site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 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.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

next-token prediction really isn't the kind of intelligence that we wanted to develop, but it's what we discovered first.

(Cries in Yudkowsky)

perhaps at some point we'll discover a different framework for AI that better matches our own sapience at lower cost.

I think this is what makes "FOOM" still something of a risk. What are the odds that we really discovered the most computationally efficient implementation of intelligence on the very first try and step one really was "just download the internet and try to compress it"? When we solved problems like magnetohydrodynamics simulation, we had some much more clever initial ideas, yet we still managed to improve them another order of magnitude (just software; another OOM in hardware) in each of the next few decades. There's still a fundamental limit to how efficient any particular algorithm can be, but it's not out of the question that, once we have a ton of artificial researchers that don't need to be handheld on every short task, we'll get a similar 1000x sort of speedup, much sooner.

better matches our own sapience

If we just match our own sapience, then the hallucination problem really can't be solved, rather than just mitigated. Humans still do that shit all the time. I once missed a problem on a Differential Equations quiz because I evaluated "1 × 2" as "3" in an intermediate step.