4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Were you into horses, or have you ever empathised with girls who were? The sentiments always struck me as similar, and seemed to be at least slightly correlated.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Well then, don't mind if I henceforth associate you with the "Nice here, but have you been to Baden-Württemberg yet" stickers that I've been seeing on things ranging from Italian statues to Japanese vending machines instead ;)
(Honestly, it's a brilliant ad campaign that I'd never have expected a German institution would come up with. I've caught myself idly fantasizing like "this would be a great place to put one of those stickers" looking at inappropriate landmarks like concentration camps, public toilets and industrial ruins, which is quite the feat in terms of living rent-free in my head)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Well, to shift the frame a bit, does it matter? Of the people who read an article titled "Will an Egg a Day Keep the Doctor Away, or Will It Simply Raise Your Cholesterol?", how many do care about whether its contents are factual and well-sourced*, and how many just want the qualia of reading an article about something to while away their time on the mortal coil? Depending on what the product of human writers that the market actually demands is, yours might just be yet another case of writing off cars for being inadequate horses.
*and does it even make a difference if the source chain just bottoms out in some garbage p-hacked nutrition paper that will be forgotten in five years when some slop research lab decides to p-hack up a new paper on the topic? What fraction of writing anywhere is about something more than the qualia of writing and reading something like the thing it pretends to be? Perhaps straight up making up citations is just cutting out some layers of indirection in the con.
tl;dr: Rather than being more bullish on AI, I think you ought to be more bearish on humanity.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
Eh, if that post is the meat of the allegations, I would quite strongly lean towards it being a coincidence.
The evidence seems to boil down to:
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Alignment of gaps in posting with two big events in Ghislaine Maxwell's life. Just two events? Surely a person this public and active will have had more than two known events during which they could not have been on Reddit. Did the internet sleuths check for that? Why no mention? Seems like the potential for cherry-picking is great.
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The reddit user posted pro-pedophilia dogwhistles. Pedophilia absolutely mindkills normies, so it's not surprising they overindex on this (and preferring world models in which your enemies are a small number of individuals with many aliases is a curiously universal tendency: see the standard 4chan argument where all the disagreeing posts in a thread are insinuated to be by the same person, or more recently organised as a raid by some discord), but this in isolation is actually a fairy weak Bayesian signal considering that Reddit powermods are a famously degenerate bunch. Also, wasn't the narrative about Ghislaine Maxwell that she looked more like a case of someone who would (for whatever reason) do anything for Epstein, than like a proactive pedophile?
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The username.
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The reddit user stopped posting after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest. From what I understand, this happened well after the Reddit user started being dogpiled on the suspicion of being Ghislaine Maxwell; it is plausible enough that the Reddit user abandoned their account from the pressure (I imagine they were getting smothered in loads of hatemail, and there were probably some e-bloodhounds on the case who would have gotten to their personal email, phone number, address etc.).
Against this, we have:
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The low base probability.
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The extra low base probability that an active, put-together socialite would have the time and motivation to be a Reddit powermod. Again, Reddit mods are a famously low-human-capital bunch; is the amount of energy the job takes even compatible with normal functioning?
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The Reddit user, per the screenshots in your post, seems to have primarily posted tech and privacy activism news. This alone codes so heavily male that, if I saw it on some aggregator blog being linked from HN with a female name attached, I would pull the "I bet this person is a transwoman" card. (Fun game to play with tech blogs.) Am I supposed to believe that, on top of being a rich socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell also was a one-in-a-million unicorn nerd girl with male self-actualization patterns who is into privacy and free speech rights?
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All the other evidence that one would expect to be found under such a level of scrutiny but is conspicuously absent. Did the Reddit user ever insinuate insider knowledge of finance or high society, which Maxwell would have had? Reddit's status economy places a high value on "I have this uncle who has real insider information so let me explain to you plebs". Would the powermod have foregone this opportunity? What about the absolute standard things OSINTers do such as trying to infer time zones from posting patterns? Are we to believe that Maxwell had perfect opsec about this while being so conspicuously trash about other things?
