why the change?
"[thing that clearly exists] doesn't exist" is established code for "is not the crisp category you think it is" (e.g. Why Fish Don't Exist).
Additionally, the definition of murder might vary from place to place, but if there isn't a crisp definition for a given jurisdiction, we say that place lacks law and order. And since treaties are definitionally between multiple parties, those parties need to share a definition of anything material, in a way they don't need to share a definition of murder that occurs on their own soil.
I'm with you. My friend got the recipe by asking Romeo for it and we've made them ourselves, although it's complicated.
Treaties Don't Exist
When I think of international regulation, I think treaty. But treaty doesn’t have a universal definition; whether an international agreement is called a treaty, agreement, or accord is a vibes-based decisions. Beyond that, there are forms of international cooperation that are definitely not treaties. It’s not obvious what hard choices or soft vibes will be best for AI policy, so I assembled a short list of options.
For a post about international treaties, this post takes a pretty US-centric approach. Sorry about that. If anyone can speak to the internal process for international cooperation in another country, please share.
Treaties
Psych: treaty has an extremely strict definition within the US. Treaties are things ratified by a ⅔ majority in the senate using the procedure the constitution lays out for international treaties. Anything else is, from the perspective of the US, a sparkling international agreement.
From 1946-1999, 94% of international agreements the US completed were sparkling, rather than treaties. My impression is it’s even more now.
The most recently ratified treaty I (and by I I mean Claude) found was a tax treaty with Chile, ratified in 2023. It was originally signed in 2010, which might give us a hint as to why this procedure isn’t used very often.
Sparkling International Agreements
If the president doesn’t want to try for the impossible ⅔ majority required by a proper treaty, he has a few options. He can fiat declare US agreement by issuing an executive order (called an Executive Agreement), or can put the agreement to Congress and use the procedure for passing laws with a simple majority (called a Congressional-Executive Agreement). This has the same standing in international law as ratification.
NAFTA was passed by Congressional-Executive Agreement.
Interagency Networks
Federal agencies can choose to cooperate with agencies in other countries without any of the three estates giving them explicit instructions to do so. These cross-agency collaborations are generally not binding and have no enforcement mechanisms, but are aimed at problems where everyone wants to work together and benefits from doing so.
For example, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision provides “guidelines and standards” on banking best practices but is powerless to make member banks follow them, and adherence is mixed.
Mutual recognition arrangements
Two agencies in different countries agree to voluntarily accept the other’s authority on some matter, without involving politicians. For example, the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has bilateral “memos of understanding” with many countries enabling the exchange of information.
Standards Bodies
These are non-governmental bodies that government agencies may listen to if they feel like it. E.g. standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Or a small country may judge WHO to be pretty on the ball, and choose to trust WHO’s recommendations instead of developing their own..
Informal coordination
Sometimes people do stuff together. The US and South Korea conduct joint military training exercises. Pre-Basel-Committee banking governors shared tips with each other. Bureaucrats from around the world attend conferences together and later text their new friends asking for thoughts.
Soft “law”
Law is a misnomer here because soft means “lacking even the pretense of enforcement.” These are your UN resolutions not backed by the US threatening to bomb someone, your G7 aspirational press releases, your Paris Accords that allow each country to set their own CO2 target.
Eric S. Raymond describes these as “wordcel bullshit”, and my inner engineer is quick to agree, but as I'll say more about in a future take, I think the truth might be more complicated.
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I definitely took the original post to be describing a terminal value rather than manifestation of something deeper, if you meant instrumental that handles a lot of my objections.
But while I'm here, another data point: I've heard multiple young women say they won't make explicit requests in bed because what they mean is "weight this action moderately higher among your list of options" but the dude hears "keep doing this on rote until I give you another instruction". I haven't heard this from anyone over 30, hopefully it means someone learned something.
What are the theories of change behind SB53 and the RAISE act? What else do they need to see those theories through?
These laws both aim to regulate frontier AI, and their success has been used to argue for support for their respective political owners (Scott Weiner and Alex Bores[1]). But neither law is going to do much on its own. That's not necessarily a problem- starting small and working your way up is a classic political strategy. But I'd like to understand if these laws are essentially symbolic and coalitional, or good on the margin (the way changing health insurance rules got real gay people health insurance that paid for real health care, which would be beneficial even if it didn't advance gay marriage an iota), or groundwork laying (the way a law against murder is not useful without cops or prisons, but is still a necessary component).
- ^
which isn't necessarily wrong even if the bills are themselves useless- maybe the best way to get optimal AI legislation is to support people who support any AI legislation, at least for now.
A big one would be that...
When I look at the women I know who actually ask guys out, they are consistently the ones landing especially desirable guys. For women, explicitly asking a guy out buys an absolutely enormous amount of value; it completely dwarfs any other change a typical woman can consider in terms of dating impact
...isn't the experience of me or women I know. Asking men out leads to boyfriends who are generally passive and offload a bunch of work onto you (even when they're BSDM tops). But I found myself not wanting to comment with this initially because I couldn't immediately explain CNC fantasies with it.
Here are some other models that explain part of your data. None of them explain all of it, but they each explain something additional that deep nonconsent preferences don't. Also as I typed them up I realized they explained more than I thought, but again, your initial strong frame pushed out that knowledge.
- women are scared men will get angry if they go from "yes" to "no", in a way they won't if the woman goes from "----" to "no", so women delay being explicit until they have all the information
- "I would like to submit a formal request to touch your boob" is the lowest possible skill way to ask for consent. High skill ways are appreciated, in part because the space of boob-touching is large and you will never manage to convey sufficient detail verbally.
- A partner who is good at reading you is valuable in lots of ways- perhaps valuable enough to give up a bunch of guys who would have been merely okay.
- people are scared of rejection at every stage and women don't have the same push to get over it
- Gen Z men seem to have more fear/less push to get over it and indeed, AIUI aren't asking women out very much.
- this can also explain CNC fantasies- there's no risk of owning a desire and seeing it rejected
- women are disincentivized to express desire
(all models are possibilities and generalities, people are complicated, etc)
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1What I don't want is people being like "this is problematic and missing important things" without actually saying a single thing that it's wrong about or presenting any alternative model.
Reading this gave me the same feeling I used to get reading Brent's stuff: you're pointing at a real phenomenon but also pushing a bunch of data out of frame so it's really hard to challenge the model. If you want counterarguments, I think you need to relax that, and especially not insist on a single explanation for every member of a set that was selected for being best explained by your favorite explanation.
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how can we distinguish people who: