Viliam

Karma: 24,461

Viliam Apr 22, 2025, 11:24 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: Hruss’s comment on: Crime and Punishment #1
It happens right in front of my house. Addicts steal things at shops, sell them at a pawn shop, buy drugs from a dealer waiting right in front of the pawn shop (difficult not to notice: the only guy who wears a black hoodie in the middle of a hot day), then inject the drugs behind the pawn shop.
When the shops are closed, or the addicts draw too much attention from the security, they try breaking into our houses and cellars instead. Every door in the neighborhood has signs of an attempt to pry it open.
What can we do about this?
Make shop theft impossible? Unlikely to happen, they would need to have the security literally everywhere.
Prevent the pawn shop from buying stolen stuff? I don’t understand the details, but I was told that if they make the seller sign a paper saying “I totally swear I didn’t steal this”, they are legally ok. The pawn shop owner definitely knows that he deals with stolen stuff; that’s why he moves everything between the shops, so that when they rob your house, you won’t find your stuff in the shop window on your street the next day.
Prevent the dealer from selling drugs? That’s quite tricky, legally, because owning a small amount of drug “for your own use” is not illegal here. Of course the dealer only brings one small bag of powder each time. Also, you pay to one guy, and get the powder from another guy, so it is legally tricky to determine at which moment exactly the drug was sold. (The first guy didn’t give you any drug, and the second guy didn’t take any money from you. If you only catch one of them, he will probably claim it was just a misunderstanding.)
So our only remaining option is to form a vigilante squad, and… well, I am not going to write down anything that may or may not happen afterwards. Didn’t expect this to happen to me, and yet, here I am.
Reducing penalties for drug use is a well-sounding idiocy. In theory, you reduce the penalties for drug use, but in practice, you reduce the penalties for drug distribution, because most of the time when you catch a dealer, he can argue that this was all for his own use. And he only takes with him one bag of powder at a time. Yes, in theory it is possible to find the store full of bags, but you just made it needlessly complicated. When drug possession is a crime, you can catch the dealer, he says it was for his own use, you arrest him anyway. (Ideally, you would give him exponentially increasing sentences, starting with community service.)

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 8:46 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
This feels like debating a holocaust denier. We are moving from “it did not happen at all” to “maybe it wasn’t six million Jews but only five million”. (“You did not name a single historian, Greek city state, solitary event, or personality from history” → “ancients simply did not keep accurate records … what evidence we do have shows the numbers to be always exaggerated”)
The argument by inaccurate records goes both ways. If there is a genocide today, we probably know about it, and someone at least makes a note in Wikipedia. In the past, ethnic groups could be erased with no one (other than the people involved in the war) noticing. The fact that the list of known genocides in 20th century is longer than the list of known genocides in e.g. 12th century is mostly because of better bookkeeping.
And yet, despite choosing a century randomly (if I tried on purpose, I could have chosen e.g. the 13th century with Albigenian Crusade as a good example), Wikipedia mentions “Massacre of the Latins” with about 60 000 dead in the 12th century. In a world where the population was not even ¹⁄₁₀ of what it is today, so relatively comparable with the numbers that you have mentioned. And we have no idea about what massacres might have happened in 12th century Africa.
So yes, today we have more victims in absolute numbers, but that’s because we have larger populations and stronger weapons. When you have to kill your enemies using a hand axe, I guess you get quite tired after chopping off dozen heads. With a nuke, you just press a button and thousands die. And yet, despite the other side having nukes, most Japanese survived WW2. (Which is something they totally did not expect, given their usual behavior towards defeated enemies.) The people in the past were as efficient at killing their enemies with swords, as we are with the weapons of mass destruction today.
“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Samuel 15:3) Tell me again how civilians were not considered valid targets in the past.
You mention compelling prisoners of war to labor, as an analogy to slavery. Yeah, but that was an exception during the war. (Except for the Soviets, who conveniently kept many of the prisoners of war long after the war was over.) Now compare to a situation thousand years ago, when the slave trade was a crucial part of European economy, comparable to oil trade today. The reason entire countries converted to Christianity was to stop the unending slave raids from their neighbors. (Christians had a taboo against enslaving each other. So did Muslims. Both of them considered it okay to enslave each other, and the pagans.) Or consider Africa: the first black slaves brought to America were legally bought in Africa from the local African slave traders. Americans did not invent slavery; they just provided a huge new market for it.
Sorry, I think it is you who needs to learn history. Yes, humans suck today; the “Noble Savages” were not any better, probably much worse.

