no, Heppner's attorney-client privilege argument wasn't that the conversation was privileged inherently because it was legal consultation with Claude, but that it was privileged as personal notes made in preparation for consultation with counsel and then actually communicated to counsel, see Ford-Bey v. Professional Anesthesia Services and Greyhound Lines, Inc. v. Viad Corp.
Rakoff makes two arguments against this:
- privilege was broken because Claude/Anthropic is a third party; but I don't think he successfully distinguishes Claude from say Google Docs/Translate/Gmail in this regard (he just notes that Google Docs isn't usually claimed to confer privilege on its own; but this is not the claim being made about Claude either); and see NYSBA ethics rules 820 and 842)
- he quotes Gould v Mitsui: documents do not "acquire protection merely because they were transferred" to counsel; but that same case says they do acquire protection if communicated "for the purpose of obtaining or rendering legal advice"
I didn’t say he said it was privileged because he consulted with Claude for legal purposes so I’m not sure where that came from.
Re: Mitsui, it’s not the same case. It’s the same paragraph. And it’s pretty clear from the context that, if I send my lawyer an email requesting legal advice, the contents of that email are privileged, but if I attach pre-existing documents those documents are not, because they had no privilege to begin with. That’s not controversial. The challenge comes from the interplay between the court’s description of the privilege test, the reasonable expectations of a technology user, and the underlying, possibly obfuscated, reality of that technology’s function. Read literally, this case undermines privilege for a wide range of laypeople and attorneys doing a wide range of normal activities that have nothing to do with asking Claude for trial strategy.
You're right, I either misread your comment or got confused with a different comment or something.
But I do think the Mitsui point is relevant; in particular, the claim that the citation is supposed to back up is:
"Moreover, even assuming that Heppner intended to share these communications with his counsel and eventually did so, it is black-letter law that non-privileged communications are not somehow alchemically changed into privileged ones upon being shared with counsel."
But the distinction Mitsui is actually making is rather different: between communications "for the purpose of obtaining or rendering legal advice" and not; that's at best orthogonal to Rakoff's claim; and the other two cases I mentioned pretty explicitly make the opposite case: documents written with intent to share with counsel, and then actually shared with counsel seeking legal advice, are in fact covered under privilege. The assumption being that the documents are not "pre-existing", they're created as part of the process of communicating with counsel.
But yes, I agree that the "third-party" point separately undermines privilege in many contexts.
The ruling explicitly overrules Shih, thus making exactly that argument:
> Shih, of course, is not binding on this Court, and this Court respectfully disagrees with its holding. As relevant here, the court in Shih principally concluded that the work product doctrine is not limited to materials prepared by or at the direction of an attorney. Id. But that conclusion undermines the policy animating the work product doctrine, which, as one of the cases cited in Shih explains, is "to preserve a zone of privacy in which a lawyer can prepare and develop legal theories and strategy 'with an eye toward litigation.'"
Does that imply that materials produced by the client in conversation with the attorney (e.g. attorney says to client "Ok write here in your own words what happened so I can understand your perspective") are not privileged?
Or would those presumably exist under the umbrella of privacy because they're relevant to the lawyer preparing and developing their legal strategy?
The overruling of both Shih and the standards laid out in NYSBA ethics opinions 820/842 (and various other state bar associations, and the fact that apparently no one tried to challenge those in court until AI) without real discussion of implications seems rather unusual; and that's a rather charitable reading to avoid the crazier "Claude is a person" framing
also, he quotes Gould v Mitsui: documents do not "acquire protection merely because they were transferred" to counsel; but that same case says they do acquire protection if communicated "for the purpose of obtaining or rendering legal advice"
I don't know much about the Kingdom of Jerusalem per se, but even today many Jews say prayers specifically written after the Crusades
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres
So the symbols of "hope and triumph of establishing Christianity in the Holy Land" do not evoke particularly positive connotations, even aside from the usual modern opposition to that particular mission.
eh this "plagiarism" framing is overreaching
there were two proofs in the paper: countability of algebraic numbers and uncountability of reals
countability of algebraic numbers is a rather trivial induction on countability of rationals/pairs of numbers, which Cantor already knew about
Cantor himself did prove uncountability of real numbers; Dedekind just helped him clean the proof up
to me it seems like Dedekind's assistance was the kind of thing that might merit an acknowledgement, or possibly even joint authorship if subspecialty norms are generous, but far from a novel contribution on its own; unlike the uncountability of reals which was genuinely important and nontrivial. Dedekind, like Cantor, had other very important contributions, but certainly no claim on what Cantor is known for; and the context with Kronecker meant that this would prevent the work from ever being published. Also, this article doesn't actually show Dedekind was specifically upset by the "plagiarism", there may be any number of other reasons they may have stopped corresponding; and Dedekind's "hope this is useful" comment to Cantor can be read as permission to use it for his purposes
Ah, sorry. I have a (bad?) habit of using newlines as sentence separator in informal contexts, and HN likes to eat newlines if they're not doubled. I'd edit but it's too late now.
