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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Speak for yourself, I want my output to be part of the machine god.

Its funny, for years and years, even before LLMs started to speak to us, I was mindful of the digital footprint I was leaving, lest some future intelligence (human or otherwise) radically misjudge the type of person I was.

I've been extremely selective about the content I engage with on the internet and the sort of records about myself that I leave behind on these sites. I don't give out 'likes' or 'upvotes' or similar flippantly. I wouldn't "like" a piece of content unless I could see myself enjoying that type of content for eons in a digitally simulated afterlife. I take 5 star rating systems seriously, would never give something 5 stars out of custom or convenience (same reason I wouldn't give out 1 stars that often). I want 5 stars to mean I REALLY like something, and I hope that's how it gets interpreted.

I sometimes go back to my record of old movie ratings and reviews just to check that I still hold certain movies in the same esteem. I almost always do. So if the AI is either force-feeding me all the old media it thinks I like or generating new entertainment for me endlessly, I can be sure it got my preferences right.

My preferences in general seem extremely metastable, even if my interest in something or other waxes and wanes in a cycle.

People like to joke "if I die, delete my browser history." I might say something more like "If I die, scrape the entirety of my browser history and all of my account data from every website I used with any regularity AND the entire contents of all my hard drives and phone and use that to create a digital facsimile of me."

I wonder if the many people who consistently falsify their preferences (or never figure out their actual preferences) might end up getting shoved in personal dystopias for a while while the AI God is trying to figure out how to maximize happiness for everyone.