Rights of Man
Written in a fit of pique brought about by Edmund Burke's blistering attack of the French Revolution, Paine's The Rights of Man has come to be regarded as one of the most important works in the realm of Western political philosophy. In it, Paine contends that some rights that are granted through natural law, rather than by governments or constitutions. A must-read for those interested in politics, philosophy, and the intersection of the two.
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What Hacker News says
- There are a great many problems with LLM's and AI in general. The underlying problem is, LLMs break the social contract in about as many ways as a human can dream up. There is no useful beneficial purpose that doesn't also open the door to intractable destructive forces manifold over that benefit; its a modern day pandora's box, and its hubris to think otherwise.
This underlying societal problem has knock-on effects just like chilling effects on free speech, but these effects we talk about are much more pernicious.
To understand, you have to know something about volunteer work, and what charity is. Charity is intended to help others who are doing poorly, at little to no personal benefit to you, to improve their circumstances. Its gods work, there is very little expectation involved on the giver. Its not charity if you are forced to give.
When you give something to someone as charity, and then that someone, or an observing third-party related to that charity extorts you and attempts to coerce you for more. What do you think the natural inclination is going to be?
There is now additional coercive personal cost attached to that which was not given freely; what naturally happens. This is theft.
Volunteer psychology says, you stop giving when it starts costing you more than you were willing to give. Those costs may not be monetary, in many cases they are personal, and many people who give often vet those who they are giving to so as to help good people rather than enable evil people. LLM's make no distinction.
Less people give, but that is not all. Less people who are intelligent give anything. They withdraw their support. Where the average person in society was once pulled up to higher forms of thought by those with intelligence and a gift for conveying thought, that vanishes as communication vanishes. From that point forward, the average is pulled only to baser and baser forms of thought and the average people seem like the smartest people in the room though that feeling is flawed (because they aren't that intelligent).
The exchange for charity is often I'll help you here, and you are obligated to use it to get yourself into a better position so you can help both yourself and other people along the way. Paying it forward if you can. Charity is wasted on those that would use what is given to support destructive and evil acts.
There are types of people who will just take until no more can be given which is a type of evil, which is why you need to vet people beforehand but an LLM is simply a programmatic implementation of taking. The entire idea of a robot worker replacing low-mid level jobs during limits of growth is one that seems enticing from the short-sighted producer side except it ends up stalling economic activity. Economies run through an equal exchange between two groups. The moment there is no exchange because money isn't being provided for labor, products can't be bought. Shortages occur, unrest, usually slavery then death when production systems for food break down.
We are already seeing this disruption in jobs in the Tech sector that is 5 times the national unemployment during peak hiring (where offpeak has hiring freezes), in a single year. When you can't keep talent, that talent has options and goes elsewhere, either contributing within the economy or creating their own (black markets). ECP in non-market socialist systems (like what we are about to have in about 5 years), guarantees a lot of death or slavery.
People volunteer to help others, if someone then uses those conversations to create a humunculus that steals that knowledge and gives it to anyone that asks, even potentially terrorist or other evil actors, no one who worked for the expertise will support that.
Inevitably it also means someone will use that same thing to replace those expert jobs entry level portions with a machine that can't reason, and no new candidates can get the experience to become an expert. Its a slow descent into an age of ruin that ends in collapse.
You end up with cyclical chaotic spirals of economic stagnation, followed by shortage, followed by slavery or death from starvation; no AGI needed. All that's needed is imposing arbitrary additional cost on those least able to bear it. Interference in the job market, making it impossible to find work, gender relations (making it impossible to couple up and have babies), political relations (that drive greater government and control at the same time limiting any future). Its dystopian but its becoming a reality because of evil people in positions that allow front-of-line blocking to course correct continue their evil work; and they are characteristically wllfully blind to the destructive acts they perform and the consequences.
There are a lot of low pay jobs that will just vanish, people don't have enough money to raise children as it is; old crowds out the new until finally, a great dying occurs. That is the future if we don't stop it and resolve the changes that were made (as the bridges were burnt) by the current generation in political power. They should have peaked in power in 95, exited in 2005-2010. They still hold the majority and its 2024 (30 years after taking power). They'll die of old age soon, and because they were the only ones that knew all the changes that were made, new bridges will have to be built from scratch with less knowledge, resources, goodwill/trust, and people. They claimed they wanted a better world for their children, while creating a hellscape for them instead made of lies and deceit.
Very few people are taught specifically what the social contract entails. Its well past time people learn, lest they end up being the supporting cause of their own destruction.
