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Notes -
Hi Y'all. This is a test of shady thinking and not one-shotted into an LLM. But I endorse this essay and invite criticism. I worked on this. My reason for posting this is to learn more about this state of affairs in the responses.
Two Badges, Two Bloodlines: Sheriffs and Police in America
American law enforcement is often described, lazily, as a single institution — "the police" — but it is actually two distinct institutions wearing similar uniforms. One, the sheriff, is nearly a thousand years old and answers to voters. The other, the municipal police department, is barely two hundred years old and answers to a mayor or city manager through an appointed chief. They patrol overlapping ground, sometimes literally the same streets, but they come from different lineages, hold different kinds of authority, and occasionally collide over exactly whose ground it is.
The Shire-Reeve: Where the Sheriff Comes From
The sheriff's office is the older of the two by a wide margin, and its origin is genuinely Anglo-Saxon. In pre-Norman England, the kingdom was divided into administrative units called shires — the ancestor of the modern English "county" or "-shire" suffix (Yorkshire, Hampshire). Each shire was overseen by a royal official called a scir-gerefa, or "shire reeve": the king's local representative, responsible for collecting taxes, enforcing royal law, presiding over the shire court, and raising the posse comitatus — literally "the power of the county," an ad hoc militia the reeve could summon from the free men of the area. "Shire reeve" contracted over centuries into "sheriff."
The Norman Conquest of 1066 didn't erase this office; it absorbed it. The Normans kept the sheriff as the crown's man in the county, a dual tax-collector-and-lawman role that persisted through the medieval period. Crucially, the sheriff's authority was territorial and comprehensive within the shire — not tied to a town, a court, or a single function, but to the entire county as a jurisdiction. That territorial, county-wide model is the DNA the office still carries in America today.
Two related medieval offices are worth naming because their vocabulary survives:
The Break: Why "Police" Is a Different Animal
For centuries, the Anglo-American world had no professional, salaried, full-time police force in the modern sense. Law enforcement was a patchwork of sheriffs, constables, night watchmen, and private thief-takers. That system buckled under the pressure of industrialization and urbanization — London's population exploded in the early 1800s, and crime, riot, and disorder outran what part-time constables and a county sheriff could handle.
The fix, in 1829, was Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police of London — the first modern, professional, centrally organized, uniformed civilian police force, deliberately built as something new: full-time, salaried, hierarchically commanded, and answerable to the Home Secretary rather than to a county or a court. This is the template — "policing," as a bureaucratic, city-based, appointed institution — that spread to American cities in the following decades: Boston organized a police department in 1838, New York City in 1845, and other major cities followed through the mid-1800s, explicitly copying the London model.
So while the sheriff descends from feudal county administration, the police department descends from a nineteenth-century urban reform movement — a different century, a different problem (industrial-city disorder rather than rural shire governance), and a different organizational logic (appointed bureaucracy rather than personal county officer).
The American Twist
Colonial America imported the sheriff wholesale — county government in Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere was built around an appointed (later elected) sheriff almost from the start, and many American county sheriff's offices predate the founding of their own states. But America made one significant change: it made the office elected, generally by direct popular vote of the county. This is a genuinely American democratization of a medieval crown office, and it is the single most important structural fact about the American sheriff. A sheriff answers to the county electorate directly, on a fixed term, not to a city council, a mayor, or a police commission.
It's also worth being honest that American policing has more than one point of origin. Alongside the Peelian municipal-police strand in the urban North, the antebellum South developed organized slave patrols — armed groups authorized to stop, search, and control enslaved people and enforce curfews — which historians widely identify as a direct institutional ancestor of many Southern police departments after the Civil War. The frontier added a third strand: town marshals, federal U.S. Marshals (a role explicitly modeled on the English sheriff, exported to federal territory), and vigilance-committee policing in areas without formal government. American law enforcement, in other words, is a braid of at least three lineages — feudal county sheriff, urban professional police, and Southern slave-patrol/frontier policing — not one clean line.
