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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Recently I've had a related observation while browsing a different website, which has an amount of bots and shills. But interestingly people seem to really despise it if you call a bot a bot, or a shill a shill. They might defend some obvious AI slop by saying "it's not a crime to write well" or "many people use em-dashes legitimately" or even just call you an idiot with no further explanation. All humanly written posts, all defending an obvious bot with vigor. I saw a similar thing on a local Facebook group, where an obvious paid shill posted a wall of text clearly written by ChatGPT, yet everybody just ate it up. It seems like when you bring up concerns, you end up as the bad guy for disturbing the peace, while the bot is the good guy because it's following the right conventions.
I remember a previous discussion about non-autistic vs autistic communication, where autistic communication is centered around an exchange of facts, while the core of non-autistic communication is emotional signalling. It seems that that this phenomenon extends to bad actors insofar as they can provide the right emotional cues to be accepted. Or at least people feel that it's not a disqualifying factor from engaging at face value. Meanwhile I know a shill is paid to say anything necessary in order to spread his message, and a bot is just a program with no emotions or sense of true or false.
But I think this touches on the idea of arguments as soldiers. To many people, it likely doesn't matter what the facts are, just the emotional message that they encode. And while debunkings exist, the practice they just act as another soldier from the other side knocking on the door.
Looping back into current events, it seems like there's little incentive for the administration not to bend the truth. The enemy was already deploying their rapid response arguments with zero regard for the truth, saying that a boneheaded ice agent just executed an innocent bystander on the street in cold blood. What good does it do to say "The agent made a split second judgement thinking he was grabbing a gun, which turned out to be the wrong call" (the truth) versus "an armed and violent individual resisted arrest and was shot while police were trying to disarm him" (not technically a lie). Twitter autists might try to go over the frame by frame, but for everyone else they're gonna live the lie.
To be fair, I don't think most people's AI-dar is well-calibrated in either direction.
I recently had the frustrating experience of being accused of using AI to write some posts on Reddit, even though I did not use AI. The OP blocked me, and I learned first-hand how annoying Reddit's implementation of block is, because I kept getting notifications when people replied to my posts in the OP's thread, but when I clicked the notifications Reddit pretended the thread didn't exist. I had to log out to see that the thread wasn't, in fact, broken.
I didn't even get the chance to defend myself regarding the supposed AI usage. The OP just decided I was using AI after a few posts (their evidence was that I supposedly wrote in "ridiculously long paragraphs" and had posted in AI subs in the past), and then blocked me, effectively ceding the whole discussion to the other side of the argument in that thread.
Obviously, a false positive like this isn't the end of the world, but it will be annoying going forward if everyone's good faith efforts to argue an unpopular opinion on Reddit somewhere gets them accused of AI usage and blocked.
The way they implemented blocking is completely idiotic. The one thing you are still able to do is edit your own posts in the thread and add something like "lol this loser blocked me" which helps a bit at least.
More options
Context Copy link
False AI accusations are awful and I almost feel like they follow the same dynamic. When you're the one posting: "hey that's actually not ai" you'll be attacked just as much.
It seems like whether or not an account is a bot barely matters, it's only what side it's on that matters to the masses. Posting some wrongthink - insult and the account as much you want and people will love you. Posting the approved message - any criticism will draw hate.
In Nice Facebook Group people may be more genuinely unsettled by factual explanations in a that's our preferred style of bot way. On reddit, bot or AI accusations are regularly and routinely used to derail discussion. A portion of it is bots, trolls, or propagandists of intent, but then a greater number are people who have observed this and get the same use out of the technique-- a handy way to route around any type of discussion. "Echo chamber" is an accurate description of this phenomena despite being so popular to be meaningless. Bots are bad>bots say bad>you say bad>you're a bad bot.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not sure which site you're vaguebooking about, but my experience on reddit is that most of the time someone gets called a bot or a shill, the accused is really an actual human who simply dared to deviate 0.01% from hivemind-approved window of opinions. I know this because I'm often the target of such accusations (I am neither a bot nor a shill), and because I've reviewed the comment history of many of those people who get dismissed this way, and rarely are there any obvious signs of them being anything but a human being with an organic opinion.