Thomas Paine's Rights of Man has a lot of good points on this.
- I agree it seems farcicle but it will inevitably creep in regardless with any centralized system, simply as turnover of people's roles to younger overseers without the benefit of experience occurs. Self-limiting and enforcing limits is not unheard of though usually exceedingly rare.
There is such a thing as the rule of law, but as you mentioned when the powerful band together in collusive behavior anything is possible, and its usually for their benefit. The rule of law as we've come to know it generally speaking usually requires appropriate representation with regard to crafting/maintaining those laws but that is not always the case.
Also, without maintaining a market which limits currency sufficiently to allow rational price discovery, you run into the Economic Calculation problem which has no solution. A form of it is inflation/deflation curves based on lagging indicators where you whipsaw closer and closer to the margins until one or the other outcome spirals out. Very dynamical.
> What we are seeing. >> I don't buy this at all as a key factor
We'll have to disagree. Its pretty obvious that previous generations starting at the point of taking the dollar off the gold standard have consistently spent more than revenue (negative cashflow). They've spread the loss in value globally, but its still a loss and worse its in lagging inflation adjusted payouts.
The bill always comes due, and the consequences of policies put in place over that time will be paid by generations who had no say in its creation. Debt can be just as coercive when backed by law (austerity measures).
Incidentally, a very similar issue came up during the French Revolution (Bastille) at least according to Thomas Paine who wrote about it in passing in his Rights of Man (1770s). That and Common Sense are both very interesting reads if you can make the time.
In my opinion, power should be entrusted to the people's representation in a republic with important limitations enforced independently to preserve their responsiveness to the people they represent.
For example representatives who spend more than X% of their time on activities other than representation, time for which they are paid by the taxpayer. Or representing/concentrating more than 80,000 people's voting rights in a single person aren't really representing their constituents in any equitable way. Exceeding either of those limits causes their responsibility and duty to fall in furtherance of maintaining their profession.
- List seems to be nearly all novels, with a few plays and poems.
No Euclid's Geometry, no Herodotus Histories, no Bible or Koran, no Samuelson's Economics or Smith's Wealth of Nations, no Plato's Republic, no Communist Manifesto, no Leviathan or Rights of Man, no On the Origin of Species. Just off the top of my head.
All of those and more are arguably in the top 100 greatest books of of all time.
- She argues that it's inaccurate to call them liberals because the term didn't exist then (at least with the same meaning, "liberality" meant generous) and they wouldn't have any idea what you were talking about. Basically, Anglophones retcon'd a rights-based liberalism in the late 1800s.
Personally, I think she takes the argument a bit too far. She credits Constant and de Staël for formalizing liberalism in the aftermath of the Revolution, essentially trying to save the good parts from the wreckage. But, like, Thomas Jefferson helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which laid out the key principles Constant was trying to salvage, and he was most certainly influenced by Locke.
Still, I think this book is well worth reading as a corrective to the Anglo-centric, individual rights-based history of liberalism I've been exposed to in the past. There's a lot more to the story.
- So the rights of the constitution should only apply to citizens? I thought Thomas Paine wrote the book "The Rights of Man", not "The Rights of American Citizens".
How does one misjudge the intent of the founding fathers so? The intent was to create a world free from the tyranny of the European ruling classes, where people had inherent rights, but some people just toss that away without regard.
- So you've got nothing to say about Becky or Thomas then.
By all means if you're happy that America is sliding into tyranny through aggressively utilising ICE then good for you, at least someone is enjoying it. I'm happy to retract my "because ICE deportations are often performed illegally" and downgrade it to "ICE detain people illegally" (as part of the process of deporting). Shit, I'll even downgrade it to "ICE are needlessly cruel when detaining suspects".
Is that ok with you? Are you content that the US is needlessly cruel when detaining suspects? That it deports people without trial based on a hell of a stretch of an interpretation of a law penned in 1798 that was designed for use in wartime? For me its the door opening to tyranny. If they can find excuses to deport people without trial and you find that reasonable, how might you feel if a future government found an excuse to deport _you_ without trial? Might you appreciate the problem with tyranny then? Is it only ok because its happening to other people?
The founding fathers were inspired by Thomas Paine one of his main works is The Rights of Man and the beliefs of _natural_ law. The idea that rights are not privileges that can be taken away on a whim, they are naturally existing, inherent and everyone gets them. That's the liberty our ancestors fought for.
A belief in cruelty and the stripping of rights of a particular underclass tends towards the idea of a stratified society which IMHO runs counter to the founding philosophies of the USA.
