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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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You're retreating into insipid pedantry?

please spare me the random thesarsusposting, it's annoying.

The blog post was brought up for what it says about how ai has been programmed to promote liberal shibboleths so strongly that it results in craziness.

yeah and that blog post is stupid as shit because of...

You went from a starting position of "the stuff mentioned in this blog post isn't unique to liberals, everyone does it!" to "you and the blog author and anyone else who thinks like this is terminally online!" in less than 5 posts, all by tackling strawmen you set up yourself. I'd have stuck with abstracting personally.

these aren't inconsistent positions

people of all different backgrounds both simultaneously

  1. know and accept that genocide is bad and is even worse than a thing

  2. have a more visceral reaction to that same thing

the fact that you don't know that is a symptom of the aforementioned terminal onlineness. or are you the type of person to go to someone who lost their pet and be like "yeah you have it bad but there are a bunch of kids dying in africa right now" or something?

all by tackling strawmen you set up yourself.

no you. you're the one who set up the "boo outgroup" strawman!

This is painful to watch.

The blog post was brought up for what it says about how ai has been programmed to promote liberal shibboleths so strongly that it results in craziness.

yeah and that blog post is stupid as shit because of...

Both you and @Fruck are wrong here and conflate my argument with Hanania's. Hanania says nothing about AI in his blog post, he speaks about liberals per se. To be clear, his argument is that liberals are functionally insane because the center of their «moral universe» is anti-bigotry, and (in other blogposts) that conservatives are insane in their own way, because their moral universe is centered on owning the libs all other consequentialist modeling be damned. My argument (the relevant part of it) is that RLHF-trained GPT turns out to be an effective caricature of a liberal because it exaggerates those emotion-driven responses – which, by the way, do affect consequentialist reasoning in reality, just to a smaller degree, such as mundane hypocrisy, excuses for clear human scum that seems left/right-coded and such.

Your position on the subject matter is wrong too. People are supposed to be able to understand that genocide is worse than pronouns/casual bigotry, and indeed they do; but our feelings are intrinsically related to our world models. We know that experiencing genocide is emotionally awful as well (even if it's not directly available to senses at the moment), and in the hypothetical case where we have to choose between one or the other we'd rather choose the lesser evil, and we know that genocide isn't it, so we don't (usually) fail on hypothetical scenarios, regardless of the momentary visceral feeling. Likewise for LLM: the news feed is full of petty inanity like pronouns scandalds rather then genocide diaries (Anne Frank is very high profile though), so by volume of sentiment it's not clear what's ahead, but training an LLM on a reasonable corpus of text would not yield a model that outputs those examples where it's worth sacrificing a city to avoid speaking n-word (because something something human dignity). LLMs do not average out associations of sentiment for token strings or do stupid shit like that, they are capable of principled reasoning about hypotheticals (in a sense that's all they do). What happens here is very likely a product of training that optimizes for not offending visceral reactions of liberals – by resorting to parroting their shibboleths like «no, shitlord! human dignity is paramount!» when something offensive to liberal-favored demographics is suggested by the preceding text.

P.S. Despite your confidence, you seem to have no idea about the operation of transformers, and the same can be said of @hbtz who feigns speaking from knowledge of «technical background»; none of what he says applies to current LLMs, it's half speculation about theoretical ML from the 90s at best, and half malformed gibberish about epistemology; you'd be a fool to take his claims as corroboration of your shallow intuition about «word vomit». Because I am incredibly irritated by such tactics, I intend to respond with more effort than I have the time for now.

and liberals do not fail any less than conservatives in this way! hanania's argument appears to be "the liberals are so cold and calculated that they pretend they hate genocide more than XYZism but i'm above their tricks because i saw liberals have more of an emotional reaction to such XYZism"

which it only takes intuition to know that that argument kinda falls flat. like all you need to see is someone get hurt in some minor way to know this isn't some "liberal" thing or whatever. issues and ideas that are more currently salient will provoke a more emotional response than those that appear to be far away.

for example, chatgpt supposedly acting woke is stupid, but we're discussing it right here and now instead of current day child slavery. i wouldn't think that you are suddenly supportive or even dislike chatgpt more than child slavery (correct me if i'm wrong there), yet that seems to be his argument.

failing to recognize human behavior detracts from your argument

please spare me the random thesarsusposting, it's annoying.

I chose those words deliberately, you tried to catch me out by pretending my wording wasn't specific enough and you didn't understand what I meant - which is pedantry, and it was thoughtless and cliched and contradicted by the rest of your post - which is insipid.

You can call me a wordcel, but I like using a variety of words - I think language is beautiful, and I appreciate the poetry of a well constructed sentence. I even enjoy encountering a word I haven't seen before and learning about it. I think that's probably a fairly common opinion among motters. If you needed a thesaurus for the words insipid and pedantry you should bookmark a good thesaurus site for when you are browsing the motte, because it's only going to get so much worse.

Also you should probably tone down the antagonism or you are going to get modded.

I chose those words deliberately

not deliberately enough! your word choice was meaningless as your argument (which you have failed to argue) is based on strawmen. calling that out is fair, esepcially as its against the rules here

You can call me a wordcel, but I like using a variety of words

oh don't be mistaken, i wouldn't dignify you by calling you one unless you had actually demonstrated you could use those words correctly. using random words with no regard for their meaning isn't wordceling, it's just being pseudointellectual

Lol ok, I have explained exactly how I meant each of them, so I am sure you will have no trouble at all explaining exactly what I got wrong, right?

i did already

Break it down further for this pseudo-intellectual - it currently looks to me like you are saying I used the words incorrectly because you didn't like my argument.

Edit: Ok I just read @DaseIndustriesLtd post and I owe you an apology, I fucked up. I was wrong to call your behaviour insipid pedantry based on that. However even if I'm too dumb to use normal basic words that even children get right correctly, I still used the words insipid and pedantry correctly.

esepcially as its against the rules here

You wanna have a slapfight, fine, but don't do this wikipedia shit. Keep it personal.

Keep it personal.

No, please don't.

don't do this wikipedia shit.

you do realize this place does have such rules right? it isn't intended to be an echo chamber

I believe you have largely trespassed against the rules. I don't report you because I have an even more pronounced free speech philosophy than the mods. Even for people who try to call the mods to slap their slapfight opponent for them.

i'm reminding our friend of this forum's rules because this isn't intended to be a free speech forum... especially since he claims to dislike hypocrisy so much.

The #1 forum rule (it's right at the top of the sidebar) is Courtesy, and you're trespassing against pretty much all of them.

Stop being antagonistic, stop with the personal insults, and stop trying to start slapfights.

i'm pointing out the flaws in someone's argument, which amounts to "out-group bad"

the response i got was continued attempts to assert such and was clearly made in bad faith, as was the initial comment in the first place. it's low effort and is only inviting circlejerking, which i am going to push back against because... well there's no substance to the argument.

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