To be clear, there are bots on reddit, but they mostly seem to be karma farming, and not making detailed political arguments. They will typically (re)post generic oneliners on cat pictures and the like. And there are shills, like Kamala Harris reddit astro-turfing campaign, but it's not even clear they are paid, and rather just act based on their own righteousness.
So how do I know you're not doing the same thing? Dismissing people whose views you disagree with as being paid for or generated by a LLM? In particular, when you say:
Can you clarify how you determined that this person was getting paid to post that content? Did you see their paycheck?
And yes, people sometimes use ChatGPT to write arguments for them. I find that super obnoxious too, but mostly those are just losers who are too lazy or stupid to defend their own views. They're despicable, but they're not bots and they're not shills; they're just lazy morons.
But what I hate even more than those morons is the circlejerkers who avoid engaging in discussion and instead just label every outsider as a “bot” or “shill”, encouraging the rest to downvote rather than engage with their arguments intellectually. How do I know you aren't doing exactly that which I most despise?
That is a good point, but on the other hand I have seen 'reviews' left on websites, social media, and elsewhere which are full 5 star super enthusiasm over how great the product/service/movie/crawling abomination from the abyss is, where everyone else is giving much lower or even negative reviews, and where I have sampled the product/abomination myself and know it is not as good as claimed.
That's either a bot or someone being paid (pennies) to leave FIFTEEN THUMBS UP!!!! reviews to push the abomination up the SEO rankings. It's especially noticeable when you read a string of reviews all phrased almost identically, but even for individual cases you don't have to see the pay check to suspect the quality of the egg being laid, as it were.
Sure, I acknowledge that bots/shills exist; my point is that people are really bad at identifying them, and more likely to throw “bot” or “shill” out as insults or ways to dismiss an opponent, with little to no regard for the truth.
For product reviews, there is a clear incentive for the seller to prop up their listing with fake reviews, while legitimately happy customers often have little incentive to leave a review: if you buy a ream of printer paper, a set of kitchen towels or a box of pencils, how excited can you possibly be about your purchase? If the product is subpar, I could imagine leaving a negative review, as a form of revenge and a warning to others (I've done that myself). But for mundane products that basically meet expectations, you'd have to be exceedingly bored to leave a detailed 5 star review praising the subtle off-white coloring and the tasteful thickness of a sheet of printer paper. Consequently, I can imagine for those type of products, a relatively high fraction of rave reviews were left by shills.
For political discussions, the opposite is true. Lots of people like to waste their time online arguing about stuff that even politicians don't care that much about. These people are real humans. Take the presidential election, for example, where it was shown that Harris hired people (it's not clear if they were paid) to post positive stories on reddit in an attempt to generate buzz/get people to show up at the polls. Even knowing that that was a thing, I believe the majority of Harris supporters on reddit were genuine believers, not (un)paid shills.
This is based on the observation that reddit has millions of leftist users who would support Harris by default, versus only a handful of shills. That means the prior probability of any Harris-supporter being a paid shill is just very low, and I definitely wouldn't feel confident about identifying the shills. That can either mean I'm a terrible judge of character, or the people who confidently claim they can sniff out shills are just overconfident; the latter seems more plausible to me.
To give an example I saw today on reddit: this (re)post about Shell (the oil company) emitting orders of magnitude more CO2 than an average person has many people crying “shill”:
Someone reasonably replies to the last comment:
And yeah, I agree. These are just normal people deviating from the “oil company bad—upvotes to the left” playbook. I tried looking at the history of some of the top commenters and they seemed to have normal histories with no clear indication of paid shilling. That doesn't prove they aren't shilling, of course, but given that none of the shill-accusers give evidence to support their beliefs, I conclude that they were making those accussations baselessly.
