Drug use (including alcohol) is probably the most common way for people to seriously and irreperably destroy their lives.
A "paternalistic approach" is absolutely justified if it can prevent this level of harm.
I actually agree with that. But I don't see the logical progression from that to locking people in cages and forcing them to buy from the least trustworthy people on earth as the solution. During Prohibition in the US did lives stop getting destroyed by alcohol?
I see a lot of lives seriously and irreperably destroyed by criminal records and long prison sentences that otherwise could have been productive.
> A "paternalistic approach" is absolutely justified if it can prevent this level of harm.
Would you advocate for government banning processed sugar? Sugar behaves like a drug in most ways, including addictiveness (psychological and physiological), euphoria, etc. Untold levels of harm are caused by people to their own bodies and the healthcare system at large by over indulging in sugar and products containing such. Diabetes is a true living hell that never stops one it's started.
Following that logic, it seems like the government should jail people for sugar use, but that obviously seems absurd (reductio ad absurdum).
I do not want to defend Prohibition, but AFAIK it has a persistent effect on alcohol consumption patterns in USA by lowering per-capita consumption of hard spirits (that was significantly higher before).
But when you see the effect of these libertarian policies in American cities the results speak for themselves. Harm reduction and lax enforcement have really destroyed some communities, and this was simply not as large a problem in the 50s or 60s.
There's really no better poster child for this phenomenon than San Francisco. It was the economic center of the technology boom and unlike New York or London of centuries past, completely failed to become a "center of the world" city despite having the “center of the world” economy. By most accounts, it actually functions less well than it did before the internet was invented.
No doubt there would be some damage from libertarian drug policies, but it would look a lot more like alcohol does, which IMHO would be less damaging to society and people than prohibition and heavy handed legal punishments is. People do need help with alochol issues sometimes, and it does sometimes destroy lives/families, but we don't make it orders of magnitude worse by treating them like criminals. (although we did try it in the US a hundred years ago and it didn't go well like we thought it would).
I think there is strong empirical evidence that drug liberalization sounds good but has failed where tried. If an American city can turn it around (as SF had a great chance to do) I'll change teams and stop talking about the issue.
Now imagine the inverse. We find somewhere a thriving city with "draconian" drug policies. Would you reconsider your position?
^ That's bait, we all know Singapore exists…
I myself wonder how many of the liberal flag bearers would change their "views" without protest if they saw another ideology becoming dominant. We've seen this happen with gender blank-slatism. It has been fully adopted by most western institutions by osmosis, and the priorities of a 60's or 70's liberal were put in the back seat without objection.
The article isn't even about ChatGPT, it's about the moderation endpoint that OpenAI provides.
You're moving the goalposts. The LLM doing moderation is trained on human responses to Internet posts—literally human censorship training an LLM to introduce bias at scale.
It's the definition of a belief. Beliefs are structural components of cognition. But also they are not the same thing as reality.
People should be educated about this concept. Without the education, it is impossible for people to tell the difference between a deeply held belief and reality.
When you are in the minority, your beliefs are challenged and you get comfortable defending them and getting along with those who don't hold them. The same cannot be said of our liberal order. Some genuine self reflection on the part of our current liberal order is badly needed.
>In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?
>The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.* When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.
-"The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt p. 334
There's a whole TED talk about it (same author as the above) that goes into the differences in morality: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
In many well meaning liberals heart, there is a strongly held but rarely publicly discussed belief that they alone belong to the well-meaning, high IQ class. Any other worldview or ideological flavor is always understood by this type as simply incorrect, perhaps caused by failures in morals or intellect. Talk about a buzzkill.