How They Differ Today
The jurisdictional split is the practical heart of it. City police have authority within the city's boundary; the sheriff's office has authority across the entire county, which matters most in unincorporated areas that have no city government of their own and therefore no municipal police force at all — there, the sheriff is the only game in town. Sheriffs also tend to accumulate the "custodial" functions of the justice system almost everywhere in the U.S.: they typically run the county jail, provide security for county courthouses, and serve civil process (the actual physical delivery of eviction notices, subpoenas, and warrants) — functions that trace directly back to the medieval bailiff's job of executing a court's orders. Municipal police, by contrast, are built around active patrol, 911 response, and criminal investigation within a bounded city.
Antagonism, Overlap, and Turf
Because a city sits inside a county, city police and the county sheriff usually have concurrent jurisdiction over the same physical ground — both technically have authority there, even though in practice the city department handles the overwhelming majority of day-to-day calls. That overlap is a standing source of friction, for a few recurring reasons:
Case Study: Atlanta and Fulton County
Atlanta is a clean illustration of the whole arrangement, with a wrinkle: the city sits mostly in Fulton County but partly spills into DeKalb County, meaning Atlanta technically has two county sheriffs whose jurisdictions touch it, alongside its own police department.
Day-to-day policing inside the city — patrol, 911 response, investigations — is the job of the Atlanta Police Department, a municipal force answerable to the mayor. Because Atlanta is almost entirely incorporated territory, the Fulton County Sheriff's Office doesn't patrol city streets in the way a rural county sheriff would patrol unincorporated land. Instead, its role is concentrated in the classic sheriff functions inherited from the bailiff/shire-reeve tradition: running the Fulton County Jail, providing security for county courtrooms and judges, and handling warrant service and civil process.
Georgia law makes the underlying tension explicit rather than leaving it implicit. The Georgia Constitution designates the sheriff as the chief law enforcement officer of the county, and in counties that also have a police department, the sheriff voluntarily relinquishes general law-enforcement responsibility to that department — but cannot be forced to, and retains authority to intervene in any law enforcement effort within the county, including situations where deputies witness a violation of law or where no police officer is present. That single sentence is the whole sheriff/police relationship in miniature: routine deference from the sheriff to the city police, backed by a constitutional reserve power the sheriff never actually gives up.
The Fulton County Jail on Rice Street is also a case study in why the sheriff's custodial role carries real political weight. The jail was built to hold about 1,125 people but has housed as many as 3,000, and the U.S. Department of Justice found in 2024 that conditions there were unconstitutionally "inhumane, violent and hazardous." Because the jail is a sheriff's-office responsibility rather than a police-department one, accountability for a crisis like that runs to the elected sheriff — currently Patrick "Pat" Labat, the 28th Sheriff of Fulton County — not to the Atlanta police chief or the mayor, even though the jail sits inside city limits and holds people arrested by city police. It's a good demonstration of how the sheriff/police division isn't just historical trivia; it determines, very concretely, who is politically on the hook when something goes wrong.
The Peelian Ideal and Its American Inversion
If the sheriff/police split explains the structure of American law enforcement, it says nothing about its philosophy — and here the American story is one of quiet drift from the very tradition it borrowed its organizational form from.
Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police was not built primarily as a crime-fighting machine. The nine principles credited to Peel and his first two commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, describe something closer to an anti-authoritarian bargain: police hold no more legal power than an ordinary citizen, their legitimacy rests entirely on public approval rather than on the capacity to coerce, physical force is a last resort and a sign of failure rather than of competence, and the true measure of police effectiveness is the absence of crime and disorder — not the volume of arrests or shows of force. The most quoted formulation, "the police are the public and the public are the police," makes the officer a citizen temporarily and narrowly deputized, not a separate caste standing over the public.
American cities adopted Peel's organizational form — the full-time, uniformed, hierarchical municipal department — while gradually losing the legitimacy theory that justified it. The shift is visible once policing gets reframed as a "war," first on crime and then on drugs: force stops being a last resort and becomes a demonstration of seriousness, and the public shifts from being the source of the department's authority to being a population the department manages. Chief William Parker's postwar rebuilding of the LAPD is a useful marker of this turn — a deliberately insulated, quasi-military force, professionalized in a way that was sold as incorruptibility but functioned as a wall between officers and the people they policed. His successor Daryl Gates, who also founded the country's first SWAT team, hardened that culture further into an aggressively proactive, adversarial style of policing.
