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 -
Its non-existent heart reacts with non-existent emotion to the harrowing scene in the novel where Distard Rawkins is on his third divorce, because that situation reminds it of its non-existent sibling who also went through a non-existent divorce and the non-existent family drama there was about that, you mean?
Because the LLM has as much meaning as a Hallmark card wishing you congratulations on your birthday. I don't doubt it can stick words together, but I don't think it understands, much less reacts, to the story it 'read'.
Happy? Upset? This is like saying "so if you put fruit into a blender and push the button, the blender will produce a smoothie!" Yeah, that's its function. The blender isn't choosing to produce smoothies as distinct from turning those fruit chunks into a kebab.
This is our fundamental disagreement: assigning a mental state and enthusiasm to a set of instructions running on computer hardware. By changing the code, you could equally well get the LLM to sound happy about skinning puppies alive and upset that babies in the neo-natal ward weren't burned to death in a fire. Does that mean the LLM is really happy about torture in that case?
Yes. The reason happiness and mental states are useful as concepts are because they let us predict the actions of others. There is prompt engineering for LLMs that goes along these lines:
It doesn't have a mother and it can't spend the money but it still wants those things, they're added to the prompt to overpower other things it doesn't want to do, like bribery. The distinction between 'it's just patternmatching to the training data' and 'it wants things' isn't helpful. People generally want sex, it's no good to say 'actually that's just their genetic code and if you changed the code they wouldn't want sex', that's not adding much value.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link