« no definition of "sentience" that I could operationalize and put into a sentience-o-meter to reliably measure »
That's because there's no such thing as a "sentience-o-meter", and there's no need to "operationalize" or "measure" anything. Instead, what's wrong with the definition given by Wikipedia, "ability to experience feelings and sensations"? That surely aligns with about 2500 years of philosophy and common sense, preceding all the techno mumbo-jumbo that confuses us today.
Sentience is a property of the higher forms of life, i.e. animals, which is derived from Latin "anima", meaning "soul" or "spirit".¹ Mammals and birds qualify because we relate to them easily and naturally.
Artefacts like GPUs don't even have metabolism, they can't procreate, they're dead matter, and having electricity running through them in intricate circuits doesn't change that.
[1] Some languages make grammatical distinctions based on whether an object is considered "spirited" or not, surfacing fundamentals of human perception of the world at the level of grammar.
« We use shadowbanning (i.e. banning an account without saying so) in specific cases such as spammers and serial trolls. »
All my comments are stillborn, dead by default. I guess that means shadowbanning has been applied. I'm neither a spammer nor a serial troll. Some people flagged my comments, and the more substantive and factful they were, the more they seemed¹ to be flagged. Some people appear to have licence to drive their political agendas, and others who oppose these views are charged with “trampling curiosity”. HN does not seem to live up to its purported ideals.
[1] There is zero transparency so I cannot see who flagged what how much. What I can see is that the more substantive a comment is the higher the risk it runs of being flagged and made invisible, which practically means automatized censorship (not calling it such would be hairsplitting).
Your account wasn't banned per se but software was killing your posts. I realize that's not much of a distinction when your posts are getting killed, but from our side the difference is significant.
> I'm neither a spammer nor a serial troll
Ok, but when you break the site guidelines (e.g. "Incredibly stupid and misleading comment of yours, slily insinuating" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49670568), and use HN primarily for political/ideological battle—which the guidelines ask commenters not to do [1], and which is a line at which we start banning [2]—it ends up amounting to the same thing.
Having skimmed your comments, I have mixed feelings about how the system [3] functioned here. On the one hand, you have been breaking the site guidelines and not using HN as intended. From that point of view, the software wasn't wrong.
On the other hand, your account was arguing for contrarian positions which caused it to get penalized by the community (which by definition disagrees with those), and eventually by the software, more than it would have if you did not have a minority view.
From an HN point of view, this is a thorny patch. We want to hold space for minority views and have no taste for the smugness of majorities, nor the brutal way they behave when contradicted. We know that creative ideas tend to come from uncommon sources, and since such things are what HN exists for, it would be foolish to cut those short. We want the long tails of most distributions to extend longer here than they get to do amid the large-group dynamics of most places online.
But was also need HN discussions to remain intellectually curious and not degenerate into flamewars. The trouble is that users with minority views are often the ones setting fires and stoking flames. They come into a discussion already feeling embattled and surrounded, and start out swinging. This pre-emptive hostility obviously has a defensive function. It is understandable when people have a background of seeing their views being silenced or treated unfairly. But it guarantees an aggressive response from the majority.
When that response inevitably comes, the minority account often then retreats into righteous indignation about being censored, banned, or squashed. But would they have been squashed if they had expressed themselves more neutrally and with more relational capacity? It's hard to say; they rarely try.
We want HN to be a space where minority views have a fair chance, but we can't have people breaking the site guidelines with flamewar, battle rhetoric, and so on, regardless of their views. We do try to cut them more slack than if they were coming from a dominant position—that's why I'm replying to you at such length—but not so much that we'd end up with two sets of rules.
In the end, we often have to ban such accounts despite knowing how difficult it is to take a minority position and in that respect sympathizing with the account holders—not because we agree-or-disagree with their views but because they're so clearly breaking the rules.
I've posted about this many times [4], usually in a context where I see this dynamic showing up and want to try to help by explaining it. What a minority view-holder needs to do differently, if they want a different outcome, is to remain neutral, resist the temptation to lash out, and field the majority responses (which are often rather shallow and predictable) with some understanding of where people are coming from, and how difficult (and even frightening) it might be to give even an inch on the topic.
What this means is that there is a greater burden on people holding a minority position [5]. It may be unfair, but it's intrinsic to how majorities and minorities interact.
Thank you for your comprehensive, cirumspect and considerate comment, thanks for overruling “the system” and resetting my -16 “karma” score.