So, like compulsory jury duty and the draft, this would be directly against the 13th Amendment.
Then again, according to the Supreme Court, even forced, unpaid road duty (chain gangs anyone?) is an inherent power of the government, so maybe this is ok.
> In view of ancient usage and the unanimity of judicial opinion, it must be taken as settled that, unless restrained by some constitutional limitation, a state has inherent power to require every able-bodied man within its jurisdiction to labor for a reasonable time on public roads near his residence without direct compensation.
(spoiler alert: according to the ruling, the US Constitution, including Amendments, does not limit this power; and this is in fact cited as justification for upholding the draft)
Do you have any reason to believe that amendment was ever intended to cover things like mandatory jury duty? Or are you advocating for reading the text verbatim with zero consideration of the context or history? That kind of reading impacts a lot more than this, and not entirely in a good way.
I think there are much better argument for mandatory jury duty, like the fact that it's an inherent and explicit part of the preexisting Constitution, and that was not explicitly repealed nor (as far as I know) considered.
But the Court chose not to use those arguments, perhaps because they are less absolute and don't apply as cleanly to the draft.
Personally, I think that jury duty as it is today (no real pay, sometimes very long trials, "hardship" completely at the discretion of the judge) is actually a substantive violation of the principles of liberty that the 13th Amendment (along with the rest of the Constitution, notably the 5th Amendment) was meant to protect; (though I myself would likely enjoy actually being on a jury, and am fortunate that I can afford it/my work would likely pay).
And I don't think it would've been crazy to require an Amendment to institute a compulsory military draft, or better yet interpret the 13th Amendment to allow the draft (and jury duty) on narrower grounds but use it to better protect soldiers against various abuses inherent in the current military power structure and lack of exit option.
I do think that mandatory road duty is about as direct a violation of the purpose of the 13th Amendment as anything else the state could do. I think the (explicit) argument that the takings and due process clauses protect your money but not your labor is patently ridiculous.
> I do think that mandatory road duty is about as direct a violation of the purpose of the 13th Amendment as anything else the state could do.
Let me make sure I'm getting this right. You're making a serious claim that if the state required you to, say, clean the road by your house every morning, you'd feel like your experience would rival those of 19th-century slaves? You genuinely think that was the kind of thing the amendment was written for and do not see a meaningful distinction between the two?
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Obviously the experience wouldn't rival one of a 19th century slave and nobody is making that claim. However, forced labor for no compensation is slavery, by definition.
> Obviously the experience wouldn't rival one of a 19th century slave and nobody is making that claim.
This was literally the comment:
>> I do think that mandatory road duty is about as direct a violation of the purpose of the 13th Amendment as anything else the state could do.
The state could bring back 19th-century-style slavery, too. Wouldn't that be a more direct violation of the purpose of the amendment? Because eliminating that sort of thing was kinda the purpose of the amendment, no? The purpose of the amendment clearly wasn't to prevent the government from requiring you to maintain the road around your home... right?
This isn't my interpretation, I'm reading what you guys are writing as-is. You're trying to add more context and explanation that wasn't there, weakening (and frankly contradicting) their argument.
It's especially ironic given you're both simultaneously trying to read the amendment so blindly and disregarding the context or purpose (the original purpose emphatically was not to prevent you from having to do a bit of upkeep around your neighborhood), yet somehow you don't like it when your own writing is read literally?
Systematic widespread slavery is obviously different from using the threat or application of violence to compel unpaid labor in smaller-scale scenarios, but both are de facto slavery and both are direct violations of the amendment. If you wanna argue that there is a concept of a "lesser violation" and that it makes some forms of slavery OK, be my guest but even children don't buy arguments like that.
It's like trying to argue that a little murder is fine because really, the laws are set up to prevent mass murder.
> Systematic widespread slavery is obviously different from using the threat or application of violence to compel unpaid labor in smaller-scale scenarios,
Eh? Violence? For refusing mandatory upkeep around your home and neighborhood? Are you writing this from North Korea or something? How is fining you such a foreign concept where you live that your government has to resort to violence to get you to do some upkeep as a homeowner?
