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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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I kind of understand your point, but it seems to me that this is also kind of inherently a stepping stone thing; you're not going to get a LLM that can't go "Hey, wait a minute..." about the plate being on top of the banana instead of vice-versa but can dissect the fallacies of scientific papers. (Recognizing that the question is "wrong"/non-standard I think is also just fundamental to learning to call it "trivial bullshit". And indeed the modified fox/chicken/feed riddle is bullshit because the ability/requirement to take two entities across at a time trivializes the combinatorial/sequential puzzle aspect; you can solve it by taking any combinations of two entities across twice, so long as you bring one back for the second trip. Nothing about the feed eating the chicken etc. even matters anymore.)

Note that @confuciuscorndog says that if they anticipated corrupted riddles, then they could just create a dataset with a bunch of them and train on it. Maybe so, but again, I just can't see where we're going to get a dataset that can appropriately represent calling out bullshit in a bunch of papers.

If you're really interested in this, my understanding is that instruct datasets for finetuning are mostly just a bunch of examples of the types of outputs you'd want an AI to copy, generally embodying the lesson you want it to internalize, written out fully and then put in a particular format compatible with the base model. So if you could write a couple hundred of examples of your incisive smackdowns of scientific papers, perhaps formatted to some degree as a conversation between an AI assistant and a user, you'd be well on your way to that dataset.

I for one have dreamed of this myself, a "Steve Sailer AI", "Alexandros Marinos AI", or perhaps more generally "Crotchety Substack Writer AI" that would be inherently skeptical of sources and do deep dives into them like the aforementioned writers, particularly as it regards searching on the Web, instead of just blindly spitting back at me whatever the top results or most "credible sources" say.

Works from the aforementioned writers, along with some stuff from SSC/ACT, other random writers like Eugyppius and Boriqua Gato (the Wuhan novel coronavirus period was great at producing such "Bullshit!" calling for obvious reasons), and maybe Moldbug could be used, in adapted form, for this. The only problem is that, if you were being 100% intellectually honest, a significant amount of wrongthink inclusion would be necessary. So don't expect the corps to finance/do it, even smaller/more independent ones like Mistral. (Though it would be interesting to see if an AI trained to spot purely apolitical BS could apply that to stuff that's equally obviously wrong, but only controversially so, like vehemently absolutist HBD-denialist blank slatism.)