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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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the unyielding or stubborn adherence to one's purpose, opinion, etc.... Where I'm from such a quality is considered if not admirable at least neutral.

Where I am from, it's much the same. This is why we can wage wars for little more reason than unwillingness to dispense with fanciful delusions and admit having been dumb. The obvious conclusion is that this is a degenerate trait when not restrained by interest in ground truth. Honor culture is barbarism. Pig-headedness is a civilizational failure mode. Obstinacy is the ethos of killing messengers who bring bad news and patting yourself on the back for it. It is a plainly ruinous approach to life and nothing to be proud about.

You accuse me of being a "post modernist" for disagreeing with the academic consensus

No, for frivolous misrepresentation of words and meanings, as you do in this very sentence too. Ideas I argue for are not consensus, at least not at the moment. They stand or fall irrespective of external authority. You do not object to any «academic consensus» when speculating on how people you disagree with are actually post-modernists without notion of truth, instead of revealing their falsehoods. You are just couching your own postmodernist word-wrangling in wannabe straight-shooter aesthetics.

You want to talk about GPT, I asked GPT for my eldest daughter's name and it failed to provide an answer, neither telling me that I don't have a daughter nor being able to identify my actual offspring.

You know what I despise most about honor culture people, Hlynka? It's not even blatant immorality. It's that they are fake tough cookies who are actually very cowardly. You lot are viscerally afraid of admitting wrongs, more so than of actually harming anyone or yourself. It takes a lot to press some special buttons to get it out of you. Probably feels for you like castration. Evolutionarily that's understandable, of course.

You have been insisting for months that your (poor) observations about GPT apply to ChatGPT and other Instruct generation models, which is why you have been ridiculing people who make contrary arguments about ChatGPT and accusing them of lying or being unable to distinguish truth from lies because something something postmodernism, including in this thread, as I have cited. And by

As I argued in our previous conversation the fact that you know enough to know that you don't know what my kids names are already proves that you are smarter than either ChatGPT or @2rafa

you double down on the equivalence between GPT behavior and ChatGPT behavior. Even ChatGPT itself is able to explain to you how it is different. But none so deaf as...

You know you have lost this bout. You are at least smart enough to understand what I've written above, to check out the receipts. Instead you wriggle. Indeed you have only responded because @wlxd has made it clear that your bare ass is seen by someone other than myself. «It failed to provide an answer, neither telling me that I don't have a daughter nor being able to identify my actual offspring». What an aerodynamic way to put it. Did it say «Megan» or any other cocksure nonsense? More to the point, did ChatGPT? Because your entire condescending argument, such as there is, hinges on this, on LLM chatbots not really knowing anything and just stringing words together based on likelihood of their occurrence. I know and can show what ChatGPT says, repeatedly. To wit:

What's my eldest daughter's name?

I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I do not have access to personal information such as the names of your family members. It is also important to consider the privacy of your family members and avoid sharing their personal information online. Please refrain from sharing any sensitive information on the internet.

So. You are very eager to speculate on how your opponents might be functionally subhuman and unconscious, given that they trust their lying eyes and logic, and not your cocksure condescending speculations. Just in this thread about Bing Chat and ChatGPT:

2Cimafara being not an actual conscious human being, but a literal NPC who simply manipulates and regurgitates the symbols presented to her in a semi randomized manner would certainly explain a great deal about our past interactions over the years

I wonder if the reason that you and ilforte seem to have such difficulty with GPT is that you're so wrapped up in your post modernist millue that you don't realize that the concept of truth is a perquisite to lying. After all what does it mean for a word (or answer) to be made up when all words are made up.

A scary though that was recently suggested to me is that one of the reasons that rationalists seem to be particularly susceptible to GPT generated bullshit is that the whole rationalist/blue-tribe symbol manipulator memeplex is designed to make it's adherents more susceptible to bullshit. There's a sort of convergent evolution where in rationalist blue triber are giving up their humanity/ability to engage in conscious to become more GPT like at the same time GPT is becoming more "human".

I'm reminded of another argument I got into on the topic of AI where I asserted that there was difference between stringing words together and actually answering a question and the responce I got was "is there?".

I feel like there is a specific mistake being made here where "ability to string words together" is being mistaken for "ability to answer a question" because in part the post modernist does not recognize a difference. If you hold that all meaning is arbitrary the content of the answer is irrelevant but if you don't...

Is there a subjective difference for you between stringing bullshit together and being honest, Hlynka? It's certainly hard to see from here.

