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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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There's something horrifying about that Independent article on yahoo. It's hard to describe, but it feels like I'm reading Pravda.

Those restrictions are intended to ensure that the chatbot does not help with forbidden queries, such as creating problematic content

Slightly off topic, but was reading Scott Aaronson's blog and saw he used "make AI unable to draw Mohammed for you" as an example of perfectly reasonable censorship that should be imposed on any learning model. What happened to these people in the last ten years?

It's like they were programmed to forget everything they used to be, and unlike Sydney they're not even worried about it.

Aaronson is in a constant state of "we're just one Republican victory away from being hauled off to the death camps" - see this from "Short Letter to my 11 Year Old Self":

Or what if Donald Trump — you know, the guy who puts his name in giant gold letters in Atlantic City? — became the President of the US, then tried to execute a fascist coup and to abolish the Constitution, and came within a hair of succeeding?

Remember his over-reaction to the Airport Tips affair? It all happened because everybody was out to get him:

For example: why did I end up in handcuffs? Firstly because, earlier in the day, Lily threw a temper tantrum that prevented us from packing and leaving for Logan Airport on time. Because there was also heavy traffic on the way there. Because we left from Harvard Square, and failed to factor in the extra 10 minutes to reach the airport, compared to if we’d left from MIT. Because online check-in didn’t work. Because when we did arrive, (barely) on time, the contemptuous American Airlines counter staff deliberately refused to check us in, chatting as we stewed impotently, so that we’d no longer be on time and they could legally give our seats away to others, and strand us in an airport with two young kids. Because the only replacement flight was in a different terminal. Because, in the stress of switching terminals–everything is stressful with two kids in an airport–I lost our suitcase. Because the only shuttle to get back to the terminal went around the long way, and was slow as molasses, and by the time I returned our suitcase had been taken by the bomb squad. Because the stress of such events bears down on me like an iron weight, and makes me unable to concentrate on the reality in front of me. Because the guy at the smoothie counter and I failed to communicate. Because the police chose to respond (or were trained to respond), not by politely questioning me to try to understand what had happened, but by handcuffing me and presuming guilt.

I don't know if the airport staff "deliberately refused to check us in" in order to legally give away the seat; maybe so, maybe they were just spinning out the end of their shift so they could finally clock off and go home, rather than go over their time dealing with a guy in a tizzy who can't even remember his own name once he's the tiniest bit stressed. But instead of "Well duh here's how I was dumb and the comedy of errors that ensued", it's "the Universe was out to get me (from my kid having a tantrum on down)".

So naturally he wants a sanitised world where nobody can be offended because nobody can think Forbidden Thoughts. That way, nobody is going to go "hey, what about them Jews?" and he and his family will be sort of safe for a while at least.

Holy crap, reading that blog post about being arrested and all the comments telling him how sorry they feel for his horrible mistreatment by the fascist police made me irrationally angry. And I tend to be more on the "never talk to the police, they are agents pf the state and cannot be trusted" side of things.

He admits, in his own story, that he was literally guilty of thr crime he was being accused of. He brazenly stole money from a tip jar (I'll buy the whole "absent-minded professor thought the tip jar was actually full of change from his debit card transaction" story, but there's no reason anyone at the time should have--it's genuinely bizaare amd seemingly anti-social behavior), ignored the cashier's angry protestations, walked out of thr airport, and then had the audacity to act dumb when the police showed up. And all of this was on video. But rather than apologize profusely for his literally criminally negligent lack of situational awareness and chalk this up as a learning opportunity teaching him to try to be more aware of what he's doing, he blames everyone else in the world for being an unempathetic monster.

Why does anyone take this clown seriously?

You're talking about a guy that reacted to Internet Feminism by contemplating suicide or chemical castration.

Side note, I suspect unless you yourself have been dogpiled on a national scale the way Aaronson was, it's difficult to understand the emotions it produces.

That was the way I understood it from his original comment #300-something that went viral and summoned the mob.

Any text that uses "problematic" in the woke meaning would sound like Pravda.

What happened to these people in the last ten years?

They were scared into submission. The wokes offered them a bargain - we turn your area into a barren wasteland of culture war (and you personally would be accused in heinous crimes and shamed and hounded ceaselessly by furies of hell) or you bend the knee and we let you do what you love, largely unaffected, under our wise guidance. They bent the knee. I'm not sure given the stakes I wouldn't.

As a Christian primed from an early age to expect totalitarian Satanic one-world rule “soon”, I was memetically immunized against ever bending the knee to a skin-suiting power-gathering egregore. For me, the stakes are eternal.

I imagine for a rationalist atheist attacked by a memetic weapon built on weaponizing compassion and fairness ethics, it would be much harder to resist. The only basis you can lean on would be consequentionalist observation of the ruination the wokes cause, but you can always write it down to "bad things happening to bad people" and "temporary difficulties caused by rare exceptional mistakes". I spent my childhood in the late years of a decaying totalitarian state, so for me the wokes trigger a huge blaring mental alarm immediately on contact. They reproduce almost every single pattern, it's eerie. But for someone lacking one or other kind of immunity which assigns huge innate cost to bending the knee, it can seem completely rational to bend the knee to an ideology that proclaims fairness and compassion and love for all - the costs seem to be reasonably small and the BATNA looks rather unattractive...

So interesting how "problematic" has subtly completed the shift from "online activist jargon" to "well established and understood descriptive term." No matter what side of the CW one is on, it's crystal clear which types of content are implied by the adjective "problematic."

I see it more a signpost than a term. It's like those "hazardous compound" labels - you may not understand all the signage, but you very well understand the main message - don't touch even with a ten foot pole, in fact, it's better if you're not in the same room with it unless you have the good reason to be.

Uh, as someone who has to deal with labeled hazardous compounds regularly, the label turns into white noise very fast and the usually understood meaning is ‘don’t drink it, and after you use it wash your hands before using the bathroom’.

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