> but both are de facto slavery and both are direct violations of the amendment. If you wanna argue that there is a concept of a "lesser violation" and that it makes some forms of slavery OK, be my guest but even children don't buy arguments like that.
This was the "strongest plausible interpretation" of what I've been saying this whole time?
Children buy perfectly well the idea that requiring homeowners to do some upkeep around them is not even remotely "slavery". Just like how they understand perfectly well that making them clean their rooms is not "slavery" either. They understand it's not only ridiculous, but outright insulting to human dignity to suggest that these are comparable to slavery. Adults on HN are the ones who somehow struggle with this, not children.
> Eh? Violence? For refusing mandatory upkeep around your home and neighborhood? Are you writing this from North Korea or something? How is fining you such a foreign concept where you live that your government has to resort to violence to get you to do some upkeep as a homeowner?
What happens when you don't pay the fine? What happens when you resist the armed men at your door?
> outright insulting to human dignity to suggest that these are comparable to slavery
What's outright insulting to human dignity is authoritarians justifying slavery on the basis of "other forms are worse".
Garnish your wages? Freeze your bank account? Put a lien on your house? I don't know, I've never been blessed with the urge to die on this hill. They sure as heck have a million options besides injuring you, and they won't injure you unless you do something other than merely refusing labor or payment. "He didn't pay the fine, let's go beat him up till he does" is not how things work in my part of the world.
Ah yes, our wonderful governments won't beat us up if we don't comply, they'll just take our possessions and money so we don't have food, shelter, transportation, or the capacity to generate income. Totally non-violent.
"political power flows from the barrel of a gun" - Mao
The central claim in particular is not proven because a physical theory P need not be able to express statements like "there exists a number G, which, when interpreted as the text of a theory T, essentially states that the theory T itself is unprovable in the broader physical theory P" as an empirical physical fact.
It's also very hard to verify the sources for some claims: I would expect the snag to be that many model theory results we have (Such as Gödel theorems) require quantifying over an infinite set, but that seems plausibly not possible to model in the physical universe. I quickly found this quote from the paper:
> Arithmetic expressiveness; LQG can internally model the natural numbers with
their basic operations. This is important as quantum gravity should reproduce calculations used for amplitudes, curvature scalars, entropy, etc in appropriate limits. Both string theory [34, 37] and LQG [35, 38] satisfy this by reproducing GR and QM in appropriate limits
Here the citations are four entire books. How am I supposed to very that LQG can model N with that?
Here's a dumber argument: suppose you simulate a Newtonian universe in a computer. We do this at a coarse scale all the time. Now, suppose we dedicate a few percentage of solar output to this project and out pops functioning artificial life that can think more or less like we do. Such an "organism" would be able to discover Gödel incompleteness just as well, and thus eventually conclude via the same chain of logic as this paper that the simulation hypothesis is false. While inside a simulation.
Sure, I'm assuming here that nothing Gödel's brain did is fundamentally non-computable, but that's a pretty easy lift I think. Math is hard but it's not that hard.
For what it's worth, while I find this "obvious" as well, given the Church-Turing Thesis etc, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and philosopher Roger Penrose famously does think that human brains require access to non-computable insights to do math.
appear to the a-life Moses with tablets with the non-simulation proof written in Lean. They don't need insights to verify that proof, just a computer running inside the simulation.
Or just start simulating QM on a limited basis, just inside their brains. You might need to run evolution for another few million years until they start taking advantage of whatever Penrosian effects there are.
This is not really necessary tho; it only requires that the mathematical model has a certain arithmetic complexity. The usual demo is Robinson Arithmetic, which is addition, multiplication on the natural numbers, and a successor operation.
Godel then latches onto that to create an alphabet of the symbols which then are mapped to numbers; thus formulas are even bigger numbers, and derivations are even bigger bigger numbers. So for any statements there should be a derivation that prove the statement is true or a derivation that proves the statement is false. Of course most statements will be false, but even then there will be a derivation showing so.
Then Godel does some clever manipulation to show that there will be some statements for which there can be no such derivation in either way. But that does not need the physics theory to express things about itself. It only requires to be mathematically complex enough (it'd be weird if a theory of everything was simpler than Robinson Arithmetic) and that it has rules of derivation of its statements (ie, that mechanical math can be applied to deduce the truth of the matter from the first principles of the theory).
