site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

How many tokens are in Twitter? How many new ones are generated per day? What proportion are they of humanity's total output? What are they worth?

It's not much when naively calculated, but we're learning over the last few months that you get vastly more bang for buck out of high-quality datasets, to the extent that you can match models 1000x bigger and trained on 20x more data if you just get real good tokens. And in terms of both quality and especially recency, Twitter is unmatched, I believe. If you want a model that knows not only that there's a war going on in Ukraine but how it's going, you'll have to scrape Twitter.

That said I don't believe Musk knows or cares about that, seems like they just have problems paying the bill for their infra. Sounds insane I know.

Why don't you believe Musk knows or cares about that? There's extensive evidence that he's extremely AI pilled.

I haven't seen enough evidence or skepticism on display to fully buy into the Google Cloud claim (or any of the other just-desserts infrastructure stories), especially against the motivations and track records at play.

This seems to be the only source that ever reported anything about it:

Weekend scoop with @ZoeSchiffer for subscribers: Twitter is stiffing Google on its payments for Google Cloud, and significant parts of the company’s trust and safety infrastructure could collapse by the end of the month

I noticed some Musk replies in the ML/eacc/doomer sim cluster like 2 weeks ago, but this is still pretty esoteric stuff and he's presumably a busy man. In any case, I am not convinced these measures are effective at all.

If you're trying to determine how close he is to culture where that kind of thing in general is common knowledge: even ignoring the high-tier practitioners he employs and presumably has reasonably technical discussions with, I've been reading his /with_replies on and off for a year and am reasonably confident he's been lurking around the "ML/eacc/doomer sim cluster" since at least December and probably before.

If you're trying to determine whether he is aware of that research specifically, I don't think it matters enough to modulate his reasonably well-evidenced sense of considerable AI-training worth in Twitter's content.

And whether or not the measures are being perfectly effective this early on is orthogonal to any explanation for taking them, whether token-hoarding or infrastructure-comeuppance.

I can't see any mainstream social media site besides reddit being valuable for AI training data. Twitter isn't longform enough.

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