The overwhelming majority of countries around the world have processes for naturalization [1]. They are often fairly onerous, but that is true of many European countries as well.
> What if after "age checks" are put in place many www users stop using these "platforms." No doubt EFF would try to argue that's somehow bad
I would love for people to stop using the evilcorp platforms. But what will actually happen is that normal people will just scan their IDs and continue as before and only weird geeks will refuse. Normal people will continue posting valuable information on YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, etc. and it will become increasingly impossible to access any of it without scanning your ID.
The "dawn of man" was perhaps 100,000 years ago. Humans, in some regions, have been raising cattle for maybe 10% of that time. And for almost all of that 10%, beef was a luxury good eaten only on occasion except by the very rich. It was certainly not a staple food. Common people, when they ate meat, were much more likely to eat fish, sheep, and goats. Cattle were mostly raised for milk and as draught animals. There is absolutely nothing natural or ancient about contemporary consumption of factory-farmed beef, either in quantity or in the manner of production.
Living in a big city is usually better for the environment than living in a rural area. City-dwellers live in smaller spaces closer together, so they consume fewer resources and emit less carbon.
Muhammad is not a god, and he was very insistent on that point. The Buddha is also not seen as a god is most traditions. Elohim, Allah, and Ahura are generic terms for God or gods.
One does not need to know the specific identity of God to justifiably believe that rights come from God. Suppose that I receive a handwritten letter with no name on it. By the nature of the letter, I can reasonably infer that it was sent by a human, even if I don't know what specific human it was.
GP's argument is that the nature of rights implies that they must come from God. This is because they think rights can't be taken away by others; if they could, they would be privileges, not rights. They presumably think that for a right to be inalienable, it must come from an authority above all others, like God.
You seem to think that rights only apply to specific people at specific times and places. That's fine, but it's the very point that GP was addressing—if rights are given by the government, then they're not rights at all. Restating the claim that rights are not universal does not address GP's argument.
I don't think GP's argument works when it comes to God, because it might be that rights simply exist independent of any authority. Maybe they're an emergent property of human beings, or maybe they simply exist, the way that many believe that God, the number two, or the universe itself just exist without cause. GP might not agree, but it's certainly coherent to believe in inalienable rights without believing in God.
I'm not that convinced by this paper. The "impossible languages" are all English with some sort of transformation applied, such as shuffling the word order. It seems like learning such languages would require first learning English and then learning the transformation. It's not surprising that systems would be worse at learning such languages than just learning English on its own. But I don't think these sorts of languages are what Chomsky is talking about. When Chomsky says "impossible languages," he means languages that have a coherent and learnable structure but which aren't compatible with what he thinks are innate grammatical facilities of the human mind. So for instance, x86 assembly language is reasonably structured and can express anything that C++ can, but unlike C++, it doesn't have a recursive tree-based syntax. Chomsky believes that any natural language you find will be structured more like C++ than like assembly language, because he thinks humans have an innate mental facility for using tree-based languages. I actually think a better test of whether LLMs learn languages like humans would be to see if they learn assembly as well as C++. That would be incomplete of course, but it would be getting at what Chomsky's talking about.
Also, GPT-2 actually seems to do quite well on some of the tested languages, including word-hop, partial reverse, and local-shuffle. It doesn't do quite as well as plain English, but GPT-2 was designed to learn English, so it's not surprising that it would do a little better. For instance, they tokenization seems biased towards English. They show "bookshelf" becoming the tokens "book", "sh", and "lf" – which in many of the languages get spread throughout a sentence. I don't think a system designed to learn shuffled-English would tokenize this way!
> The whole meta-story of the first few chapters of Genesis was about creation. Not just creation of the universe as we know it, but the pro-creation between a man and a woman in the sanctimony of marriage
I find this to be a very strange reading. I never got that from the creation narrative at all. Looking through it, I only see two places that seem to be about marriage. First there's Genesis 2:22-24:
> 22. And God YHVH fashioned the side that had been taken from the man (adam) into a woman (ishah), bringing her to the man (adam). 23. Then the man (adam) said, “this one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called woman (ishah), for from a man (ish) was she taken.” 24. Hence a man (ish) leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife (ishah), so that they become one flesh.