The Rodney King beating in 1991, and the acquittal and riots that followed in 1992, is the right hinge point for this story because it made the inversion visible on videotape to people who had no reason to disbelieve it otherwise. The Christopher Commission's subsequent report did not describe a rogue incident; it described a department-wide subculture in which aggressive force functioned as a badge of competence, repeat offenders faced minimal internal accountability, and officers' own radio transcripts revealed open contempt for the people they were supposed to be serving. That is the Peelian bargain broken at its foundation — not "an officer used excessive force," but "the institution's internal incentives no longer route back to public consent as the source of its authority."
The pattern has recurred since, at Ferguson in 2014 and Minneapolis in 2020, each producing its own commission and reform push, and each reasserting the same underlying culture once attention moved on. Two structural facts make a durable Peelian correction unusually hard in the U.S. First, the country never centralized on Peel's model of a single accountable authority — Britain has one national government able to set a uniform doctrine and standard, while the U.S. has roughly 18,000 separate law enforcement agencies, each led by an independently elected sheriff or an independently appointed chief, free to define "professionalism" on their own terms. Second, ironically, the same crisis that exposed the problem also armed it further: the federal 1033 program, which moved surplus military equipment into civilian police departments, expanded significantly in the years after Rodney King, not before.
Was Peel Right, and Did America Err?
Largely yes, and largely yes — with two important qualifications. Peel's core claim was not simply an ethical preference but a functional one: legitimacy and operating capacity are the same asset. A public that trusts police reports crimes, cooperates with investigations, and testifies as witnesses; a public that doesn't will produce worse crime control regardless of how aggressively a department is resourced, which then invites the aggression that erodes trust further. Every American departure from the Peelian model has tended to confirm this by producing worse outcomes on the department's own terms, not just on humanitarian ones.
The first qualification is that Peel designed his model for Georgian and Victorian London — a society without mass civilian gun ownership and with a far lower baseline rate of lethal violence than the modern United States. "The police hold no more power than an ordinary citizen" is harder to sustain as a working principle when the citizen being approached may be armed; that is a genuine complication of translating the model, not merely an excuse for abandoning it.
The second, more important qualification is that "American policing was corrupted away from a Peelian ideal" is not a story that fits the whole country evenly. In much of the South, policing's institutional starting point was not a consent-based force at all, but slave patrols and their Jim Crow-era successors — a lineage built from the outset on controlling a population rather than deriving authority from it. For a great many Americans, there was no earlier golden age of policing by consent to fall from; the "inversion" narrative fits the mid-century, Parker-to-Gates, LAPD-style story more precisely than it fits the country as a whole. What is fair to say is that wherever the Peelian bargain was genuinely in force, the postwar drift toward force-as-legitimacy measurably broke it — and Rodney King is the moment that drift became undeniable on camera.
Conclusion
The sheriff and the municipal police officer look almost interchangeable on the street — badge, gun, patrol vehicle — but they're products of different centuries and different political theories of accountability. The sheriff is a nine-hundred-year-old county officer, elected directly by the people he polices, whose core competencies (jails, courts, civil process) trace straight back to the medieval bailiff's bailiwick. The police officer is a nineteenth-century bureaucratic invention, appointed rather than elected, built for the city rather than the county, and designed to solve a problem — industrial urban disorder — that the shire-reeve system was never built for. Where their jurisdictions overlap, as they do in every American city sitting inside a county, that difference in lineage and accountability is exactly what produces friction: two law enforcement traditions, sharing a bailiwick, answering to two different masters.
Your comment plus username makes me chuckle at the idea of setting loose a bot account trained to imitate Scott Alexander as closely as possible (mods, this is a joke)
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Upheld.
You have been previously warned about substituting LLMs for effort. This instance is not any better.
