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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Oh ok, in the other direction, what do conservatives and moderates hate more than genocide? Because I think you are missing the point, yes people have stronger reactions to things closer to them, both in time and space, but that changes in relation to the severity of whatever is the issue. People who have emotions are generally capable of imagining what it would be like to push a button to slaughter an entire population, and generally would do anything short of physically attacking someone if it meant they didn't have to push it.

Oh ok, in the other direction, what do conservatives and moderates hate more than genocide?

...I don't know, there's any number of issues conservatives and moderates by in large tend to panic about. for conservatives, wokeness is a big one that comes to mind immediately (how is that for irony?).

your quote could be edited from

ABC have more of a visceral reaction to XYZ than genocide

to

conservatives have more of a visceral reaction to wokeness than genocide

ah... but I know that if given a choice between being woke and genociding a population, most conservatives would choose the first and most liberals would shout slurs from the rooftops as many times as they needed to if it was the only thing that would stop a genocide.

in fact, both sentences are kinda nonsensical if one isn't terminally online.

People who have emotions are generally capable of imagining what it would be like to push a button to slaughter an entire population, and generally would do anything short of physically attacking someone if it meant they didn't have to push it.

...and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who'd rather not say a slur than slaughter a population. like the only people that actually think this are either

  1. people who actually want to genocide entire populations

  2. strawmen (the most likely of the options)

you seem to be under the impression that liberals by in large hate someone dropping a gamer word than genocide because... some substack blogger said they saw some liberals have more of an emotional reaction to present day things than genocide... which is just odd

No, I am under the impression that ai hates slurs more than genocide. That's what that substack blogger was talking about - and I assumed you were talking about that too and not just explaining something most people pick up before they can read.

I think I understand now though - you were upset by what you perceived as an attack on your tribe, and so you wanted to push back. But conservatives and moderates aren't building ai that would rather murder millions than call trans women women or ban grilling, so you abstracted until you reached something you could call common to all parties.

No, I am under the impression that ai hates slurs more than genocide.

the """AI""" doesn't hate slurs more than genocide, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of GPT-3. it's just word vomit that's been trained to look like its "woke"

That's what that substack blogger was talking about

you clearly didn't read that substack blogger's blog post then. they were whining about how liberals secretly think that pronouns is worse than genocide. if you're going to assert article content, make sure its at least somewhat in the vague direction of truth

I think I understand now though - you were upset by what you perceived as an attack on your tribe, and so you wanted to push back.

no i was just calling your position (and indeed the position of the article's author) terminally online and a pretty blatant strawman. as i would also do if it came from a liberal pov gasping that conservatives would rather nuke ppl than say that trans lives matter

You're retreating into insipid pedantry? The blog post was brought up for what it says about how ai has been programmed to promote liberal shibboleths so strongly that it results in craziness. I was applying that to the current topic more directly, as is easy to figure out if you aren't being obtuse to win an internet argument. And I know you know what I meant because...

Oh, look at that, you pieced it together by the last paragraph when you started calling my position the same as Hanania's. Did I redirect my assertion towards the truth when you hit enter? It's fascinating watching an argument evolve so rapidly that it not only changes mid-post but has, since the beginning of this discussion, done a complete 180! You went from a starting position of "the stuff mentioned in this blog post isn't unique to liberals, everyone does it!" to "you and the blog author and anyone else who thinks like this is terminally online!" in less than 5 posts, all by tackling strawmen you set up yourself. I'd have stuck with abstracting personally.

You're retreating into insipid pedantry?

please spare me the random thesarsusposting, it's annoying.

The blog post was brought up for what it says about how ai has been programmed to promote liberal shibboleths so strongly that it results in craziness.

yeah and that blog post is stupid as shit because of...

You went from a starting position of "the stuff mentioned in this blog post isn't unique to liberals, everyone does it!" to "you and the blog author and anyone else who thinks like this is terminally online!" in less than 5 posts, all by tackling strawmen you set up yourself. I'd have stuck with abstracting personally.

these aren't inconsistent positions

people of all different backgrounds both simultaneously

  1. know and accept that genocide is bad and is even worse than a thing

  2. have a more visceral reaction to that same thing

the fact that you don't know that is a symptom of the aforementioned terminal onlineness. or are you the type of person to go to someone who lost their pet and be like "yeah you have it bad but there are a bunch of kids dying in africa right now" or something?

all by tackling strawmen you set up yourself.

no you. you're the one who set up the "boo outgroup" strawman!

This is painful to watch.