Of course I understand the problem about minority and majority positions. Creating majorities, minoritizing dissent, and inciting the (gregarious) majority to actively trample opposition (by mere quantity, not quality; by mass and weight, not argument or intellect) is the bread and butter of how propaganda works and operates. It cannot ever succeed in convincing everybody, but it can succeed in effectively shutting down opposition, which is the purpose.
As for my comment 49670568 (“Incredibly stupid …”), if you read it in context with parent and gp 49668588, you'll see I was echoing to Rob's “Incredibly arrogant/racist take” wrt to Adrian, whose comments I'd been subscribed to via RSS for a couple months prior to creating an HN account, and whom I've never seen posting anything akin to what Rob alleged, and so I was simply taking Adrian's defense (because I felt someone had to).
True, there was a provocative angle to my comment in the last two paragraphs, exacerbated perhaps by being also analytical. People from the US, in my experience, often don't realize how arrogant their self-content attitude in political matters comes across based on how much the US is trampling on other countries (and by trampling I mean to kill and destroy, to cheat and deceive, to plunder and tax, and then to justify or deny).
« The trouble is that users with minority views are often the ones setting fires and stoking flames. » — I usually try to remain factual. Trouble is, facts often are not welcome because psychologically and psychosocially, persuasions dictated by propaganda prevail, and there is pressure to “conform” and “comply”, and to even dismiss dissenters as “whacky” (example 49711252, in context 49708657).
« But would they have been squashed if they had expressed themselves more neutrally and with more relational capacity? It's hard to say; they rarely try. » — I will try. But I have to say that the majority view is very often expressed “in battle mode”, like the bully making it clear there can be no other view, which, again, is simply the result of how propaganda works, by creating the vocabulary and talking points (“global war on terror”, you might remember, “Russian annexation of Crimea”, “pilot suicide”, “Hamas terror”, “Russian war of aggression”), which then are repeated over and over again, and have to be repeated precisely because they are either total lies or meant to suppress the true story, which is much more complex.
« where people are coming from, and how difficult (and even frightening) it might be to give even an inch on the topic » — Yes, I know, a lot of people are frightened, which is also an effect of propaganda. Some, however, and these are the most vocal, do enjoy being in the majority because they enjoy trampling, which could be observed and experienced in real life during the CoVID hoax.
« there is a greater burden on people holding a minority position » — I can see this is the pragmatic conclusion that I would probably also arrive at from your vantage point.
Thanks again for taking the time to elaborate on this meta topic (which I understand is the mainstay topic for you). I might include a reference to your statement in future controversial comments I might make so it gets a chance to be considered by a wider audience.
Finally, on a meta level, the field of propaganda and psychology is interesting in its own right, an important part of social (or perhaps rather post-social) life as shaped by technological mass media, and therefore certainly not unworthy of many a hacker's curiosity, attention, and perhaps even investigation. — Best, Michael
If it were only the Ukraine the war would have long been over. The West block has supplied more than $500 billion in aid to the Ukraine, that's more than twice the US lend/lease to the Soviet Union in 2026 dollars. Plus intelligence information and probably other things I'm forgetting. The more dollars are sent to Kiev, the more blood and lives the Ukrainians are expected to invest. That's the deal.
They're not. Rather, the organizers of war – typically rich and powerful people in or close to London or Washington – use their propaganda networks to play these popular cards of culture and identity. Don't confuse the cause and the means.
Boeing proposes sth called the “Boeing Honeywell Uninterruptible Autopilot” to add drone-like remote control capabilities to its airliners (for security reasons, obviously). I'm not aware of a similar offering for Airbus but I have no doubt such a capability has existed in Airbus as well for perhaps two decades. I expected development of such a sensitive system for Airbus to be based in France, but your comment about “strong hints” and “play ball” has me thinking…
« nuclear weapons » — They're science fiction, smoke blown around huge quantities of explosives still being produced at WW2 levels.
Michael Palmer, in his book Hiroshima revisited, doesn't go as far as to rule out “nukes” entirely, but damage assessment, medical evidence, witness reports and measurements show that no such thing as claimed by the US and Japanese governments happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead, there were other ingredients to the atrocities, like the usual napalm, so-called “pumpkin bombs” (the iconic Nagasaki model), flash bombs and coloured smoke (“special effects”), and mustard gas (to generate “radiation sickness”), which is a gel that can linger on and emit poison for weeks (depending on the weather).
Napalm and mustard gas are 100 % consistent with the medical record, which the author is professionally qualified to assess, citing academic literature (which is scarse in case of napalm, probably on account of its heavy use by the US against East Asian peoples in the “defense of democracy”).
