in the past", because history is terribly influenced by things in the past, by definition.
So do you think citizens of the UK should be held accountable somehow? I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
Authorities and government? Yes. Even if the current ones weren't born when history was made, it's their duty to understand the history of the country they are governing, and of how past decisions shaped the world as it currently is.
> I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
The history of Hong Kong itself is deeply influenced by Great Britain's actions (as well as other world powers, of course), and it doesn't start with mainland China's takeover.
Another example of UK's actions deeply influencing the current world, unrelated to China, is Iran (and well, the Middle East in general). So the UK cannot simply point fingers at others and forget about how they helped shape the situation.
Well it's possible in the same coincidental sense that I described, right? You can be railroaded _and_ be guilty of horrific crimes. It depends whether fairness and justness are properties of the process or the outcome.
Regardless, it's presumably all relative. At least there's certainly an ordering of states I'd rather have against me, as a person living in them. Maybe Sweden?
I think if it's coincidental, it cannot be fair right? Fair in the sense we're discussing here must mean a repeatable system. If a wrongful process arrives at the right conclusion, it's still not fair (e.g. let's say a bunch of people lynch someone accused of murdering a child, without hearing any evidence, and it turns out the suspect was really a child mudered: was the process "fair"?).
Or if you don't like the child murder analogy: suppose an FBI employee decided to betray the US to the Soviets out of money, not ideology (cue Robert Hanssen). The US is at this point in time still executing traitors to the state. They grab this Hanssen-type, send him to the electric chair (on faulty evidence or simply "vibes" of guilt), but later it turns out this person was really guilty. Was this process fair?
Maybe Sweden if relatively fairer, like you said. I suspect not. But even if it was relatively fair, what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair?
It's possible for a meat grinder process to still be good at convicting, say, all murderers, at the cost of a few false positives. In a utilitarian sense that could be considered reasonable. And it might well be repeatable in a way. Even default-guilty is repeatable, and 'just' on those terms, as long as your pre-charging pipeline isn't kicking up too many false positives.
Really it's just about the definition of fairness or justness though. I'm not really disagreeing because I'm not putting forward definitions of my own either, but a lot of the comments here throw out the terms with some assumed meaning. For example, I'm pretty sure if you polled Chinese people, they wouldn't have a problem with the OP story's outcome. So does that make it democratic? Or good as a point of public policy? It's all a bit hand-wavey without specifying.
> what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair?
Well we (I'm assuming) both live in the West and so we encounter the exceptionalist narrative of this place. Certainly HN is a Western forum. Most views of China held by people in the West are based on partial truths and thought-terminating cliches.
But that's kind of just how _people_ are the world over, no? Chinese people in Chinese forums have a parallel experience to this, just mirrored.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think we're in agreement.
I too think the situation is probably mirrored from China's side. I hope there are some people over there who can also understand there's some middle ground, that neither side is totally right or wrong, and that we both perceive the world in half-truths and thought-terminating cliches.
And yes, because I live in the West (well, Latin America, anyway) I'm more upset about the distortions from "our" side. I don't really get to witness the Chinese side. I'm very skeptical even of what "our" side claims the distortions on the Chinese side are, since I don't get to witness them directly and I have reason to be skeptical of my side's narrative.
To some extent, Somalia. They have a 'xeer' system which is by design independent of the government and works as essentially a peer-to-peer justice system but with a fairly common set of 'law' throughout the country. It works through a process of decentralized judges which are appealable through inter-tribal courts ensuring the process is largely divorced from both the government and any one tribe.
There have been a few cases of Somalis for example even killing government police/military and them being found not guilty in xeer court and even the government respected the decision.
Is this true though? I haven't done the experiment, but I can envision the LLM critiquing its own output (if it was created in a different session) and iteratively correcting it and always finding flaws in it. Are LLMs even primed to say "this is perfect and it needs no further improvements"?
What I have seen is ChatGPT and Claude battling it out, always correcting and finding fault with each other's output (trying to solve the same problem). It's hilarious.
Sam Altman decided to irresponsibly talk bullshit about parenting because yes, he needed that marketing sound bite.
I cannot believe someone will wonder how people managed to decode "my baby dropped pizza and then giggled" before LLMs. I mean, if someone is honestly terrified about the answer to this life-or-death question and cannot figure out life without an LLM, they probably shouldn't be a parent.
Then again, Altman is faking it. Not sure if what he's faking is this affectation of being a clueless parent, or of being a human being.
That’s not the questions people will ask though. They’ll go “what body temperature is too high?” Baby temperatures are not the same as ours. The threshold for fevers and such are different.
They will ask “how much water should my newborn drink?” That’s a dangerous thing to get wrong (outside of certain circumstances, the answer is “none.” Milk/formula provides necessary hydration).
They will ask about healthy food alternatives - what if it tells them to feed their baby fresh honey on some homemade concoction (botulism risk)?
People googled this stuff before, but a basic search doesn’t respond with you about how it’s right and consistently feed you emotionally bad info in the same fashion.
I was mostly arguing that Altman's statements, if taken at face value, show him to be unfit to be a parent. I stand by this, but mostly because I think people like him -- Altman, Musk, I tend to conflate -- are robots masquerading as human beings.
That said, of course Altman is being cynical about this. He's just marketing his product, ChatGPT. I don't believe for a minute he really outsources his baby's well-being to an LLM.
I saw this described as LLMs writing "punched up" paragraphs, and every paragraph must be maximally impacting. Where a human would acknowledge some paragraphs are simply filler, a way to reach some point, to "default" LLMs every paragraph must have maximum effect, like a mic drop.
> I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to dream as a cat
If you haven't already, read "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", one of the Sandman stories. It was also adapted by Netflix as the last episode of season 1 of The Sandman.
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