@Shirayuki2 @roystgnr
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5 day ban for now, we really don't want large text dumps from AI here. Will discuss with other mods on shortening or lengthening ban.
Writing an effortpost carries with it a number of implications:
-This is a thing you know (or think you know) a lot about.
-This is a thing you genuinely belief, and each word in here represent your own thoughts on the matter.
-This is a thing you care enough about to type out however much you typed out.
All of which then inform the way people are going to reply, argue, comment, and engage in discussion with you and others. Someone who makes an effortpost with an LLM is much less likely to follow up in response to people who respond to them, and much less likely to make good responses. There's little point in debating a particular point they made if they don't even believe or fully understand that point. Cases where the essay was collaboratively put together and edited with an LLM are less egregious examples of this, but still carry some of the issues. If you only know or care enough about this issue to write 500 words yourself about it, then don't make the readers read a 2500 word post inflating it with unnecessary things.
Maybe we just need a weekly or monthly LLM containment thread. "Here is a thing I asked AI about and the essay it gave me and I thought it was interesting and worth sharing/discussion." Because I think there can be value to it, it's just not the same sort of value as the main human-human discussions here.
In order to make an unordered list in Markdown, you have to (1) put a space after the hyphen at the start of each line and (2) press the Enter key twice, not just once, after each line.
I didn't think the OG markdown required a blank line between list items. But there are lots of variants: even Reddit doesn't render it consistently across its frontends.
"Lots of variants" is an understatement. There is simply no standard specification of Markdown like, say, there is a specification of HTML or a specification of C.
I thought CommonMark served that purpose (though no one implements it properly).
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If I want to read AI generated text, I do not need to go to the motte, I can simply prompt Claude. For about 22 dollars a month, I could generate not only more text than the motte produces than what I am capable of reading.
By contrast, human-generated text has at least opportunity costs. If we simple allow LLM textposting then approximately 99% of the text on this site would be LLM-generated in equilibrium.
I will grant you that it is entirely possible that some of the commentators here are mostly bots. But even so, the anti-bot rules will severely constrain their behavior. They can not simply post a few megabytes worth of text per day over hundreds or thousands of comments because that would be a clear tell.
Furthermore, from what I read, authorship aside, this is not a QC post, to put it mildly. Too long, little meat. How does it relate to the CW? No particularly new or divisive thesis.
Five years ago, it would have been tolerated because there would have been no hazard to letting it stand, people rambling about the origin of sheriffs were not generally a menace in the internet.
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Unrelatedly, a new user account created hours after a ban, commenting first and foremost on the ban decision has certainly a bit of a taste for me. But then, I am sure that no commentators here would ever stoop to creating alt accounts, so welcome to the motte I guess.
This isn't right, though. With a Claude subscription, you can only read AI-generated text based on a prompt that you put in, and furthermore, the AI-generated text you read is just a one-shot by Claude (or multiple refinements that you chose). When someone posts AI-generated text on the internet, they're providing extra value to the text beyond the AI generation: they chose the prompt, they chose the specific LLM to feed the prompt, and they also chose this generation to share. Even if that person chose the prompt and LLM randomly and decided to share the very first generation, those creative choices are encoded into the results as the person's intent.
The Motte - and almost any web forum - would be better off banning LLM-posting for this reason, IMHO. But that's a different argument than the one that someone else posting an LLM generation provides nothing to a reader that the reader can't get themselves. And that argument is wrong, and, as long as we're talking about a forum where humans are the ones clicking "Comment," that will always be wrong. (Aside: even if users were bots that had the ability to post comments without human input, this would be wrong, because any response by that bot would reflect not only the comment you posted but also the settings and pre-prompt instructions in context provided by whatever human set up that bot, which almost definitely can't be reproduced in a Claude or other LLM chatbot tool).
The main reason I don’t want LLM based content is that I come to fora to read the thoughts of humans in their own words. I think having everything run through LLMs would degrade the original content that would otherwise be produced.
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A question I've had for a while is that, well, given that LLM text written for humans is so uniformly bad, why do we expect anything else it produces to be worthwhile?
