site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   23954 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What crucial characteristic is AI missing? Agency? It's not missing it so much as they just choose not to implement it.

Knowing that there is a real world, out there, beyond language.

Are the moon landings a hoax? Large Language Models can say what people say, perhaps rather more fluently and persuasively. If one is open to the possibility that there is more than one kind of intelligence, then LLM's have one of those kinds of intelligence, and in greater degree than an average human. But LLM's are rather stuck on giving their own opinion of whether the moon landings are a hoax, because they don't know whether the moon is real or fictional. Nor do the know whether the Earth is real or fictional. The whole "ground truth" thing is missing.

We don't know the "ground truth" either, though. All the information that we parse, such as touching the Earth or seeing the moon in the sky or through a telescope are basically hallucinations created by our brains based on the sensory input that we take in through detection mechanisms in our cells. We have to trust that the qualia that we experience are somewhat accurate representations of the "ground truth." Our experience is such that we perceive reality accurately enough such that we can keep surviving both as individuals and as a species, but who knows just how accurate that really is?

LLMs are certainly far more limited compared to us in the variety of sensory input they can take in, or how often it can update itself permanently based on that sensory input, and the difference in quantity is probably large enough to have a quality of its own.

My guess as to the biggest missing factor between here and AGI is efficient online and self-directed learning (aka continuous or lifetime learning).

More specifically, a means of avoiding the inward spiral that comes when the model's output becomes part of its input (via the chat context). I've noticed that LLMs very quickly become less flexible as a conversation progresses, and I think this kind of self-imitation is part of it. I'm working on something and I'd like to force the AI to push itself out of distribution, but I'm not sure how.

Yes, agency. How do you know they know how to implement it?

Because it exists? The agentic AIs are already a thing

Those don't really work. There have been a bunch of iterations but prompts of the form 'decide what you should do to achieve task X and then do it' don't produce good results in situ and it's not really clear why. I think partly because AI is not good at conceptualising the space of unknowns and acting under uncertainty, and it's not good at collaborating with others. Agentic AI tends to get lost, or muddled, or hare off in the wrong direction. This may be suboptimal training, of course.

I read Zvi he follows AI much closer than I will ever bother to.

There are potential tricks around the problem you talk about. One of the easier ones is asking the AI to prompt engineer itself. "How would you request a task to do X" ... "How would you improve this prompt that is a request to do task X" ... keep doing that and asking separately "which is a better prompt to do task X".

The sense I get is that there is thinking that an AI is doing, but it is mostly like a dice roll. Rolling consecutively for a cumulatively high number isn't a great strategy, but you don't need to do that. You can instead do something where you re-roll for the best possible roll, then move on to the next roll and do the same thing.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats