site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14960 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

AI DESTROYS THE HUGOS!!!

Okay, that's totally a clickbait title and not really accurate. But hey, it's not as high stakes as a potential nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, or Trump's tariffs, or even whether or not polyamory is ruining society, but it's my beat: nerdy sci-fi bullshit.

It's a year beginning with a 2, which means there is drama over this year's WorldCon.

What is WorldCon?

We're all nerds here, but I know not all of us are SFF nerds, so for @2rafa and the handful of others who'd never lower themselves to reading shit with elves, WorldCon is the annual science fiction convention, held in a different city every year, that awards the Hugos, at one time considered the most prestigious award in science fiction. The drama and controversies over past WorldCons and Hugo Awards have been enumerated here often; at this point, as my lede says, it's practically an annual tradition. I don't collect links but maybe if you ask @gattsuru nicely he'll post some of the past dirt.

Usually these controversies are something Culture War-related. The Hugos are widely perceived to have gone fully Woke, and I must admit that I am one of those heavy SF readers who not only no longer cares much about the Hugos, whereas at one time I would have at least checked out the latest Hugo winner, I now consider them to be almost an anti-recommendation.

Just to give you an idea of the state of the Hugos: it's been ten years since a man won the Hugo for best novel (Cixin Liu and his translator Ken Liu (no relation) for The Three-Body Problem in 2015), and most years since then have seen between 0 and 2 men even nominated. This year actually features three men on the ballot (including Adrian Tchaikovsky nominated twice)! I'm rooting for Tchaikovsky since I actually read his books but, well, John Scalzi is the last white guy to get a Hugo, in 2013 (for one of his worst novels, Redshirts).

So anyway, technically this year's drama is not (so far) about the Hugos themselves, but about WorldCon (which this year is being held in Seattle).

What did they do this time?

Short version: They used ChatGPT to vet WorlCon panelists. Several WorldCon committee members resigned in protest, and the list of authors and other program participants doing likewise is growing.

https://file770.com/seattle-worldcon-2025-hugo-administrators-and-wsfs-division-head-resign/

https://www.patreon.com/posts/128296070

https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/06/0139251/hugo-administrators-resign-in-wake-of-chatgpt-controversy

https://gizmodo.com/worldcon-2025-chatgpt-controversy-hugos-2000598351

Longer version: Reportedly there were as many as 1300 people applying to participate in various WorldCon programs this year: this would be book signings, readings, panels, workshops, etc. Obviously not everyone who wants to be on a panel can be, and WorldCon has to be selective about who it invites. The vetting is done by volunteers, and researching 1300 people must be pretty time consuming; apparently they had the bright idea of using ChatGPT do a search and summary of all prospective participants as a "first pass."

I assume they mostly want to weed out obvious crazies and literal Nazis and pedos, but given that WorldCon skews very woke nowadays, the vetting almost certainly includes looking for any "problematic" public statements or other transgressions in someone's background that might lead to a Cancellation or Drama.

Honestly, using an LLM to summarize and categorize your list of randos seems like a pretty good use of AI to me. Supposedly all final decisions were made by humans, but nonetheless, the concom is imploding.

If you're unaware, most artists and authors hate AI. This has also been covered extensively in past CW threads, but the stated reason for the disdain towards AI is that authors' and artists' work was "stolen" to train LLMs without compensation, but there is also a very real fear of being replaced.

This generalized antipathy has basically been extended to any use of AI at all, so even though the WorldCon committee is insisting there has been no use of generative AI, no final decisions made by AI, and that AI has nothing to do with any Hugo nominations or decisions, people are still Very Very Angry that it was used at all.

If you read the commentary, it's not just general AI-hate (though there is plenty of that), but also concern that the LLMs might have made Problematic Decisions. Obviously, people are bringing up hallucinations (what if ChatGPT made up a racist Twitter post?) and the possibility of false negatives, but, there is also concern about false positives. What if ChatGPT missed something Problematic? Again, supposedly humans were supposed to make the final decisions, but cynically, I think they're worried that ChatGPT might approve too many cishetwhitemales. Also much outrage at "Entering private data into an AI without permission" (i.e., typing someone's name into ChatGPT and asking it to do an Internet search).

This isn't as juicy as past WorldCon/Hugo dramas, but it's very Current Year. I cannot help finding it ironic that we're now at a place where science fiction fans are demanding that we ban AI tools.

