this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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I think this is an issue with people being offended by definitions. Slavery did “help” the economy. Was it right? No, but it did. Mexico’s drug problem helps that economy. Adolf Hitler was “effective” as a leader. He created a cultural identity for people that had none and mobilized them to a war. Ethical? Absolutely not. What he did was horrendous and the bit should include a caveat, but we need to be a little more understanding that it’s a computer; it will use the dictionary of the English language.
I agree with your position. In all of your examples, the actions and choices are morally wrong but we cannot deny facts that lead to those outcomes. If we do, that is how these mistakes will get repeated by future generations.
Your and @WoodenBleachers's idea of "effective" is very subjective though.
For example Germany was far worse off during the last few weeks of Hitler's term than it was before him. He left it in ruins and under the control of multiple other powers.
To me, that's not effective leadership, it's a complete car crash.
That’s getting far deeper into the topic than I’d like. As a surface level description it still remains valid. He was able to convince the majority that his way of thinking was the right way to go and deployed a plan to that effect to great success for a sustained period of time.
So, you're basically saying an effective leader is someone who can convince people to go along with them for a sustained period. Jim Jones was an effective leader by that metric. Which I would dispute. So was the guy who led the Donner Party to their deaths.
This is why I see a problem with this. You and I are able to discuss this and work out what each other means.
But in a world where people are time-poor and critical thinking takes time, errors based on fundamental misunderstandings of consensual meanings can flourish.
And the speed and sheer amount of global digital communication means that they can be multiplied and compounded in ways that individual fact checkers will not be able to challenge sucessfully.
I mean Jim Jones was pretty damn effective at convincing a large group of people to commit mass suicide. If he'd been ineffective, he'd have been one of the thousands of failed cult leaders you and I have never heard of. Similarly, if Hitler had been ineffective, it wouldn't have takes the combined forces of half the world to fight him.
This is true, I guess the difference in the Jim Jones scenario is whether you define effective leadership as being able to get your plan carried out (even if that plan is killing everyone you lead) or whether you define it as achieving good outcomes for those you lead.
Hitler didn't do either of those things in the end so I still don't rate him, but I can see why you would if you just look at the first part of his reign.
AI often produces unintended consequences based on its interpretations - there's a great TED talk on some of these - and I think with the LLMs we have way more variables in our inputs than we have time to define them. That will probably change as they get refined.
If you ask it for evidence Hitler was effective, it will give you what you asked for. It is incapable of looking at the bigger picture.
it doesn't even look at the smaller picture. LLMs build sentences by looking at what's most statistically likely to follow the part of the sentence they have already built (based on the most frequent combinations from their training data). If they start with "Hitler was effective" LLMs don't make any ethical consideration at all.... they just look at how to end that sentence in the most statistically convincing imitation of human language that they can.
Guardrails are built by painstakingly trying to add ad-hoc rules not to generate "combinations that contain these words" or "sequences of words like these". They are easily bypassed by asking for the same concept in another way that wasn't explicitly disabled, because there's no "concept" to LLMs, just combination of words.
Yes, but in many defense the "smaller picture" I was alluding to was more like the 4096 tokens of context ChatGPT uses. I didn't mean to suggest it was doing anything we'd recognize as forming an opinion.
Sorry if I gave you the impression that I was trying to disagree with you. I just piggy-backed on your comment and sort of continued it. If you read them one after the other as one comment (at least iny head), they seem to flow well
I mean slavery was bad for the economy in the long run. And Hitler didn't create a German cultural identity, that'd been a thing for a while at the time.
Slavery is not good for the economy... Think about it, you have a good part of your population that are providing free labour, sure, but they aren't consumers. Consumption is between 50 and 80% of GDP for developed countries, so if you have half your population as slave you loose between 20% and 35% of your GDP (they still have to eat so you don't loose a 100% of their consumption).
That also means less revenue in taxes, more unemployed for non slaves because they have to compete with free labour.
Slaves don't order on Amazon, go on vacation, go to the movies, go to restaurant etc etc That's really bad for the economy.
That really bad for a modern consumer economy yes. But those werent a thing before the industrial revolution. Before that the large majority of people were subsitance/tennant farmer or serfs who consumed basically nothing other than food and fuel in winter. Thats what a slave based economy was an alternantive to. Its also why slvery died out in the 19th century, it no longer fit the times.
I wish it did die out in the 19th century. We have more slaves now than ever.
There being more slaves now then ever is heavily disputed. There is also the fact that was little more than a billion people in the world when the trans-Atlantic slave trade stopped, so there would have to be 8 times as many for slavery to be as prevalent.
Yes, I agree, our per capita slave figure has to be much lower these days, mathematically speaking.
Even one slave is a slave too many, and knowing there are still so many (whatever figure we put it at) is heartbreaking.
Things like the cocoa plantation slaves and the slave fishing ships have people kidnapped and forced to work for nothing. Actual slavery by any definition.
Of course, when I said it died out I didn't mean slavery was entirely gone and doesn't exist at all. I mean it died out as a prevalent societal structure.
100s of people in slavery on a cocoa plantation is of course awful, but it shouldn't obscure the fact that there used to be vast swathes of land where slaves outnumbered free people and their children were born into bondage - that is what has died out.
I understand your wider point and I agree with it.
But I think the point I was making actually supposts what you were saying upthread.
The agrarian model of the cocoa industry is economically reliant on slavery. 2.1 million children labour on those plantations in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, and a significant number have been trafficked or forced.
And isn't the economy much better now than before the industrial revolution?
Obviously, but my point was that slaves weren't economically terrible in an agrarian peasant/serf economy, which everywhere was before the industrial revolution.
Look at the Saudi, China or the UAE, it's still a pretty efficient way to boost your economy. People don't need to be consumer if this isn't what your country needs.
China has slavery? Also Saudi Arabia and the UAE import slaves, which is better for the economy than those people not being there at all but worse than them being regular workers.
Muslim and christian minorities are forced to work in camps to "re-educate" them to be good chinese citizen.
Oh yeah fair enough.
True consumers are only 1 pillar of gdp.
I think the problem is more that given the short attention span of the general public (myself included), these "definitions" (I don't believe that slavery can be "defined" as good, but okay) are what's going to stick in the shifting sea of discourse, and are going to be picked out of that sea by people with vile intentions and want to justify them.
It's also an issue that LLMs are a lot more convincing than they should be, and the same people with short attention spans who don't have time to understand how they work are going to believe that an Artificial Intelligence with access to all the internet's information has concluded that slavery had benefits.
This is what I think too. We've had enough trouble with "vaccines CaUsE AuTiSm" and that was just one article by one rogue doctor.
AI is capable of a real death-by-a-thousand-cuts effect.
especially with the current lack of regulation on it
That was pushed by many media organizations because its sensationalist topic. Antivaxers are idiots but the media played a fucking huge role blowing a pilot study that had a rather fucking absurd conclusion out of proportions, so they can sell more ads/newspapers. I fucking doubt most antivaxers (Hell I doubt most people haven't either) even read the original study and came to their own conclusions on this. They just watched on the telly some stupid idiots giving a bullshit story that they didn't combat at all
Hitler didn't create a cultural identity for Germans, that already happened in the 1800s.
Yes agreed. There is nuance and details and context always left out or ignored