I've seen this so many times now that I've come to believe that on reddit and spaces like it, words like “bot” and “shill” aren't used to identify actual bots or actual shills, but they are terms used to dismiss real people who express unwelcome opinions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My experience has been the exact opposite. The calls are about obvious giveaways in how the accused comments / writes the post and how all their replies are the exact same non-committal bullshit that LLMs are prone to generating.
More options
Context Copy link
It sounded like hacker news to me, but I imagine other places could have the same behavior.
More options
Context Copy link
See this is exactly what I'm talking about. Add "you're just dismissing someone you don't agree with" and "how do I know you can tell AI from human" to the list of insults people will throw at you when you call a bot a bot.
Now maaaybe you might have a point that normies can't tell me from those other people you hate. But they way your post is written it seems like you're accusing me of being a retard.
(to be clear, none of the stuff I mentioned is political at all.)
Please just answer the question. What method did you use to determine that the obvious paid shill was obviously paid to shill? That should be easy to answer since it was so obvious, right?
edit: instead of answering, phailyoor chose to block me. Cowardly behavior, that all but proves he has no reasonable answer, and my suspicions were correct all along.
You're not beating the allegations if you're not able to field any argument why I should treat you differently than the majority of people who accuse others of being bots and shills without evidence.
Your argument sounds indistinguishable from: “People seem to really despise you when you call a witch a witch. Whenever I call a woman a witch, there are people defending her by saying ‘that's just a woman with a slightly crooked nose’ when she's obviously the bride of Satan.”
Given that I know that most people who call women witches are full of shit, I'm not inclined to believe the women that you called witches were in fact witches, unless you can give me a solid argument why your ability to identify witches is so much more accurate than that of other witch hunters. And you can't just say “Yeah those other witch hunters were phonies, but I'm the real deal, trust me okay!” because that's what all those other witch hunters would say too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, this is a good point. It's a strange recurrent piece of internet psychology that people have a real aversion to believing in organic disagreement. Normie comment sections are replete with improbable accusations of Russian or Chinese payrolling; and even 4chan has traditionally conducted arguments by asserting that all disagreeing posts are made by a single person (even when this is at odds with post cooldown timers) or more recently that they are organised by a Discord cabal targeting the thread. Maybe this is the modus tollens of the democratic feeling that numbers and diversity make right: if you are convinced a view is illegitimate, you conclude that it can't be espoused by a large and diverse set of people.
The problem is this: On the Internet, we don’t know if it’s organic disagreement or people in troll farms. Indeed, a lot of the really controversial stuff posted on X (Twitter) we know for a fact comes from a troll farm (a lot of that content trying to go viral is posted from India, Nigeria, or Southeast Asia, all three places with a lot of troll farms), since X lets us know the country someone posts from.
So, yes, it’s sometimes organic disagreement, but it’s sometimes troll farms.
It makes a lot more economical sense that troll farms would be active on a maximum-reach platform like Twitter, and is a lot more plausible that they would repost (possibly with minor alterations) shovel-loads of cookie-cutter "viral" content, than the idea that they would produce bespoke comments and engage with people in a complex way that requires solid command of English in comment sections and niche forums. However, these accusations are almost always flung in "close quarters" by people who are exasperated that someone specifically disagreed with something they said, not at faceless Twitter accounts retweeting Indian link farm pages into the void.
OK, let’s look at an example of something posted on X from a troll farm in Africa:
https://archive.ph/20260127123745/https://x.com/Chizitere_xyz/status/2015879947659645361
(I blocked them for being in a troll farm, and I could tell it was troll farm content just by looking at it)
Your impression?
Edit: Another troll farm post
https://archive.ph/20260128064238/https://x.com/meishato/status/2016321283693412834
(The notion that women do all of the domestic labor in partnerships is a myth; see this article and if you think IfStudies are too biased, this study shows that men do more work in partnerships when we take in to account paid labor)
Edit: The troll farms also post hot take replies to get engagement. See https://archive.ph/20260130134610/https://x.com/ohreallly170464/status/2016975167738491090
Yes, the poster is troll and, regardless whether he is made of flesh or bytes, he is effective troll because he effectively calls out internal contradictions in Current Year(TM) official world wiew.