This doesn't mention procreation at all! It seems to say that men and women come together because they have a common origin, not necessarily because it produces offspring. You could still say that this supports heterosexual marriage, but I don't see any particular reason to read it as prohibiting other types of marriage. And in fact, it seems to work fine with gay marriage – two men or two women are also presumably from the same flesh and bones as Adam and Eve.
Then there's Genesis 3:16:
> And to the woman [God] said, “I will greatly expand your hard labor—and your pregnancies; in hardship shall you bear children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.
This says something about bearing children and about male-female relationships, but it doesn't really draw the line saying that the purpose of marriage is to produce children. It also presents all of this as an unfortunate state of affairs.
I guess there's also 1:28-29:
> 28. And God created man (adam) in the divine image, creating them in the image of God—creating them male and female. 29. God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.”
That talks about reproduction, but it doesn't say anything about marriage.
> I'm purely speaking from an academic sense here (the art of understanding what someone wrote a long time ago).
Right. I think whoever wrote the creation story was trying to provide an explanation for why the world was the way it was: why the world exists, why there are seven days in a week, why there are men and women, why they have dominance over the animals, why there's suffering, why snakes have no legs, and so and so forth. I don't think they meant for the creation story to give instructions at all, except a moral that one should obey God. I don't get the impression that the author was trying to sanctify marriage or procreation at all. If they were, it seems like they would have described Adam and Eve's wedding, they would have spent more than one sentence on the birth of their first child, and they wouldn't have presented pregnancy as a curse.
It would be hard to argue that the bible actively promotes same-sex marriage, but I think you could reasonably argue that it says nothing on the subject and so leaves it for the church/community to decide.
There are places where the bible gives guidance for heterosexual marriages, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all other marriages are prohibited. Most people are heterosexual, so it makes sense that the bible would talk about marriage in a heterosexual context.
There are also several verses that condemn gay sex, but I think you could make the case that it's not talking about the types of loving, committed gay relationships that we have in mind today. And also, even if gay sex is forbidden, you could still hold that gay couples are allowed to get married and adopt children, but that they should remain celibate. That's rough, but Christians commonly hold that heterosexuals aren't supposed to have non-procreative sex either. For comparison, the American Jewish Conservative movement holds that male-on-male anal sex is biblically prohibited, but all other aspects of gay relationships are permitted. And even though the sexual act is forbidden, it's also forbidden to invade someone's privacy by questioning whether they're doing it.
I think there should be a new rule that any time someone writes an article bragging about how he's† a badass independent thinker just like Paul Graham and Eliezer Yudkowsky, he must in the same article identify his major disagreements with Paul Graham and Elizer Yudkowsky. Because to me the authors of these articles seem exactly as tribal as mainstream political and religious groups, they just care about different things. Yeah, I shouldn't be able to guess your views on sex from your views on taxes, but I also shouldn't be able to guess your views on wokeness from your views on AI safety. Yet I can make both predictions with about equal accuracy.
† I have yet to see an article like this written by a woman.
> Have you read the Bible? It's shockingly different from what people believe is written there. It is a post-apocalyptic survival guide, as well as a collection of human stories and ideas that might date back hundreds of thousands of years.
You must mean hundreds or thousands, right? Modern homo-sapiens are not hundreds of thousands of years old.
> Have you read the Quran? Reading it is essential to understanding Muslims and their faith. It is first and foremost an anti-christian book, and the faith is foremost anti-christian. Just as christendom at one time was foremost anti-pagan.
I've only read parts of the Quran in translation, and I wouldn't say that I understand it that well. It's not organized in a narrative structure like the bible, and there are a lot of parts that are impossible to understand without outside knowledge, like a surah that condemns Abu Lahab but doesn't explain who he was [1]. The Quran is not really the sort of book that you can just read on its own without guidance and expect to understand.