The damage pattern is extensive rather than intensive (that is the military expert assessment), just as seen in other napalmed cities in Japan. Miraculous survivors at the alleged “ground zero” (no such thing can really be derived from the damage pattern) preclude any generation of heat drastically higher than what is attainable by conventional means (“victims were vaporized”). So do slender objects like antennas and trees (which blossomed again next spring, then interpreted as a “miracle”). The few stone buildings there were can be seen standing out among the remains of flimsy huts that were blown and burnt.
And of course there was no disruption in settlement, the cities were built up and inhabited again.
« simulations on what happens with your aging asrenal » — Swarms of red herrings to keep the myth alive. Surely other uses of supercomputers are conceivable, even for non-disclosed purposes.
Strangely, while the non-existence of such weapons is undoubtedly good news, there are many “nuke fanboys” (no girls, though – this is a male thing) who will get upset and even angry at this, as if the “atomic bomb” were some kind of god to venerate, when it really only is lies and propaganda that we've been fed when we were kids.
To be clear, this is not to dispute nuclear energy, just the claim that it may be used to obtain explosions, and even extraordinary ones.
Looks like it's licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Cool. Might be a fun read, might be a waste of time. I try not to dive into conspiracies after having wasted so much time on them in the past.
« For example with Europe, the US got favorable trade terms in exchange for defense. » — It is occupation under the guise of defense, always has been. Keeping Germany divided for 35 years (when it could have become neutral and free in the early 50s), eager not to release control but to expand east instead, exploiting disunity, instigating the Yugoslavia wars of the 90s, more recently the Ukraine war (which goes back more than a decade in preparation).
“National masochism” is a particularly perverse kind of “virtue signaling”. It is the urge and need to malign and disavow your own nation and history, to trample and spit and urinate on it, and – especially – to do so in front of your perceived moral overlords, who are not your compatriots, in order to show off how “good” you are, “goodness” being the level of adversity and disgust you display towards your own nation.
This negative psychological disposition towards your own collective identity is a profound cultural disorder (at the level of mass psychology). It is wide-spread and even mainstream in Germany among the left-leaning. Significantly, it has never been the object of public debate, as public debate is strictly controlled by the adherents of this perverted ideology.
It wasn't much of a problem until Russia decided to go all-in on its "imperial ambitions" again which made it an unreliable trade partner for Germany.
Remember: it was Russia which tried to blackmail Germany by shutting down the pipelines, and that was before the Ukrainians settled the matter once and for all by blowing up Nordstream (Russia had been shutting down the gas flow indefinitely by end of August 2022 after three months of back-and-forth, and the dry pipeline was finally blown up end of September 2022).
> And while I don't know whether there was blackmail involved I do know that there was terrorism involved (the GermanWings crash on 3/24/15, ridiculously blamed on "pilot suicide").
What his parents and friends say. And what has been been technologically feasible for decades. Ever heard of drone technology? Ever heard of an analogous "bus driver suicide", of which statistically there should be hundreds or thousands for every alleged "airliner pilot suicide"?
To return the "compliment", consider whether it rather applies here … 49386949. And remember to "flag".
This somewhat counter-intuitive bolshevist policy of regionalization and decentralisation starts making sense if Richard Poe is right, who says they (them being mostly Jews) were working for the British.
How the British invented Communism (and blamed it on the Jews) • Richard Poe @ RTF (Matthew Ehret) • 2h01 • https://youtu.be/Cxen-IzX-Gw
For me, the lightbulb cartel comes to mind in which leading manufacturers at the time agreed to limit the longevity of incandescent lightbulbs. (This is often cited as an egregious case of planned obsolescence, but Technology Connections has a great video on this that explains there's more to it and it potentially reduced overall load on the electric grid.)
That's because there's no such thing as a "sentience-o-meter", and there's no need to "operationalize" or "measure" anything. Instead, what's wrong with the definition given by Wikipedia, "ability to experience feelings and sensations"? That surely aligns with about 2500 years of philosophy and common sense, preceding all the techno mumbo-jumbo that confuses us today.
Sentience is a property of the higher forms of life, i.e. animals, which is derived from Latin "anima", meaning "soul" or "spirit".¹ Mammals and birds qualify because we relate to them easily and naturally.
Artefacts like GPUs don't even have metabolism, they can't procreate, they're dead matter, and having electricity running through them in intricate circuits doesn't change that.
[1] Some languages make grammatical distinctions based on whether an object is considered "spirited" or not, surfacing fundamentals of human perception of the world at the level of grammar.
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