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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34531 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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New ACX post: Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse, discuss!

I'll begin: this quote from philosophybear (what's his account here btw?):

The capacity of the wealthy to command vast armies of bots (GPU’s to run machine learning are expensive) will further erode what “democracy” there is on the internet. If fee structures are bought in like I described to keep bots out, that will make the internet less democratic too. My advice is to log off and start forming connections and organizations in real life now.

... made my inner Curtis Yarvin giggle hysterically. Observe the uncanny uniformity of ideological positions on pretty much all social issues in most large newspapers, most top universities, most large corporations. The only deviations are of the "we need fifty Stalins" kind (until they become the norm eventually). Can you imagine a Harvard professor, a New York Times editor, and the Raytheon PR department having a substantial disagreement on whether we need more trans drone pilots? I can't.

And it took people the possibility of bots faking a pale shadow of such consensus to start worrying that maybe democracy is susceptible to being secretly not the rule of the people but the rule of whoever tells the people what to believe, and the unbelievable synopticity of what we are told to believe means that this rule is being actively exercised?

Later Scott sort of touches on this a bit quoting a comment that said:

On the 'disinformation vs. establishment bot' question, check out bots interacting with climate change: 83.1% of bot tweets support activism, 16.9% skepticism according to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674927821001490 .

The abstract ends with:

Based on the above findings, we suggest cultivating individuals’ media literacy in terms of distinguishing malicious social bots as a potential solution to deal with social bot skeptics disguised as humans, as well as making use of benign social bots for science popularization.

Observe the uncanny uniformity of ideological positions on pretty much all social issues in most large newspapers, most top universities, most large corporations.

I've loved Peter Thiel's most recent line on this: "What's the opposite of diversity? University."

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