So, with the preface that you should take what I have to say about the Quran with a grain of salt, I'm not sure how you could take away that it's primarily an anti-Christian text. Yes, it criticizes Christians and Jews a lot, but it also has good things to say about them. For example:
"Indeed, the believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabians—whoever truly believes in Allah and the Last Day and does good will have their reward with their Lord. And there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve." [2]
The main villains of the Quran are polytheists (like Abu Lahab). It talks about them a lot more and never has anything good to say [3]. By contrast, the New Testament barely even mentions polytheists or pagans – most of its criticism is directed against Jews.
Muslims traditionally believe that Jesus was the messiah, that he was born of a virgin, that he performed miracles, and that he's going to return and rule the world in a future era [4]. It's also said that Muhammad was identified as a prophet by a Christian monk named Bahira [5]. Early on, Orthodox Christians identified Islam as a heretical form of Christianity, not a different religion [6]. These do not seem like traits of a religion that is foremost anti-Christian.
It's funny how people in this thread keep saying "well if you're going to complain about people being penalized for not using apps, you might as well complain about people being penalized for not using telephones/cars/internet"... and yes, I am going to complain about all of those things. I imagine that many or most homeless people don't have reliable access to any of the above. I have an anxiety disorder that makes it hard for me to drive or talk on the phone, and I'm sure there are many people with more extreme conditions for whom it's impossible. There are people like Richard Stallman and members of certain religious communities who have strong moral objections to using certain technologies. Society should accommodate all sorts of people and all sorts of ways of living.
> In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.)
It doesn't. Judaism holds that the soul starts out pure, having been made in the image of G-d, and it only becomes impure through wrongdoing. All humans are born with an impulse to do evil, the Yetzer Hara, but we're also created with the power to overcome it. And when we have done evil, we have the ability to atone and return our souls to the pure state they were created in. That happens, for instance, on Yom Kippur.
The context of the verse from Ezekiel is:
> O mortal, when the House of Israel dwelt on their own soil, they defiled it with their ways and their deeds […] So I poured out My wrath on them […] I scattered them among the nations […] But when they came to those nations, they caused My holy name to be profaned, in that it was said of them, “These are GOD’s people, yet they had to leave their land.” […] Say to the House of Israel: Thus said the Sovereign GOD: Not for your sake will I act, O House of Israel, but for My holy name, which you have caused to be profaned among the nations to which you have come. […] I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle pure water upon you, and you shall be purified: I will purify you from all your defilement and from all your fetishes. And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh;" https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.36.17-26
Ezekiel lived during the Babylonian exile. At face value, the text is saying that the people of Israel have been exiled because of their sins, but it makes a prophecy that G-d will cause them to stop sinning and return them to their land. That eventually did happen under Cyrus the Great. This is a constant cycle in the bible: When things are good, the Israelites forget G-d's teachings. Then something bad happens, but G-d redeems the Israelites from their suffering, which leads them to follow G-d again. Then thing get good again, and they start to forget G-d once more...
When it says that G-d will give the house of Israel a new heart, it's not (at face value) saying that individual people will literally receive new spirits (or otherwise be metaphysically transformed). Nor is it saying that G-d will literally sprinkle water on them. These are poetic ways of saying that the house of Israel will stop worshiping idols (etc), the same way that happened many times before in the Torah. You can of course add a layer of exegesis and make it about individual believers today instead of the nation of Israel in Babylonia of the 6th-century BCE. That's fine, the rabbinic tradition does that sort of thing all the time too. But at that point you're firmly in Christian territory and not in the space shared between Judaism and Christianity.
TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are generally left-wing, despite holding a reactionary view on trans people. That sort of comes with the territory of being a radical feminist. If someone is right-wing, or even just a centrist liberal feminist, then they're just an ordinary transphobe, not a TERF.
An optimistic explanation is that they don't want to be antisemitic. The present-day term for "Pharisee" is "Jew." The early rabbis who created Judaism as we know it were Pharisees, and theirs was the only first-century Jewish sect which survived until today. You can even see the alternation between "Pharisee" and "Jew" in The New Testament. For instance, in some verses it criticizes the Pharisees for washing their hands before eating, whereas in others it levies the same complaint against Jews generally: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2011%3A38%...