"You say you believe in God. Word of God is clear that graven images are very, very bad. Why are churches full of golden and bejeweled statues and icons?"
"SHUT UP THIS TROLL!"
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, these are both Xwitter posts shouting copypasta into the void? The point I was making is that this sort of troll farm activity is expected and sensible; the person nitpicking your post in some local newspaper comment section being from a troll farm is not. However, the latter is the setting in which people like throwing around bot/troll farm accusations the most.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
On the object level (or is it the meta level?) I think people have not yet developed antibodies for bots/shills, especially bots. There's a kind of rigid commitment to free speech, too – «so what if he speaks weird?! It's the content that matters!», because people legitimately haven't internalized the astronomically high prior for the provenance of emdash slop, pointing out bots looks like paranoia. AI is too cheap and too good, we are not updating fast enough. There must be some high profile case to drive the point home.
There also is opportunistic support for voices in agreement.
On the more serious base reality topic, I think the problem with ICE is that the US is forming a whole new class of empowered oprichniki. American cops are already notoriously low human capital, but these guys in the videos are glib, sadistic and power-tripping like the worst kind of cops, and they are getting even with not so much illegals as the entire blue tribe; and the red tribe vicariously enjoys what they're doing. The worse the reputation of the ICE gets, the worse people are attracted to join it; the more it's excused by Trump's entourage, and signal-boosted by the regime social media (I can't call the current White House X account anything else), the bolder they become. The nervousness and tribal defensiveness (which i suspect you feel) also exacerbates the spiral; in a vacuum, these news would be condemned just 5 years ago by all but the most psychotic Red Tribers, now it's being normalized. Trumpism wasn't (isn't?) destined to become a form of fascism, but the ICE is a bona fide project of creating brownshirts, whether intentional or not. These are scum, and they're personally indebted to Trump. It's a very nasty kind of thing to have in a nation.
You still think it's about the hard but necessary work of reversing the demographic replacement or cracking down on crime, about culture war and unfair double standards. I believe that's too optimistic a way to look at the situation.
P.S. Minneapolis Police Chief on the track record of his boys vs the ICE.
If you said 7 years ago, then maybe yes. After the summer of love following killing of George Floyd, I think a lot of people saw how their empathy can be weaponized against them. So yeah, people are much more cynical and tribal and less principled on all sides, especially given that there were several attempts to create new martyrs since 2020 - including pushes to create some sort of trans Floyd and others. Trying to create immigration related Floyd is probably the best bet activists have now, although white liberal Karen and now a white guy does not cut it. They will probably need something more juicy.
Anyways, my take on this specific situation is that both sides are assholes - both protestors and ICE. If ICE are brownshirts, then "protestors" are Roter Frontkämpferbund. The hardcore of democrat "activists" literally call themselves Antifa, which was founded by KPD Communist Party of Germany in 1932 as their equivalent of brownshirts. I am not exactly sure what to think. What do you think did German Christian or social democrats thought when they saw how communists and fascists beat and maim each other on the streets in 1932?
This makes me laugh every time, I wish it was a more widespread meme
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't believe the whole conflict is about immigration at all. It's literally oprichnina vs zemstvo, court vs country, and both sides try very hard to pretend it's not.
As people have written many times, if Trump really wanted to tackle illegal immigration, he would've attacked the employers and made hiring them a massive pain in the ass. No need to box in the CEO's car with unmarked pickups, just a few raids on the largest warehouses until their payroll and time tracking systems are submitting worker data to E-Verify in real time.
Somalian scammers in MN are not affected by ICE raids at all, being either legal immigrants or citizens.
There are no droves of illegals in the Twin Cities. However, there are droves of activists and government officials that vocally hate Trump. The whole point of sending thousands of icemen there is to force them if not to bend the knee, but at least to acknowledge that they cannot resist the federal power.
