>In real life, intelligence is associated with picking better goals.
"Better" according to what metric?
It may be the case that there is a tendency for high-intelligence humans to pick "more enlightened" goals. Perhaps there is a natural "enlightened goals" attractor for our species.
However I don't think we can extrapolate from that to a fundamentally alien AI.
I think even if this statistical tendency exists, it has clear counterexamples -- consider that 2 genius chess players may have opposite goals, of beating one another. And we shouldn't bet the future of humanity on this statistical tendency extrapolating outside of the original distribution of human species.
Here are some intuition pumps on how diverse goals can be even across intelligent species:
>I don't think it's impossible to come up with arguments against them. For one thing, extrapolating the current gradual rate of progress forwards means that we will get to see several minor "intelligence spills" before the hypothetical big and last one, and by observing what went wrong, humanity will have the opportunity to come up with solutions.
It's incredibly cold in the outer solar system right? So why is it that there is liquid water in these moons? Is it some sort of geothermal heating?
What's the most complex life which could conceivably exist in such a cold environment? Presumably there's very little sunlight penetrating through the ice to the liquid ocean.
This angle works in the other direction as well: Is a newborn a human? If yes, is a baby in the process of being born a human? If yes, is a baby who will be born in a week a human?
My understanding is that opinion polls show most people have a moderate opinion on abortion, which seems pretty reasonable given that "becoming human" is something that happens in a continuous manner over a 9-month period.
Fair point, but on the other hand, if language policing leads the American Medical Association to make decisions which decrease the quality of medical care, I'm not enthusiastic about that. The relative importance of the opinions of everyday people vs these associations is not obvious.
Re: "the edifices from which actual powers spring" -- if you want a high-paying job as a doctor, maybe you'll be best served by adopting their language guidelines. I could see the trend spreading through the general population because playing the language game becomes the best way to achieve "actual powers".
Interesting, thanks for chiming in. I wonder if the best way to push back against language policing is to simply poll various groups, see which language they prefer, and publish the results. The deltas could be interesting as well, e.g. even if most blind people dislike the term "blind", it would still be interesting if they are more likely to prefer the term "blind" than a member of the general population.
I think public opinion polling might actually solve the problem, because the actual group has greater moral authority than language police activists. I suspect people might not cite this Atlantic article during a discussion of whether their organization should adopt language policing for fear of coming across as a reactionary old fogey. But if you were citing a poll of the group in question, that's a level of moral authority that's hard for a language police activist to argue against.
Basically the hypothesis to test here is that a latinx-type reaction is fairly common, it just doesn't generally reach public consciousness the way it did in the case of latinx.
NAACP stands for "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People". Interesting how "Colored People" was an enlightened term in 1909, but "Colored People" is now out and "People of Color" is the new way to go.
>For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings. For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth.
The troll argument here is: now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue".
>Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington.
>....
>Public criticism led Stanford to abolish outright its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative—not for being ridiculous, but, the university announced, for being “broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity.”
Even if no one is arguing back, it seems like the language police are winning.
Gain of function research is supposed to help with pandemics, right? Did it help with COVID?