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 -
How is this not reasoning? I got the questions from something that says it's from 2022 so it shouldn't have seen them before. I imagine you'd say those are too easy or it might have seen them before anyway, so I made up my own harder question.
Now you see that it identifies the rule correctly and tries to apply the rule but jumbles up the logic and arithmetic. It's an inhuman failure, no person would write 172+3=37 and mean 17x2+3=37 or 81+2=82. Nevertheless, there's reasoning ability within the machine. It's not very good mathematically, the reasoning ability isn't great but it's definitely there. It's like the alien equivalent of a mediocre high-school student, apparently it scored in the 52nd percentile of a SAT test.
https://twitter.com/teddynpc/status/1598767389390573569
There is no COMPREHENSION in it. Further the design we use for these "ai"s is such that it does not have any meaningful amount of "short term memory" nor contextual "long term memory". For instance you can not "teach" it anything by example, there will not be any "reasoning through examples" and applying abstract analogies from one situation to another. It's nothing more than a really fancy perceptron matrix butchered together with a markovchain bot.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link