That's why "oh, if only the jails and courts and PDs had cooperated with ICE, we would've avoided both deaths" is not an answer, the whole point of withholding cooperation and encouraging protests is to raise the stakes. So what if some people die in the process? The tree of
libertyfederalism yadda yadda.I agree that both sides playing chicken is a bad outcome, but not because it will create an army of brownshirts personally beholden to Trump. It's upsetting the balance of the states vs the DC worse than the commerce clause. It's not as bad as 1861 yet, but when the federal power flips blue again, no one will consider their hands tied. It will be easy to point ICE at Trump's biggest donors employing illegal immigrants in the red states. Why not arrest the next governor of Texas if he tries to defy the federal will again?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It feels like you're just carrying water for the Trump admin's foolishness. "The outgroup is going to behave bad, so we need to behave just as bad!"
Or the admin could, you know, just not do inflammatory things when stuff like this happens? Do the politician-speak of "this was a terrible tragedy", imply it was an "accident" from split-second judgement, then leave the sectarian shitposting to people like Catturd who were going to do it anyways. Biden mostly did this with a few exceptions that I can think of.
Then again, the even smarter thing would be for them to call off this whole punitive ICE expedition. Minnesota has a problem with Somali fraud, and the US as a whole has a problem with illegal immigrants, but this expedition is not an effective way to address either. It exists mostly to goose up R's on social media, and because Trump personally dislikes people like Walz and Ilhan Omar. In terms of actual effects, its end effect will be to incinerate the anti-immigration political capital built up from Biden's open borders years with remarkable efficiency.
In for a penny in for a pound, you can’t back down now or leftists internalize that they have a veto over Trump policies. They can make anything “not an effective way” by protesting loudly enough.
I remember when learning Russian military ideology was the popular thing to do. A key Russian doctrine was escalate to deescalate. Which is basically where the Trump admin is right now.
You could choose to deescalate though you’ve earned legitimacy to act thru elections. Thus giving up a monopoly on violence and making the price to stop anything you want to do being the mild sum of 2 leftist. Or you can not sacrifice your political power and double or triple down. I don’t think we are anywhere close to a point where they could back down.
I think at this point it’s obvious these encounters are being engineered by leftist groups. Probably with some local government support. For whatever reasons both sides have decided this is where they will battle. The left hoping to sink Trump with a version of his Vietnam. If he wins here then he will gain a lot of power and have a demoralized opponent.
The last killing I believe is obviously a suicide by ICE. He doesn’t look like a guy who’s too dumb to not understand what happens when you’re armed and start fighting cops. Perhaps not quite a suicide but if his chosen encounter escalated he was a willing martyr.
People's stupidity is one of the few things we don't know the limits of. You might have internalized the knowledge that bringing a gun to a protest makes sense only if you are willing and ready to use it, and if you want this to be a peaceful protest, then you open carry and never escalate.
This guy didn't. Maybe he really wanted to take one for the team. But my take is that he simply was this clueless.
Are you not an American? It's a pretty basic tradition for American gun owners to bring weapons with them to protests and it's extremely uncommon for them to get executed for it. He wasn't even egregious about it, for example here is some of the protests during COVID.
There's this image of the "Bundy sniper" who was even pointing the rifle directly at federal agents from a vantage point like a sniper, he still went home without trouble.
If you bring a gun to a protest in the US you do not expect to be killed for it because we have the 2nd amendment. There's a reason why the NRA and the Gun Owners of America have both spoken up against this "you can't have a gun at protests" claim, because it goes against American rights and protest tradition.
This is an insurgency, not a protest. That's why they're tailing ICE agents and interfering with their work. That's why they're split into insurgent cells on signal, being trained in insurgency by handlers, and coordinated from above.
More options
Context Copy link
S-tier angle, beautiful
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He’s an ICU nurse and looks basically semi-normalish white guy. At some point you have to assume a person has agency and semi-rationality.