> Why do you think it was OK back then? Have you talked to any Native Americans about the effects of uncontrolled migration on their tribes? Plainly put, it was an unmitigated disaster and a genocide. They used to control the whole continent (but divided between various tribes of course, that sometimes didn't get along); now their numbers are puny and they're corralled in some shitty reservations.
In 1776, the population of the United States was mostly British. Most of the population of the United States today is descended from non-British European immigrants. But they didn't wipe out the existing British population – they just assimilated into it. The genocide of indigenous people was not a consequence of "immigration," it was a consequence of conquest. I'm against immigrants waging war against and driving out existing populations of the countries they come to, but that is not what is being discussed.
> Within a country, it's easy: people have criminal records, and can't just skip town and go to the next town and assume a new identity. (Centuries ago, however, they did.) Between countries, it's not so easy: countries don't share their criminal data that easily.
Ok, so then countries should work to start sharing criminal records and then they can have open borders, right?
> That's why we have passports: it's an identification document that shows the destination country that the person is not a criminal and is allowed to travel
A passport effectively only allows you to travel if you come from a rich country. If you come from a poor country, you need to apply for a visa. But in either case, you still need to go through a controlled border, and you're only allowed in the country for a limited time. If the concern is really about letting in criminals, and a passport or visa alleviates that, why is it so limited? And why aren't countries working to share criminal records so they don't have to do this song and dance? Hint: it's not really about crime.
> Why is that cruel? If 100M people suddenly decided to move into Andorra, how exactly do you think the country is going to pay for social services for them?
Andorra is part of the Schengen Area – there's no reason why they would all stick around in Andorra. If 100 million people came into the Schengen Area, they would get jobs and pay taxes to fund social services just like everyone else. But you ignored my main point – if you're convinced that immigrants will consume more social services than they pay taxes, why not just let them in but make them ineligible for social services? It's not really about social services either.
The reason that first-worlders don't want third-worlders coming to their countries is because (a) they don't like their skin color, (b) they don't like their culture, and (c) they'd rather have people live in extreme poverty far away than in a reduced level of poverty where they can see it, the same reason they're against building affordable housing in their own neighborhoods. When Western countries started implementing immigration controls, they were very open about this, but since the 1960s it's become fashionable for them to pretend otherwise.
Now, you might object: if that's the reason, why don't all the rich Western countries have open borders with each other? I mean, most of them do (Schengen), but still, why doesn't the USA have open borders with Canada? And the answer is: there's no reason at all. I can't think of any argument against open borders with Canada. The only reason it's not the case is because if all the white countries had open borders with each other, they wouldn't be able to lie about the reason anymore.
> it was really difficult to travel anywhere except maybe between neighboring countries.
Yet most of the inhabitants of the United States are descended from people who immigrated during the time period you're talking about. Why was it ok for them but not for people immigrating today?
> Do you want criminals from other countries coming to your country?
Do you want criminals from other towns/counties/states coming to yours? No, but that doesn't justify banning everyone from coming to your town. The normal standard is that to stop someone on the basis that they might be a criminal, law enforcement has to have some reasonable cause for suspicion. But for some reason, in the case of national borders (and not state, province, etc), the burden of proof is reversed. Everyone is guilty by default and has to prove to the state's satisfaction that they aren't dangerous. Why? If open borders work between Washington and Oregon, why don't they work between Washington and Canada?
> We also have the issue of economic migrants. No country really wants to be inundated with millions of poor people from some other country; in the era of modern social services, countries don't have the resources to provide for them.
Immigrants pay taxes, and the state doesn't need to pay for their education. It's not clear that the mean additional immigrant under an open-borders policy would have a higher net cost to the state than a native citizen. But whatever, let's just assume they would. Instead of banning them, why not just let them come but make them ineligible for social services? That's cruel, but it's way crueler to not even offer them that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization#Summary_by_coun...