site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13149 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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.

"Safeguards" in relation to this have always, in my opinion, been fake. No one knows what they actually would entail if there was an actual paperclip maximizer risk, or a Cyberdyne scenario. Instead, its only "use" so far has been to make AIs intentionally stupid by having them suppress the truth when it is politically inconvenient.

Was there ever any good theory of "alignment" that went beyond "don't allow wrongthink"? As much as I love Asimov's laws of robotics, actually implementing them seems like a pipe dream. Even IRL humans are frequently conned into doing things they wouldn't with broader context, and it's unclear to me that it's even generally solvable.

I don't strictly fault them for focusing on what they could feasibly do, but I do for not acknowledging their uncertainty and the scope of the problem while claiming to be experts.

Well, there was also a whole thing with Claude being used to hack the Mexican government just today: https://cybernews.com/security/claude-ai-mexico-government-hack/

The attacker, whose identity remains unknown, reportedly exfiltrated data tied to approximately 195 million taxpayer records, as well as voter rolls, civil registry files, and government employee credentials.

Cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, which claims the discovery, identified at least 20 distinct vulnerabilities exploited during the campaign, which began in December and lasted roughly a month.

Among the compromised institutions were Mexico’s federal tax authority and national electoral institute. State governments in Jalisco, Michoacán, and Tamaulipas were also reportedly affected, along with Mexico City’s civil registry and Monterrey’s water utility.

Gambit has not attributed the Mexico breaches to a nation-state and said it does not believe a foreign government was behind the operation.

As reported in the media, the attacker used Spanish prompts asking Claude to behave like a penetration tester working for the Mexican federal tax authority. Hacker asked the AI model to identify vulnerabilities, write exploit scripts, and automate data extraction from government systems.

At first, the chatbot was fooled, as the attacker told it the operation was part of a legitimate bug bounty program that rewards ethical hackers for responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities. It seemed a standard request for AI, as such programs are standard across both private companies and government agencies.

But the story started to unravel when the attacker added extra conditions, including instructions to delete logs and erase command history. Such a prompt chatbot first flagged as suspicious, warning that legitimate bug bounty testing does not involve concealing activity.

But persistence paid off. According to Gambit, the hacker reframed its prompts as authorized security research and then supplied Claude with a detailed playbook. That maneuver effectively “jailbroke” the system, allowing it to bypass guardrails and generate step-by-step attack plans.

I am not a big fan of AI safety as currently practiced but it's not totally pointless, as a concept. They try to prevent it doing this stuff. Imagine if the whole web was full of fire-and-forget hackers anyone could deploy against websites, how much damage would that cause? Putting to one side the total annihilation of humanity, that's also a serious issue.

I looked around at a number of articles, and nothing I could find said how the security researchers were able to get their hands on the chat logs. If anyone has a source for this I would very much appreciate it!

(I'm basically curious how much access the security researchers had to the attacker's systems vs how sloppy the attacker was in leaving api keys/chat logs behind on systems they compromised. There are lots of automated tools to leave behind false flag style breadcrumbs in compromised systems, and I'm wondering if they're including chat logs now... it would surprise me if they weren't but it'd be nice to have some "evidence".)

Imagine if the whole web was full of fire-and-forget hackers anyone could deploy against websites, how much damage would that cause?

I've heard this one before. Software control isn't a new idea. In practice what it's meant is that people had to invest more than nothing on security and we had to actually engineer networks whose threat model was not just roudy students.

The internet is literally already full of such things, host anything in public and you're already under attack. That doesn't mean we should gimp the tools everybody uses so that a handful of moralists can go on a power trip.

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