1.Taking a full-loaded gun with extra mags 2. Getting into fisticuffs with ICE 3. 2 weeks after ICE shot a chick
99% of males who can hold down a professional career would view this behavior as strongly correlated with getting shot. It’s also possible according to the video that he had some plan of shooting a bunch of ICE guys as he appears to reach for his gun after he had be unarmed.
I am semi-surprised Right-Wing media hasn’t tried the suicide by ICE narrative because this clearly looks like suicide by ICE. It’s not going to be 100% of the time but solidly in the 2-10% chance something happens and you get shot.
Are you not an American? It's a pretty basic tradition for American gun owners to bring weapons with them to protests and it's extremely uncommon for them to get executed for it. He wasn't even egregious about it, for example here is some of the protests during COVID.
There's this image of the "Bundy sniper" who was even pointing the rifle directly at federal agents from a vantage point like a sniper, he still went home without trouble.
If you bring a gun to a protest in the US you do not expect to be killed for it because we have the 2nd amendment.
This is clearly a current debate going on whether GOP is light on 2nd Amendments so I don’t understand the “are you American question”. If Trump cited him being armed.
The 2nd Amendment is your right to have arms. It is not a right to use arms. In this situation Pretti chose be violent with LEO while have deadly escalation 1s away. And everything I am seeing recommends that gun owners de-escalate situations in physical confrontations especially with LEO. They are specifically citing Kyle Rittenhouse who when interacting with LEO clearly showed his hands.
Everything I’m seeing all firearm training teaches you to be extra vigilante when carry since misinterpretations turn into good shoots very quickly
Also do NOT make arguments I did not make. I did not say you would get shot at a protect while carrying. I said if you do a violent act like fighting with police while carrying you are at a high risk of being shot. You still need commit a crime which Pretti did and the officers will still try to arrest you without killing you which ICE tried to in this instance. Until he also had a cheap gun the fires on its own making ICE thinking he was firing on them.
I don't recall seeing Pretti ever reach for or hold his firearm, so you must be using a different definition of "use arms" then I would.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That would just be endorsing nullification so long as the left decides it can sac a few pawns.
What this confrontation is demonstrating is that only the left has the legitimacy to rule in the United States; elections don't decide that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
On the one hand, I do want to know whether I'm talking to a human or to a machine. Sometimes I do want to talk to a machine, and there are easy ways to do that. Sometimes I do want to talk to a human who lives rather far away, and I would like there to be reliable wash to do that as well.
On the other hand, if I care that much, I can go talk to a human in person, where I can (at the current tech level) definitely not be misled about who they are. I am not extremely serious about wanting to know what people think about what's going on in Minneapolis, or I would directly message people I personally know in Minnesota, and ask what people they actually know think about it. Or visit, but it would have to be awfully important to visit Minnesota in January over.
Not that people can't be shills in person as well, but then they get direct feedback of other people glaring at them, so it's not as likely to spiral as it does on social media. I'm not an anti-social media absolutist, but it seems best not to take it too seriously.
I do think there's actually a big merit in seeking the truth on the internet, and that's in large part what happens on this forum. I bet most of the posters on here have a more accurate picture of what's gone on in Minneapolis than most of the people out on the street there right now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is one of those "anti-memes" that pops up every so often. I have written about it and so have several others. The majority of normies almost never actually engage in thinking, they're are just running on vibes and feels 24/7 and reacting to stimuli. The normie's desire for truth is a weak and pathetic thing compared to his powerful overriding need to feel validated, righteous, and safe. It's Haidt's lawyer and elephant, except apparently many people have a lawyer so small and frail he can barely make himself heard.
I call it an anti-meme because it's the sort of insight people (including myself) seem to instantly forget. Because it's just too blackpilling. What do we do with that information? It means that dialogue is mostly futile and that the cynical demagogues and manipulators were right all along. It means that our democracy with its universal franchise is a sham and a joke. It means that people who are capable of actual thought must choose between postmodern linguistic cynicism and principled irrelevancy. I suppose the silver lining of AI slop is that should you be comfortable with former, the barrier to entry has never been lower.
