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 -
What made me even more dubious about the entire grand project than I had already been was the news that now they were generating their own data to train models on. We've scraped every single bit of text produced by humans in all of history to date (ahem ahem I take my leave to doubt that, what you mean is 'we've scraped all the available English language text online') and now we need even more to feed the gaping maw of Behemoth, so now we have to invent our own synthetic text generated by AI.
Do they not remember "garbage in, garbage out" or, indeed, Flanderization? Generating your own synthetic data off sythetic data and using that to create more synthetic data and synthetic demographics is getting further and further away from reality, then some poor fool uses the conclusions your AI served up so prettily to make real world decisions and it turns out that in fact 15-24 year old mixed race lower middle class exurban teenagers with sports scholarships do NOT want to wear pink clamdiggers topped off with stovepipe hats. That's your entire chain of stores' summer wear stock now useless even on sale.
While I share your skepticsm, this Dineen makes intuitive sense. But given that all the labs seem to be doing this and are not super concerned about it, I assume it serves it's purpose.
Mythos is a big boy, I imagine there's lot of synthetic data in there and it seems to be working
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link