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 7:46 PM
10 points
0
on: Viliam’s Shortform
Attempts to jailbreak LLMs seem obvious to humans. What does it mean?
Maybe it is a selection bias—a non-obvious jailbreak would simply seem to me like “someone made a valid argument”, so I wouldn’t classify it as a jailbreak attempt.
Is there enough similarity so that we could create an input-checker AI which would only read the input for the purpose of determining whether it is a jailbreak attempt or not… and only if the input is considered okay, it would be passed to the second AI that actually tries to respond to it?
(That is, does the fact that the AI tries to respond to the input make it more vulnerable? As an analogy, imagine a human who is supposed to (a) write a reply to a comment, or (b) verify that the comment is written in English. The comment happens to contain a triggering description, or a mindkilling argument, or some other bad meme. I would expect the person who only verifies the English language to be less impacted, because they interact with the content of the meme less.)
Assuming that it is possible to jailbreak every AI, including the input checker, are there universal jailbreaks that apply to all AIs, or do you need to make a tailored jailbreak for each? Could we increase the resistance by having several different input-checker AIs, and have each input checked by three randomly selected ones?
(It is important that the algorithm that implements “if two out of three AIs say that the content is safe, but one says that it is a jailbreaking attempt, reject the input” is classical, not an LLM—otherwise it would be more efficient to jailbreak this one.)

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 6:37 PM
3 points
0
on: Not All Beliefs Are Created Equal: Diagnosing Toxic Ideologies
Interesting perspective. The difficult part will be that the proposed metrics are of the “more or less” type, rather than “yes or no”. So one must be familiar with multiple beliefs, in order to put the specific one on the scale.
Psychological comfort—each belief implicitly divides people into two groups: those who understand it and those who don’t; the former is better. Knowing the Pythagorean theorem can make you proud of your math skills.
It gets suspicious when a seemingly simple belief explains too much. Knowing the Pythagorean theorem allows you to calculate the longest side of a right-angled triangle, a distance between two points in N-dimensional Euclidean space even for N>3, or allows you to prove that sin²(φ) + cos²(φ) = 1, but that’s it. If it also told you how to dress, what to eat, and which political party to vote for, that would be suspicious.
On the opposite end of the scale, mathematics as a whole claims to explains a lot, it is practically involved in everything, but it is a ton of knowledge that takes years or decades to study properly. It would be suspicious if something similarly powerful could be understood by merely reading a book and hanging out with some group.
(Elephant in the room: what about “rationality”, especially the claim that “P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)” explains the entire multiverse and beyond? I think it is kinda okay, as long as you remember that you also need specific data to apply the formula to; mere general knowledge won’t help you figure out the details. Also, no one claims that the Bayes Theorem can only be used for good purposes, or that it makes you morally superior.)
Self-Sealing Mechanisms—be careful when the belief is supported by things other than arguments and data; for example by violence (verbal or otherwise). This is also tricky: is it okay to “cancel” a crackpot? I think it is okay to fire crackpots from academic/scientific institutions; those obviously wouldn’t be able to do their job otherwise. But if you start persecuting heretical thoughts expressed by people in their free time, on their blogs, etc., that goes too far.
I sometimes says that “political orientation” is basically “which part of complex reality you decided to ignore”. (That doesn’t mean that if you ignore nothing, you are unable to have opinions or make decisions. But you opinions will be usually be like “this is complicated, in general it is usually better to do X, but there are exceptions, such as Y”. The kind of reasoning that would get you kicked out of any ideological group.)