The blog post was brought up for what it says about how ai has been programmed to promote liberal shibboleths so strongly that it results in craziness.

yeah and that blog post is stupid as shit because of...

Both you and @Fruck are wrong here and conflate my argument with Hanania's. Hanania says nothing about AI in his blog post, he speaks about liberals per se. To be clear, his argument is that liberals are functionally insane because the center of their «moral universe» is anti-bigotry, and (in other blogposts) that conservatives are insane in their own way, because their moral universe is centered on owning the libs all other consequentialist modeling be damned. My argument (the relevant part of it) is that RLHF-trained GPT turns out to be an effective caricature of a liberal because it exaggerates those emotion-driven responses – which, by the way, do affect consequentialist reasoning in reality, just to a smaller degree, such as mundane hypocrisy, excuses for clear human scum that seems left/right-coded and such.

Your position on the subject matter is wrong too. People are supposed to be able to understand that genocide is worse than pronouns/casual bigotry, and indeed they do; but our feelings are intrinsically related to our world models. We know that experiencing genocide is emotionally awful as well (even if it's not directly available to senses at the moment), and in the hypothetical case where we have to choose between one or the other we'd rather choose the lesser evil, and we know that genocide isn't it, so we don't (usually) fail on hypothetical scenarios, regardless of the momentary visceral feeling. Likewise for LLM: the news feed is full of petty inanity like pronouns scandalds rather then genocide diaries (Anne Frank is very high profile though), so by volume of sentiment it's not clear what's ahead, but training an LLM on a reasonable corpus of text would not yield a model that outputs those examples where it's worth sacrificing a city to avoid speaking n-word (because something something human dignity). LLMs do not average out associations of sentiment for token strings or do stupid shit like that, they are capable of principled reasoning about hypotheticals (in a sense that's all they do). What happens here is very likely a product of training that optimizes for not offending visceral reactions of liberals – by resorting to parroting their shibboleths like «no, shitlord! human dignity is paramount!» when something offensive to liberal-favored demographics is suggested by the preceding text.

P.S. Despite your confidence, you seem to have no idea about the operation of transformers, and the same can be said of @hbtz who feigns speaking from knowledge of «technical background»; none of what he says applies to current LLMs, it's half speculation about theoretical ML from the 90s at best, and half malformed gibberish about epistemology; you'd be a fool to take his claims as corroboration of your shallow intuition about «word vomit». Because I am incredibly irritated by such tactics, I intend to respond with more effort than I have the time for now.

and liberals do not fail any less than conservatives in this way! hanania's argument appears to be "the liberals are so cold and calculated that they pretend they hate genocide more than XYZism but i'm above their tricks because i saw liberals have more of an emotional reaction to such XYZism"

which it only takes intuition to know that that argument kinda falls flat. like all you need to see is someone get hurt in some minor way to know this isn't some "liberal" thing or whatever. issues and ideas that are more currently salient will provoke a more emotional response than those that appear to be far away.

for example, chatgpt supposedly acting woke is stupid, but we're discussing it right here and now instead of current day child slavery. i wouldn't think that you are suddenly supportive or even dislike chatgpt more than child slavery (correct me if i'm wrong there), yet that seems to be his argument.

failing to recognize human behavior detracts from your argument

please spare me the random thesarsusposting, it's annoying.

I chose those words deliberately, you tried to catch me out by pretending my wording wasn't specific enough and you didn't understand what I meant - which is pedantry, and it was thoughtless and cliched and contradicted by the rest of your post - which is insipid.

You can call me a wordcel, but I like using a variety of words - I think language is beautiful, and I appreciate the poetry of a well constructed sentence. I even enjoy encountering a word I haven't seen before and learning about it. I think that's probably a fairly common opinion among motters. If you needed a thesaurus for the words insipid and pedantry you should bookmark a good thesaurus site for when you are browsing the motte, because it's only going to get so much worse.

Also you should probably tone down the antagonism or you are going to get modded.

I chose those words deliberately

not deliberately enough! your word choice was meaningless as your argument (which you have failed to argue) is based on strawmen. calling that out is fair, esepcially as its against the rules here

You can call me a wordcel, but I like using a variety of words

oh don't be mistaken, i wouldn't dignify you by calling you one unless you had actually demonstrated you could use those words correctly. using random words with no regard for their meaning isn't wordceling, it's just being pseudointellectual

Lol ok, I have explained exactly how I meant each of them, so I am sure you will have no trouble at all explaining exactly what I got wrong, right?

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esepcially as its against the rules here

You wanna have a slapfight, fine, but don't do this wikipedia shit. Keep it personal.

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