I cannot help finding it ironic that we're now at a place where science fiction fans are demanding that we ban AI tools.

What's the biggest SF movie of the past couple of years? I think it's based on a classic SF novel (the winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards) in which the humanity banned AI tools. Or I could quote some Sister Miriam Godwinson at you. Or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Distrusting AI is a classic SF trope.

Sensibly so. Sci-Fi is written by humans for humans. Even when AIs are the subject, they need to be limited in what they are allowed to do so they do not usurp the spotlight from the human-on-human drama that humans actually want to read.

Perhaps not human-on-human exactly, but with the main characters having roughly human-level intelligence and probably also some human-like drives. A story about an ant from the perspective of that ant, which likely can not even tell the other ants from its colony apart, and might reasonable operate on "walk on trail. pick up food. walk towards colony." will probably not be very engaging for humans. And a story about an ASI written from the perspective of the ASI would be utterly incomprehensible, worse than if I picked up a book on a random mathematical field and began to read it in the middle.

So most SF AIs are actually human level, and sometimes little more than human characters wrapped in tinfoil. C3PO, Data from TNG, positronic robots in Asimov, Murderbot, HAL 9000, Marvin.

If SF authors concede that ASI is possible, they mostly make it verboten and thus irrelevant through some Butlerian Jihad (Dune).

The major exception which comes to mind are the Culture novels, which are told from the perspective of the human pets kept by the ASIs which form the Culture.

I thought positronic robots were superintelligent. They end up infiltrating positions of power and taking over the world out of human control

In most Asimov stories and novels, the robots appear to be human intelligence at best. The plot of most robot short stories revolves around humans debugging robots which try to follow the Three Laws with limited cognitive capacity.

There are two stories I recall where a non-robotic AI can be reasonably thought to be smarter than the average human, one is the galactic AC in "The Last Question", the other is another short story about an Earth-bound administrative AI which ends up plotting to reduce the power of individuals who are opposed to it. There is also a standard humanoid robot running for president, but that is hardly taking over the world.

The instance you think of are likely the robots in one of the later books from the space detective series, which actually links that series to Foundation. But the edge which the robots develop -- and which allows them invent the Zeroth Law -- is not superintelligence, but telepathy.

The events in the Foundation series strongly imply that the descendants of these robots are still not superintelligent. After all, they allow the Mule -- who is himself a telepath, but not superintelligent -- to escape their planet and take over the Foundation. They leave the cleanup to the Second Foundation.

R. Daneel Olivaw (Asimov's smartest robot) is superintelligent but not incomprehensibly so; imagine a synthesis of all the most intelligent humans in every field, add millennia of experience and perfect recall, and later on, telepathy. The Minds, by contrast, are basically godlike.

No spoiler tags? I know, I know, decades-old books, but you never know who's never read them but might like to.

Daneel gets his telepathy after only a few centuries of experience, but he still doesn't clearly exceed human intelligence at that point. In his initial appearance in Caves of Steel, he's occasionally outwitted by his clever-but-not-extraordinary human partner, then even hundreds of years later he's confident that he's failing to figure out certain mysteries that his now-deceased partner would have deciphered right away. He stays at a comprehensible level of intelligence throughout the books. Even many millennia later, when he's probably the smartest thing in the galaxy overall, he still ends up relying on a one-in-a-quadrillion human savant to solve specific applied math problems he can't.

I'd also say the Minds are godlike in the ancient "squabbling Greek pantheon" sense rather than the modern "omniscient + omnipotent" sense; they surely count as superintelligent, but e.g. in Excession they never manage to understand what the eponymous object is.

There were a very wide range of intelligence levels in Asimov's stories, even just restricting to his main series' "canon" stories. Many of his stories set "early" in his fictional future are basically puzzle stories where positronic robots are doing something stupid and humans are trying to understand why. Even in his "later" settings it was just the personal-servant style robots who had roughly human-level intelligence, and those were outnumbered by humanoid-but-dullard robots limited to agriculture or manufacturing uses.

More spoilery: He had a couple standalone/non-canon stories where it looked like his robots would end up later taking over the world in classical Unfriendly AI fashion, but in canon in his longest series the most intelligent of them takes over the galaxy in part to keep it mostly under human control, after he realizes how badly human culture seems to wither away in societies where humans started relying too heavily on robots.

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