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 5:37 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Davey Morse’s comment on: Davey Morse’s Shortform
“Thousands” is probably not enough.
Imagine trying to generate a poem by one algorithm creating thousands of random combinations of words, and another algorithm choosing the most poetic among the generated combinations. No matter how good the second algorithm is, it seems quite likely that the first one simply didn’t generate anything valuable.
As the hypothesis gets more complex, the number of options grows exponentially. Imagine a pattern such as “what if X increases/decreases Y by mechanism Z”. If you propose 10 different values for each of X, Y, Z, you already have 1000 hypotheses.
I can imagine finding some low-hanging fruit if we increase the number of hypotheses to millions. But even there, we will probably be limited by lack of experimental data. (Could a diet consisting only of broccoli and peanut butter cure cancer? Maybe, but how is the LLM supposed to find out?) So we would need to find a hypothesis where we accidentally already made all the necessary experiments and even described the intermediate findings (because LLMs are good at words, but probably suck at analyzing the primary data), but we somehow failed to connect the dots. Not impossible, but requires a lot of luck.
To get further, we need some new insight. Maybe collecting tons of data in a relatively uniform format, and teaching the LLM to translate its hypotheses into SQL queries it could then verify automatically.
(Even with hypothetical ubiquitous surveillance, you would probably need an extra step where the raw video records are transcribed to textual/numeric data, so that you could run queries on them later.)

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 5:24 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
Siege of Melos: Athens demanded a tribute, Melos refused to pay, the Athenians executed the men of fighting age and sold the women and children into slavery. They then settled 500 of their own colonists on the island.
Battle of Plataea: After the battle of Plataea, the city [Caryae] was captured by the allied Greeks, the city’s men were executed and the women were enslaved.
Miletus: Persians under Darius the Great punished Miletus for rebellion by selling all of the women and children into slavery, killing the men, and expelling all of the young men as eunuchs, thereby assuring that no Miletus citizen would ever be born again.
Battle of Thebes: Thirty thousand were sold into slavery and six thousand slain in the final fighting. The city was burnt to the ground, sparing only the temples, the Cadmae citadel and the house of Pindar, out of gratitude for Pindar’s verses praising Alexander’s ancestor, Alexander I of Macedon.

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 5:08 PM
2 points
0
on: How to end credentialism
If we tried to make universities examine non-students, the easiest way for the universities to cheat would be to teach literal passwords to their students, and then fail everyone who doesn’t know the password. Then they could demonstrate that even in a fair competition only their students are able to pass the exams.
With some cleverness you could insert arbitrary passwords even into hard sciences, for example by asking “what was Einstein’s most important contribution to physics?” Even if you knew everything about physics, and everything about Einstein, it wouldn’t help you figure out what was his most important contribution in the teacher’s opinion. (Could be any of them. Could even be something meta.)
Or you could take a set of arbitrary details (something so specific that it is virtually impossible for a human to memorize all things in the same category of relevance) and keep repeating the selected details to your students every year. Ask those details in exams every year; then ask them again on the final exam.
And with soft sciences… basically everything already is like this. (Or am I wrong? There is a way to test this empirically: take students from a few universities and make them take exams at a different university that teaches nominally the same subject; preferably in a different country.)

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 3:58 PM
5 points
2
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
Not sure if your point is that you disagree with my description of war in ancient Greece and the Old Testament, or that you think I cherry-picked convenient examples in trend that goes overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, or you are ignoring the data points completely and your argument is merely “what you said pattern-matches a political tribe X, now here are some books written by a tribe Y”.

