This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.)
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.)
More options
Context Copy link