Of course, the actual undecidable godel number and the associated physical proposition would be immensely complex. But that is only cause nobody has tried to improve on Godel's methodology of assigning numbers to propositions. He used what was simpler, prime factorization, cause it was easy to reason about, but results in astronomical numbers. But there is no reason a better, less explosive way of encoding propositions could be found that made an undecidible Godel number to be translated into something comprehensible.
But this is largely unnecessary; Godel proof forces the mathematical system to speak about itself and then abuses this reflection to create a contradiction. It means the system is not complete, that there are statements in the system that cannot be proven from its first principles and derivation rules; the fact that the one Godel showed to exist is self referential does not mean all the undecidable propositions _are_ self referential. There well could be other, non self referential undecidable propositions, that could very well have a comprehensible physical interpretation.
And, regardless of the universe being a simulation or not, the physical theory will ultimately need to deal with this incompleteness.
Godel's proof relies on the self-referential nature of the Godel sentence; without that, his theorem does not apply. Generally you need arithmetic, but also (something equivalently expressive to) universal quantification. Physical theories do not need to include that.
Note Godel's proof is mechanically exactly analogous to Turing's proof of the undecidability of the halting problem, because ultimately it's the same thing (Curry-Howard, Prolog, and all that). So you can bypass arithmetic, but you can't really bypass self-reference; just like programming languages need some looping or recursion (or equivalent expressiveness) to be Turing-complete, mathematical theories need universal quantification to be subject to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
Of course, you can have a physical theory that _is_ Turing-complete, say the Newtonian billiard ball model (and, y'know, we can build computers); but that doesn't mean the theory will necessarily tell you, as a static, measureable physical fact, whether a particular physical process (say, an n-body system) will ever halt or loop, or go on forever with ever-increasing complexity; so you could (in principle, in Newtonian mechanics) build some (mechanical!) physical system that simulates the Goldbach conjecture, or looks for solutions to an arbitrary Diophantine equation, but if there are no integer solutions you'll never actually be able to show it; the theory is incomplete in the mathematical sense, but just as complete a description of reality's rules.
They have some explicit examples of physics explainable by quantum gravity that resolve but are undecidable, n-body thermalization being one. Of course that’s given a sort of hand wavey understanding of quantum gravity, I guess one that they say should tell us whether a system thermalizes.
EDIT:
I should also mention the idea that reality can tell us if a statement about a theory is true, given that the theory is an accurate description of reality. So if there’s an accurate Turing complete theory of reality, and we see some process that’s supposed to encode a decision on an undecidable statement being resolved (I guess in a non-probabilistic way as well), then we can conclude that reality is deciding undecidable statements in some nontrivial way.
Note that in general, a physical instantiation of an undecidable problem must be specified/realized to _infinite_ precision; that is, for any such system S, and for any eps>0, there is a perturbation p with distance d<eps (eg, move a billiard ball an arbitrarily small amount) that is provable; this is analogous to the fact that existence of solutions to Diophantine equations is undecidable, but the theory of real closed fields is decidable, which means that the only undecidable case is when an equation has solutions _arbitrarily close_ to integers, but never quite an integer. I am not a physicist, but I don't believe any physics actually cares about infinitely-precise setups.
Integers exist in quantum physics (e.g. electron charge, spin), which is why I think quantum gravity is important to this argument. Spacetime ends up being discretizable and we can end up having rational valued physical phenomena.
Mostly as an abstraction on top of a continuous wavefunction/quantum field
> Spacetime ends up being discretizable
As far as I know this is speculative and usually assumed by physicists to be false; it's definitely not a required feature of quantum mechanics per se, and as far as I know not of any other well-accepted theory.
> Integers are fundamental in quantum mechanics, particularly as quantum numbers that define the discrete properties of particles, such as energy levels, angular momentum, and spin.
> Quantum mechanics dictates that certain properties, like energy and angular momentum, are quantized, meaning they can only exist in discrete packets or "quanta".
Rakoff makes two arguments against this:
- privilege was broken because Claude/Anthropic is a third party; but I don't think he successfully distinguishes Claude from say Google Docs/Translate/Gmail in this regard (he just notes that Google Docs isn't usually claimed to confer privilege on its own; but this is not the claim being made about Claude either); and see NYSBA ethics rules 820 and 842)
- he quotes Gould v Mitsui: documents do not "acquire protection merely because they were transferred" to counsel; but that same case says they do acquire protection if communicated "for the purpose of obtaining or rendering legal advice"
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