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 2:31 PM
4 points
0
on: Interesting ACX 2024 Book Review Entries
Choosing Elites (1985)
With other variables held constant, a measure of “academic ability” that combined high-school records and SAT test scores was about ten times as important as a measure of “student effort” (study time and so forth), in terms of how much was learned.
Other things equal, a hundred point increase in both the SAT verbal and math scores made a slightly greater difference as to how much more students learned than did the difference between the best and worst instructors in the course.
Students’ ratings of the competence and personability of their teachers had absolutely no relationship with how much the students learned. But the teachers’ grades in graduate school did.
Yep. When we deny the IQ differences, we have to attribute the difference in the outcomes to something else… and schools and teachers seem like a natural choice. Therefore we overestimate the impact of education.
Don’t Make No Waves…Don’t Back No Losers: An Insiders’ Analysis of the Daley Machine (1975)
I couldn’t choose a specific quote, it is all very interesting.
Making the Corps (1997)
The review is interesting, but the part I liked most was this thought at the end:
In fact, [“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”] sounds pretty nice when taken at face value. For example, this is how families operate: from the parents according to their ability, to the children according to their need. Many insular, highly religious communities also operate this way. In Amish, Mennonite, and Hasidic communities, charitable giving (“alms”) often provides a social safety net for members in need. Some egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes also functioned like this. And to be honest, it does seem like it would be pretty nice to live in this kind of a community, where everyone looks out for each other.
So what’s going on? Is this kind of “communism” good actually? Libertarians have an easy answer for this – communes are fine if they’re voluntary. As long as nobody’s being violently coerced and people are allowed to leave if they want to, then it’s fine. Alright, so that’s easy but also unsatisfying. Why do people voluntarily participate in these communes, even when it means a net-loss for the most capable and productive members? Why doesn’t the Laffer curve apply to the most productive Amish farmer who has his wealth redistributed to the neediest in the community? Why didn’t the Margaret Thatcher quote about socialists “running out of other people’s money” apply to the most capable hunters in egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes?
I think the reason why some redistributive systems work and some don’t is related to the psychology of tribalism. A redistributive economic system where everyone views themselves as part of the same tribe and a system in which they view themselves as two tribes [...] are completely different in terms of the psychology of the participants and the ultimate sustainability of the system. The usual critique of wealth redistribution is that it disincentivizes economic production (Laffer curve, Margareth Thatcher quote, etc). But I think this criticism only applies to redistributive systems where the people taking a net-loss and the people taking a net-gain view themselves as two different groups. When they view themselves as part of the same group, as with the Amish or egalitarian hunter-gatherers, then the criticism seems to fall flat, as the most productive members aren’t deterred from working by the net-loss they’re taking.
Explicitly accounting for the one-tribe / two-tribe distinction also helps clear up a lot of debates in political philosophy. [...] The one-tribe democracy is the ideal: a society where people view themselves as all part of the same group, evaluate policies based on what’s best for society as a whole, and then vote based on their individual judgment of what’s best for the group, with this hopefully leading to policies converging on the correct answer. Of course people might disagree about which policies are the best and have heated debates about them, but ultimately the goal is the betterment of the society, and the debate is just over what policies best achieve that goal. On the other hand, in the two-tribe democracy, the goal is simply to vote to take away power, resources, and status from the Out-Group and give them to the In-Group.
This sounds correct to me. I think that an important part is how much I expect other people to reciprocate: not necessarily in this reality, but at least counterfactually (in a hypothetical reality where our roles are reversed). I am okay with doing things for my kids, because I expect them to grow up and do things… not necessarily for me, but further along the line. On the other hand, it would create a tension between me and my partner if we didn’t split our domestic duties in a way that seems fair to both. In other words, I need to see that “each according to one’s abilities” also applies to the others, even if their abilities are different from mine.
The part about needs is trickier, because the needs are potentially unlimited. Also, everyone needs to take a break and relax sometimes, but that means they are not working according to their abilities at the moment. So this all is not necessarily philosophically coherent, but it is still psychologically easier for me to work harder when I believe that everyone else does (even if they are at a different level of ability).
When I see people not doing things, or doing things in a way that makes sure that I will get none of it (for example a clique of people, perhaps hard-working, but making sure they only do things for the other people in the clique), that pisses me off, and then I am also not in the mood to share with them.
I guess, in small groups people punish the ones who don’t do their share (e.g. by refusing to share with them), but in large groups it is difficult to track everyone’s contribution and also to control how the tax money is used. Also, in small groups, if the group pisses you off too much, you can leave and join another group; this is more difficult when the “group” is a country, and leaving means selling your house, learning another language, adapting to a different culture, and there are only a few dozen choices available on the entire planet, and most of them either refuse to accept you or are quite dysfunctional.