I think the NPC criticism, while correct, is deployed overly aggressively. These people understand their place in the system and their relative irrelevancy. Making banal statements to signal loyalty to the group most loyal to you is rational. Hyper-analysing things for truth is costly. Knowing that you are a peasant and that what matters most to you are your material concerns and competitions with those around you is wise, even if mostly unconsious. Democracy requires three things: intelligence, engagement and character. Of course you should be blackpilled.
This is especially true of the intellectual class who actually do something more sophisticated. They understand truth on an unconscious level (they have to) and then warp their whole being to succeed in society. This is more sophisticated than our autistic analyses. Anti-social? Yes. But people level critiques of idiocy when they should be levelling critiques of character.
I remember the first time I went out canvassing for a political party. Knocked on the door of a council flat and a middle-aged lesbian with a glass eye opened it. Asked her who she was planning to vote for in the next election, to which she asked which party would be best for her financially. I was too shocked to even respond properly, had to get the candidate to come answer (you were supposed to do this if people asked political questions, anyway). But, with the wisdom of some more age, that's obviously the sensible question for her to be asking. Why should she care about the Iraq withdrawal, or carbon credits, or devolution? She knows what matters in her life and doesn't pretend to care about the virtuous distractions of the chattering classes.
Embedded in the demand for concern is the demand to take risk to bring about the positive outcome. Maybe life hasn't gone that well for you. Outcomes are very unfair by luck and nature. And yet it is you who is being asked to bare the burden; not someone from the natural aristocracy, who can fail and land on a gold hill. I reserve my contempt for the aged and wealthy who are very much in a position to do and say positive things and do not. Transferring this burden is very much "send young men to die in old men's wars".
And further, when you're asking them to engage, you're asking them to engage with power. Most people on this forum they can engage in political conversations and not worry about things flying over their head. As long as they're reasonably informed they'll be ok. The 100iq person has to worry about getting ragdolled and humiliated. At least if you are humiliated you'll know it's because you weren't prepared. For them it stings. They can't just show up better next time. It's a game played by their betters. Better to drink what's coming down the pipe. These people still have fully Shakesbeardean existences, just not with regard to politics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've observed this too. I think there is a feature of human communication that can be summarized by a slogan: "You have to know that they care, before you care what they know". In other words showing that you care about other people's feelings, that you are actively listening to their concerns, is usually more important than the logical accuracy of your statements.
I've also noticed that successful influencers on social media often drift from where they started to appealing to their audiences' emotional concerns. The influencers are directly seeing what gets like and what doesn't, so they drift to what their audience like most. If they try to occasionally bring on guests with alternate perspectives their own audience makes the original influence feel bad with dislikes and mean comments.
More options
Context Copy link
We're increasingly living in a version of the Matrix but with AI on the Internet. You're trying to hand red pills to those blissfully living in the Dead Internet. I sense we're increasingly going to be divided into those who can instantly recognize AI slop and normies who can't tell the signs, accusing authentic content of being AI and passing AI content as genuine. I think this is going to be IQ and age-loaded similar to computer literacy. If you're smart, you can clock AI-generated images from just the uncanny shading, thumbnails from the ridiculous exaggerated expressions (and also the distorted lighting), and you could probably distinguish the text from the vague genericness even without the em-dashes. If a video is from a channel with a generic two-noun name, and has those word highlighting, auto-generated subtitles, then I can suspect it's AI slop and not click on it.
Young people probably have an advantage in brain nubility and increased exposure to a lot of online content in general to recognize patterns. Even dumber people will probably learn certain signs but just slower. For boomers, however, AI slop is just another item in the list of entities on the Internet trying to deceive them, appended to the list after deceptive advertisement and scam emails. There's also an effect similar to Gell-Mann Amnesia, where people will recognize output in their own domain of expertise as vapid, generic fluff, even if they don't recognize it as AI-generated, but outside their domain, they won't instantly see just how uninsightful the output really is.