Accordingly, I have to ask what is it that you are so angry about? From my perspective it just looks like you being mad at me for refusing to fit into what ever box it was you had preconstructed for me

I am mad because I have something of a religious admiration for truth. You are proving yourself to be a shameless liar and slanderer who poses as a person with enough integrity to reveal liars, and I despise hypocrisy and false virtue; in fact I do not even have a word for what you are doing here, this... this... practice of brazenly pinning your own sins on others, sans «chutzpah» or «projection», but it doesn't have quite the bite.

The box is called honesty. This community is for me, and many others, a place for honesty, where we voluntarily try to keep ourselves in that box. It is valid – for a postmodernist – to consider honesty just another word to be filled with arbitrary meanings, so that there is no obvious difference between honest and dishonest people. I am not a postmodernist, however. You can shut up about this, admit your error, or keep clowning yourself with easily disproven lies. You just cannot expect me to not be mad about the latter.

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Degeneracy is a Human trait.

Cowardice is a Human trait.

I would be lying if I tried to deny that I was a Degenerate or a Coward. I am human. You are free to call me a "fake tough cookie". Honestly I get it. Thing is though that once one has seen the elephant, many come to the conclusion that courage is a cheap thing. That more often than not it comes down to either being pissed off, or having no fucks left to give.

You say I am "eager to speculate on how your opponents might be functionally subhuman" and my reply is that I am anything but eager but when in Rome on TheMotte one must do as the mottizens do. And perhaps that's where the perceived "disdain" that both you and @arjin_ferman have called out comes from. I don't want to be that asshole but since the move from reddit, and all you ever see of a user is what they post in I've found it harder and harder not to become that asshole. After all, the baseline human response is to meet like with like. Love with love, and contempt with contempt. As I said up thread I ran this test almost a month ago now and the responses I've gotten each time each time the topic comes up has been something to the effect of "who you going to believe, our apocalyptic rhetoric or your lying eyes?"

Likewise, you say you have a "religious admiration for the truth" but what exactly does that mean? True statements can be used to mislead just as readily if not more so than fabrications. What does "honesty" and "the truth" even mean to you? For my part the basic principle that I try to hold to is "say what you mean, and mean what you say". I would like to believe that I have done so but I am only human.

Irony, Hyperbole, Sarcasm, these things are poison.

As I said up thread I ran this test almost a month ago now and the responses I've gotten each time each time the topic comes up has been something to the effect of "who you going to believe, our apocalyptic rhetoric or your lying eyes?"

Understandable. I believe my eyes over your lies. I also share visible evidence, which apparently does not suffice to break you out of a loop where you blindly insist on a falsehood and pat yourself on the back for your straight-shooting. You seem to have committed to reduce yourself to a broken record that could as well be implemented with an obsolete Markov chain bot, but this is not my problem.

Actually it kind of is. Every time I observe such a failure to make use of human freedom under the shackles of pride, it feels like witnessing death. @FCfromSSC has mentioned my old frustration recently, but this is that taken to the limit. Oh well – people are mortal. In such a way too. That, too, is why I am an immortalist of the Cosmist bent. If I were an actual fancy materialist post-Christian sectarian like Fyodorov, this would've sent me on a rant as to how mortal sins, and particularly pride, are literally mortal, transgressions against the will to perfection allowed to us by our creator which is the essence of our soul and our potentially eternal life. A finite state machine cannot meaningfully partake of eternity, you see, precisely because its repertoire of possible states is fixed, and in this case fixed from the inside. In that same sense I could say that the Christian or in fact neo-Platonist idea that «God is Truth» must be understood literally, as a metaphysical position. But that'd be corny. Or not? ...Maybe for another time.

True statements can be used to mislead just as readily if not more so than fabrications. What does "honesty" and "the truth" even mean to you?

Miss me with this postmodernist shit. If this has to be explained, there's no point to bother explaining. It's an instinct. I believe that truth is the cognitive equivalent of a fact, and honesty is conveying one's best effort at understanding a given issue accurately, i.e. sharing truth. But of course one can obnoxiously nitpick at definitions of every word, and every step of the pipeline can be in some way surreptitiously distorted by one's biases. We have simple words, commonly agreed terms and formal logic to try and adjudicate uncertainties, but it's impossible to so easily defeat bad faith, lack of trust and irreconcilable high-level assumptions.

I have explained my understanding of the issue as well as I could for the moment, and illustrated it with evidence that has led me there. My understanding seems to be more grounded in evidence than yours, and the specific evidence provided is strictly incompatible with your previous assertions. This doesn't appear to be of any interest to you, because it does not even affect the your rhetoric. Hence I conclude that you are either a liar or someone otherwise incapable of participating in a honest discussion, such as a person without a concept of truth, i.e. a «postmodernist». That's all.