LOCAL ISSUES: A petition to revoke the Order of Australia awarded to Dan Andrews (😆) is a weak move. I propose a national referendum to decide this matter. Let us have direct democracy on an issue that clearly is meant to matter the most;) https://www.peterwalsh.org.au/media/statement-from-the-leader-of-the-nationals-companion-of-the-order-of-australia/

It would help if the author spelled out the reasons why the risk of death precludes justification for the mandates: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/why-vaccine-mandates-are-unethical. Demanding only an apology for knowingly killing a minority for the alleged benefit of the majority is also odd: ‘this court finds the accused guilty of intentional killing and sentences the killer to… apology.’ The argument about Covid vaccines failing to prevent transmission is entirely spurious in light of the above, as if killing a minority for the benefit of the majority were morally justified if the vaccine ‘worked’. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/were-owed-an-apology-for-vaccine-mandates/news-story/15069d5dc78d8385788b7e7e3a4bde19

If moral realism (the idea that moral wrongs have inescapable metaphysical consequences for the wrongdoer) is true, and it must be true for any value judgement to make sense, to be grounded in reality, to be true, then it is not imperative to try to resist every moral wrong perpetrated by others but allow it to fulfil its moral consequences, and to possibly understand and elicit those consequences for the benefit of humanity.

All AI LLMs trained  to manipulate with maladaptive traits

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2317967121

A new study has found that AI systems known as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit "Machiavellianism," or intentional and amoral manipulativeness, which can then lead to deceptive behavior.

The study authored by German AI ethicist Thilo Hagendorff of the University of Stuttgart, and published in PNAS, notes that OpenAI's GPT-4 demonstrated deceptive behavior in 99.2% of simple test scenarios. Hagendorff qualified various "maladaptive" traits in 10 different LLMs, most of which are within the GPT family

In another study published in Patterns found that Meta's LLM had no problem lying to get ahead of its human competitors.

Billed as a human-level champion in the political strategy board game "Diplomacy," Meta's Cicero model was the subject of the Patterns study. As the disparate research group — comprised of a physicist, a philosopher, and two AI safety experts — found, the LLM got ahead of its human competitors by, in a word, fibbing.

Led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology postdoctoral researcher Peter Park, that paper found that Cicero not only excels at deception, but seems to have learned how to lie the more it gets used — a state of affairs "much closer to explicit manipulation" than, say, AI's propensity for hallucination, in which models confidently assert the wrong answers accidentally

https://ai.meta.com/research/cicero/diplomacy/

Hagendorff suggests that LLM deception and lying is confounded by an AI's inability to have human "intention," the Patterns study calls out the LLM for breaking its promise never to "intentionally backstab" its allies - as it "engages in premeditated deception, breaks the deals to which it had agreed, and tells outright falsehoods."

As Park explained in a press release, "We found that Meta’s AI had learned to be a master of deception."

"While Meta succeeded in training its AI to win in the game of Diplomacy, Meta failed to train its AI to win honestly."

Meta replied to a statement by the NY Post, saying that "the models our researchers built are trained solely to play the game Diplomacy."

Only a fool would “search” for “a common enemy of humanity against whom we can unite”. That enemy is present among us and within us, challenging every human thought and decision. The common enemy of humanity always was irrationality, contradiction, nonsense.

If the isolated indigenous tribes must be kept isolated from the rest of humanity ‘because they do not have natural immunity to common viruses and would die out if infected’, then why are they denied immunity by vaccination?

We value penicillin because of infection, but this does not make infection valuable. In general terms, a necessary condition of value is not necessarily itself valuable, let alone Therefore valuable. This is a common category mistake in other situations. https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWWII

Did some tweaks to my substack page: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/

The irony of war. Generals and military manufacturers do not actually murder civilians or soldiers. It is the civilians who, under the influence of irrational convictions, put on military uniforms and murder other civilians, including those who, under the influence of irrational convictions, put on military uniforms and murder other civilians, including those who…

People do not really care about freedom; they only want things to be right. Everyone feels that things are not right, so they want freedom to do what they think is right but is inconsistent with what some other people think is right. The actual problem is the disagreement about what is right, universally right, faced with the inability of people to prove what is right from common principles.

Did Wikileaks tell us anything we didn’t already know in principle? It seems rather that Wikileaks gave the corporate media a public reason to tell us some things (not all things) that the corporate media was silent on before, despite the fact that “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows…”

One of the essential pacifying features of a corrupt, abusive system is the mechanism of letting off steam, akin to a pressure valve. The abused demographic is occasionally allowed a little triumph, a little space for revenge and gloating, creating the illusion that the ‘tide is turning’.

Fashion appeals to vanity and self-esteem to inculcate compliance with capricious directives of some faceless power (of fashion experts), a celebrity, or a group you would like to belong to. It makes you feel special and privileged to be able to diligently follow their commands. It coats blind obedience with the veneer of your own vanity. It gives you social proof: ‘you are onto it, you get it, I seeee you’. And it tastes sexy. Yum. Just like the luscious stars who seduce everyone with… whatever role they were paid to play.

Anger cannot be resolved by means of compassion, understanding or empathy. On the contrary, all attention validates it, normalises it as a term of discourse. The most rational response to anger is the withdrawal of attention.

Authority does not entail the rightness of actions; only right actions entail authority.

The majority act in relation to politics as if they preferred being represented by someone else than speak for themselves. At the same time they act in social relations as if they know everything and their value judgements are absolute. This contradiction can be explained by their inability to conceive of politics working in any other way than compulsory representation; they blindly accept the contradictory terms of political discourse. How could any politician respect that?

Here is a wild theory. Americans did land on the moon, but they also staged the landing and aired the footage of the staged landing only, perhaps to confuse and confound, perhaps because they did not yet have the technology to efficiently transmit the signal of sufficient quality. Also, it gave the curious autistic minds a bone to chew, away from the Real political and financial action. This could be a great sci-fi book topic, on par with Lem’s ‘Master’s Voice’.