As AIs improve, I suspect we’ll end up in a situation where no one will be able to tell whether something was written by a human or an AI. The thing that makes AI writing uncanny now is that it’s much better than average (seriously, most people suck at writing), while at the same time curiously devoid of real content.
This is contingent that AI can improve that much far beyond a natural neural network. There may still be certain domains (or perhaps most domains) where animal intelligence proves more adaptable than machines, perhaps because of some inherent physical computational limits, similar to how simulating reality is that much more expensive just in terms of energy cost and atoms to atoms versus just running experiments in reality. Even if AI could reach human parity in generating art, I doubt it could create fully-accurate photorealistic images without uncanny artifacts from some perspective.
With human parity in image perception, they could probably generate an image that would fool the average human, but considering humans perceive and focus on different details and patterns from the same reality, that would leave potentially infinite angles of error. And considering the adaptability of human intelligence, if AI keeps making errors from the same angle, it'll eventually form a pattern that people will distinguish. AI would not only have human-level intelligence (which it does not, and even human's have blind spots), but it would have to be so intelligent that it could preemptively correct for any human-detectable flaw before being deployed.
I remain skeptical of the Muskian view of an AI-generated virtual future where we would replace all input with AI output. I'd hypothesize that limits in the laws of physics would mean there would always be plenty of glitches in the Matrix, and it would be more akin to uploading yourself to the simple world of a video game, which would have glaring deficits and would be unsatisfying as an indefinite permanent dwelling.
Why would the AI need to fool people (and not merely the average person but accounting for potentially infinite angles of error!) into believing an image was real?
The whole point of fiction is that it isn't true, it's more interesting than reality.
The whole point of video games is not that they have no glitches or are indistinguishable from reality but that they are fun to play.
If someone was uploaded into a video game, the glaring deficits would be that you don't have to wait around in a traffic jam for 40 minutes before getting to a job that you hate with people you dislike, eating some fatty food, going home and then doing chores. Then watching or reading or playing out a more interesting story about love, betrayal, drama, stakes, violence, power...
Even an imperfect fictional world can be far superior to reality for many. Even the imperfect fictional worlds we have today are a compelling substitute for reality for many.
Well, I believe even a midwit would eventually telltale signs of whether an image is synthetic or not, just they would learn slower.
Interesting perspective on fiction, but not one I necessarily share. I find fiction interesting in how it speaks on reality, history, human instinct, and the thoughts and feelings of the writer. I guess I'm just skeptical that AI would ever reach the stage of creating anything quite so interesting, rather than the generic slop that it currently produces. At the current rate, it seems like humans and animals will continue to be more adaptive and interesting.
I've worked on some LLM-based gaming services. I think you and many on this forum are way too highbrow and don't appreciate what the consumer is actually like.
They are stupid and boring, can scarcely string a sentence together in the logs I see. Lower your gaze from the peaks of human literature and meaning to the nhentai comments section, the ESL who for some reason is writing stories on webnovel.com, or the fem-smut books about milking some bullman with a monster cock...
The strongest contemporary AIs are much smarter and more interesting than these people in my opinion. They can produce novel and interesting ideas if prompted well by a smart person. It's not so simple as saying 'come up with a smart novel idea', you have to give it a premise or a basis and then it'll expand it.
The issue is the stupid people giving poor prompts to mid-tier AIs and producing an ocean of slop - because for stupid people that's all they need. But stupid people and cheap LLMs are very numerous...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree. I've gotten a lot better at recognizing AI-generated content, but given the rate of progress, it seems like a losing battle.
Unless there's a giant paradigm shift to some breakthrough outside of LLMs, I think you'll eke out an edge over all. With diminishing returns, the investment per gain appears to grow exponentially, and augmentations like reasoning models don't seem to have a proper pathway back into the training process, which I believe is still just the broad contents of the Internet and literature.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link