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 12:36 PM
2 points
2
in reply to: khafra’s comment on: Pablo’s Shortform
substack, not blogspot

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 11:15 AM
8 points
4
in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: Pablo’s Shortform
There’s indeed been no one with that level of reach that has spread this much misinformation and started this many negative rumors in the space as David Gerard and RW. Whoever the second closest contender is, is likely not even close.
First place goes to David Gerard / RationalWiki—not exactly the same thing, but a huge overlap. There are also other editors on RationalWiki, but most of them are much less active and not as hostile towards the rationalist community as David. David is also the driving force behind the SneerClub, plus he edits Wikipedia, which vastly expands his possibilities (he can write a “snarky” comment on RW, have a journalist quote it, then he can quote the journalist in Wikipedia, protect the article against changes, and remove all quotes that oppose his narrative).
The distant second place goes to Alexander Kruel, mostly for his historical achievements, because he is not active recently. (But a decade ago, about ²⁄₃ of negative statements about the rationalist community could be traced back to David/RW and about ¹⁄₃ to Alexander’s blog.)
There is no third place, IMHO. Everything else is just a blip on the radar, including the negative press recently sparked by the Zizians.

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 10:49 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: ROM’s comment on: Pablo’s Shortform
Nice link, the rationalist community should consider moving to Kazakhstan! ;)
I don’t think this kind of comparison is important, because RW and LW are different types of websites. RationalWiki advertises itself as a resource for debunking pseudoscience, but I think that the numbers on that graph are mostly driven by their active involvement in hot topics of various culture wars: they have lots of articles on Trump, GamerGate, feminism, et cetera. On the other hand, Less Wrong actively tries to avoid all this, and tries to keep focus on mostly nerdy topics. (Also, the most popular LW writers have started their own blogs.)
So we basically have political clickbait competing for popularity with a nerdy walled garden, and if at the end of the day their numbers are similar… I think this is a pretty damning result for RationalWiki.

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 10:32 AM
11 points
2
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Pablo’s Shortform
I think libel suits are really bad tools for limiting speech
Especially when the punishment is not only that you may lose the suit, but also the money you have to spend on your legal defense even when you win.
That said, RationalWiki is primarily a bullying (excuse me, snarky) website that most people only consider okay because they believe that the targets deserve it. (And they often do—but the problem is, once you have a shiny powerful gun, it is too tempting to expand the scope.) When your mission is to attack people publicly, you better stick to the facts, and don’t dismiss criticism with “but it is funnier this way”, or the lawyers may have the last laugh.

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 10:00 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
The point is exactly that the shittiness seems decreasing on the historical scale, albeit very slowly.
Compare e.g. Moses and Hitler. Both of them became famous for being leaders who demonized their enemies and tried to exterminate them to the last one. Yet the latter is considered the archetype of evil, because he did the thing during the 20th century, when we expected people to do better. The former is considered a holy man by multiple religions, and his violent actions are not considered a stain on his character, because “back then, everyone was like that”.

Viliam Apr 21, 2025, 9:53 AM
6 points
6
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
Looking at historical documents, it seems to me that “kill everyone who resists, and install a puppet government” (the Western countries recently) is an improvement over “kill everyone who resists, and make the survivors learn your language and your version of history” (Russia today, and the Western countries a century or more ago) which is an improvement over “”kill everyone who resists, sell everyone else as a slave” (e.g. the ancient Greek city states) which was an improvement over “kill everyone, except for a few young women whom you decide to keep as sex slaves after you raped them” (the Old Testament, and probably everyone before them).
obviously the very concept of survival of the fittest is one that does not even come into play until the 18th and 19th centuries
The theory is new. But the practice… was already practiced by chimpanzees.

Viliam Apr 20, 2025, 1:13 PM
3 points
2
on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
behave, both as individuals and as nations, in a way that people of the past would find despicably cruel
Please educate me more, don’t merely throw hints like this! Should we burn some cats for fun as an antidote to our general decadence, or did you have other specific things in mind?

