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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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It's no different from saying that you're going to make a lot of obnoxious bad faith arguments, but with a polite tone, and see how long it takes to piss everyone off. Yeah, you could do that. But I would hope that no one wants to.

I think you are being very optimistic. Especially when we are talking about nerds, and double especially when we are talking about contrarian nerds who talk about verboten topics, my expectation is that any available vulnerability will be exploited, the only question is when. We have indeed seen the "unfailingly polite but obviously bad faith" method used, and it won't be long before we see this method too - assuming we don't count firmamenti's post here, or various posts by others from the prior month that I can't prove but strongly suspect were gpted.

The thing is, my biggest issue with it is that while there will be trolls, I am more worried about our hammers finding a new class of nail - I don't think the mods will be nearly skittish enough. They are invariably going to make someone feel like absolute shit by calling their earnest early forays into writing 'like a motter' "obviously chatgpt". It's the worst of both worlds - gpters will just deny using it, and some innocent people are going to be confidently smeared as bots.

Also you absolutely can moderate for quality, of course you can, that's how media criticism started. We just haven't figured out how to do it while keeping in line with the other rules like niceness. Yet. I think we could if we tried.