In the end, "Epstein's manic pixie also secretly controlled Reddit and used it to spread hypnotic pedo propaganda" seems too much like the sort of appealing but unrealistic narrative that people with main character syndrome would fall for (like, "everyone's political archenemy once slighted me by deleting my edgy post on /r/offmychest; this is personal"), plus the QAnon tendency of yearning for the legible tropes of cartoon villains, and then confirmation bias would do the rest.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
Huh, colour me surprised, this is really not quite who I headcanoned you as. I have this one German friend who is a pretty brilliant mathematician, but has surely the rock bottom lowest agreeableness of all people I have encountered, and improbably hails from a family of Bavarian alpha farmers (the sort that has owned a farmstead covering a hill overlooking some tiny village in the general area of Regensburg for generations, used to employ the local teens as farmhands and sponsors the local Schützengemeinschaft). His interactions with his father (witnessed when they were on the phone and also once the father came to help him move) always amounted to 30-minute screaming matches in straight dialect (about anything ranging from "clean your room and get a real job" to "your car is trash and you were never there for the family"), while to me the father would basically only communicate in grunts and pregnant glances that say "thanks for putting up with my loser son". Maybe I went too far free-associating on your handle, but I imagined those would be approximately your people :p
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
... fwiw I posted my original comment and then went off and curled up in a ball shaking because it was a high stress experience for me posting it, but at least the response hasn't been a bunch of jeering so hey forcing myself to not be conflict avoidant has so far paid off.
Sorry to do something that may register as injecting more fresh conflict into a situation that is already stressful for you from the amount of conflict, but unfortunately by the nature of the thing there is almost no way to bring it up in a situation that is not like this. I think that women making remarks like this is actually a big irritant to mixed spaces (and tends to breed resentment even when people are socialised to be accommodating on the surface). As is often said, men's capacity for physical violence is mirrored by women's capacity for social violence (that is, the threat of exclusion, suspension of reciprocity, coordinated punishment...), and one of the ways in which the latter is exercised are such overt displays of discombobulated emotion (perhaps signalling something like "I feel endangered to the point I can no longer maintain the default façades of social interaction, this is an emergency, someone please help"), which trigger bystanders' defensive instincts and tend to override System-2 social rules about fairness and equality that are otherwise in place.
Once, almost half a lifetime ago now, I had a very long and emotional (but not hostile) argument with my then-SO where at one point out of frustration I punctuated a sentence by slamming my fist into the mattress I was leaning on (the arrangement was such that she was reclining on the bed, and I was sitting on the floor leaning against it with one arm, fairly close to her). I had zero violent intent towards her or the object that received the blow in doing that - it felt really more like a physiological reaction, no different from when you are a little kid and got hurt and can't stop crying - and there was little in the topic of the conversation that should suggest otherwise. Yet, when I did this, she froze and stared at me with the most genuine expression of fear I've ever seen from anyone in the flesh for a few seconds, to then dissolve into a frantic run-on sentence to the effect of "oh my god, I did not know you were like that, this is not okay" which was completely out of line with her usual composed character and in turn left me horrified and impotently trying to explain myself. We talked it out in the end; the relationship did not last anyway; but that day I learned one important lesson about how what an action means to me can be different from the effect it has on others.
It is quite likely that many men have an experience like this at some point in their lifetime, which teaches them to be judicious about even accidentally flaunting their capacity for physical violence, though often it is embarrassing and private and not a thing they will proudly talk about. I wish more women could have similar experiences about their capacity for social violence - as I see it, the casually dropped "and then I curled up in a ball shaking" is really the feminine counterpart to punching the drywall and leaving a hole. The latter can never not send the message that this could have been your face, and likewise the former can never not send the message that the sentence could have been extended with "...because of you, and let's see what the people around you have to say about that" (which often needn't even be said out loud).
Eh. That's a statement that would not be so easy to prove - examples of the sort of slippery slopes that are enabled by encouraging the sharing of such "human reactions", and what sort of communities form at their bottom, abound (as the advantage gained by exhibiting the "reactions" is so strong that nobody is going to leave that $5 on the ground in the long run), while if discouraging it is in fact a bad thing, this badness must be rather subtle.
I didn't suggest that it's a "nuclear bomb" in the sense of one instance of it being immediately massively destructive (though it certainly can be; in the phpBB era, I have once seen a fairly major community ripped apart by what was, impressively enough, one sharing of such a "human reaction" by a guy's sockpuppet account LARPing as a Japanese half-sister (a critical mass of people including staff really wanted to believe).)
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