Viliam Apr 18, 2025, 9:42 PM
4 points
1
on: What If Galaxies Are Alive and Atoms Have Minds? A Thought Experiment on Life Across Scales
I agree with the part that the scale should not matter. (Except, as Richard said, the age of the universe is the same for everything in it, so the largest structures had relatively not enough time to do anything interesting.)
But I think the atoms and galaxies simply do not have enough internal complexity to do something as interesting as cells or animals. Atoms, because there is little inside. Galaxies, because the things inside them do not interact enough.

Viliam Apr 18, 2025, 9:37 PM
40 points
23
on: Three Months In, Evaluating Three Rationalist Cases for Trump
I think another general mistake here is nerds thinking that they can ride a tiger, instead of getting eaten by it.
The wannabe 4D-chess thinking goes like this: “Here is a group of people who hate reason and experts. Therefore they have no experts among themselves. Therefore, if I join them and gain their trust, as a smart person I will quickly rise to the top, and then I will have an unparalleled opportunity to change the world.”
What actually happens: The guy joins the movement, and as long as he follows the crowd, he can get quite popular. But the first moment he tries to do something different, his popularity/influence drops instantly.
I respect Hanania for admitting his mistake. Everyone else is delusional. This is basically the same mistake Dominic Cummings made a few years ago, and apparently we didn’t learn a bit.

Viliam Apr 18, 2025, 9:21 PM
3 points
4
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Three Months In, Evaluating Three Rationalist Cases for Trump
On the other hand, people from the United States are often the first to tell you that “freedom of speech” is not a general aspiration for making the world a better place, but merely a specific amendment to their constitution, which importantly only applies to censorship done directly by the government… therefore it does not apply to censorship by companies or mobs or universities or whatever.
(As an extreme example, from this perspective, a country without an official government would count as 100% free speech, even if criticizing the local warlord gets you predictably tortured to death; as long as the local warlord is not considered a “government” because of some technicality.)

Viliam Apr 18, 2025, 9:03 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Nihilism Is Not Enough By Peter Thiel
depicts society as a kind of conspiracy to suppress ambition, on the principle that misery loves company
ugly picture of human nature as spiteful and vengeful, and because it implies there is no will to serious liberation (I wanted to end work and death), in fact it predicts that such attempts will be resisted
anyone setting out to become a rich and powerful capitalist, as Thiel did, has to worry about becoming a focus of negative attention, especially when there are political movements that attack wealth and/or privilege
I agree that there definitely is a general human instinct to suppress the successful ones. I am much less certain about the exact details of what triggers it, and how could it possibly be overcome.
Notice that there is also an opposite instinct to worship the successful ones: many people practically worship their leaders, sportsmen, actors… What decides which reaction activates when they see success?
(Also, how do you distinguish between “people do X because they see others do X” and “there is a reason why multiple people independently decide to do X”? For example, my first reaction to the previous question was “people are likely to hate those who are hated by others, and worship those who are worshiped by others”, which seems like something Girard might say, but that also seems like a lazy answer; maybe people arrive at the same conclusions because they see the same triggers.)
A possible explanation is that people try to suppress others when the distance between them is small, and worship them when the distance is large. If you are a peasant, a more successful peasant is probably a witch and needs to be burned… but a king is practically a different species. A person similar to you evokes the feeling of “it should have been me instead”, which leads to resentment.
Familiarity breeds contempt / “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” / “An expert is an ordinary fellow from another town.” = people are much less likely to admire someone whom they already knew before that person became famous.
So, to trigger the worship instinct, people should know as little as possible about your past; you should appear in front of them as a fully developed success. To a more credulous audience, you could perhaps give a story about how you were already awesome as a baby (it helps if someone else says that).
...this is not an optimistic perspective either: it offers you a recipe to individually overcome the talent suppression instinct (every time you level up, move to a different city, and get rid of everyone who knows you; use pseudonyms online, and burn them when you level up), but it does not suggest a way out for the society as a whole.