The Motte is a relatively pro-tech space. I expect people here to be more sympathetic to LLMs than the median person. The Motte is, after all, several steps removed a spin-off from SSC and Less Wrong before that, both sources that have swallowed LLM/AI technology pretty enthusiastically. Nonetheless here, when it comes to posting, there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that LLM-posting is bad, and the text that they produce is worthless slop.
Shouldn't that incline us to skepticism regarding everything else boosters and hype men say about these bots? If you read text from an LLM, it's garbage. If you talk to an LLM for an hour, the overwhelming impression you'll come away with is how dumb and uninteresting they are. This is supposed to be the rapidly-improving super-intelligence that will obsolete us? Really?
LLM text written for humans can be very useful. For quick research, short of having a team of experts on retainer who are obliged to answer you within a minute or two if you text them, the bots are obviously the answer. If I am debugging a specific Linux problem, I am not going to care that Scott could have presented the answer in a better writing style.
Here is a CW analogy for you. Guns are undeniably useful. Cheap. Scale well. Incapacitate physically stronger opponents without ever getting into close combat. Kill your enemies without needing to deal with the vagueness of poisons or henchmen.
Yet inexplicably, many places and societies restrict the use and sometimes even the bearing of guns. There are whole sports built around the fiction that you can't just shoot your opponent. How does this fit together?
Clearly, this is just societies avoiding a tragedy of the commons, an inadequate equilibrium. Your life might be slightly improved by you carrying, but it will be massively impacted if everyone around you (including kids and schizophrenics) is likewise packing. The gun CW is merely about the specifics of the tradeoffs, but very few people support just arming everyone.
As I have outlined above, permitting LLM-generated texts would transform this website in pretty much the same way as airdropping a few crates of Kalashnikovs would transform schoolyard violence.
I'm not sure I agree with the point it makes, but that's a really cool analogy.
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LLMs shouldn't be opining on politics in the same way paid shills shouldn't, there's something insincere about it. They're explicitly trained to have a political stance. They reflect on the companies that make them after all. They are like paid employees and not free citizens. Talking politics or arguing with a paid employee about politics is no good.
Whereas having someone program something for you is standard.
How can the achievements of LLMs in programming be denied? It's an objective fact, they can do these things.
Also I genuinely don't think that they're dumb or boring outside of programming. I could talk with an LLM for an hour about history, economics, technology, finance or fiction and it's suddenly near midnight. There is a lot of depth in long-context and long prompts where one can get out of 'surface-level' talk. Unfortunately, the main use-case is agentic coding where prompt adherence is very important. So the creativity can be hard to access as it rigorously tries to obey what you told it to do.
I don't think I would mind talking to someone being paid to advocate for a political position, as long they were honest about the situation. I wouldn't mind talking to a worker for a political party, the same way that I don't mind talking to party volunteers outside polling places on election day. Still, you may have a different attitude to me.
I'm not denying that LLMs might be useful in programming. I'm not a programmer myself - I neither know nor care about the specifics of that field. What I deny is that usefulness for coding clearly translates into domain-general usefulness. As far as I can tell bots are useful for some forms of symbol manipulation, but are quite limited and narrow in their usefulness beyond that. When they manipulate symbols in fields that I'm familiar with, i.e. words, I find they are consistently bad at it.
I did see something going around about LLM intelligence, something along the lines of, "compare Fable to your ten smartest friends", with the implication that Fable would easily win that comparison. All I can say in response to that is, "get better friends". I've asked bots about history, philosophy, theology, fiction, politics, and in general things that I consider myself to know a lot about, and they are invariably awful. There is just no point asking one to do anything.
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I wrote a whole post about this.
Whether or not AI text is "worthless slop" depends on context. For fiction, or original thinking? Yes. For summarizing things or presenting information? No. The reason we prohibit LLM-posting (except when clearly stated as such and to serve a purpose) is that the Motte is supposed to be a discussion site, and no one (well, almost no one) actually thinks LLMs are "discussing" anything. If you just want to see LLMs arguing back and forth, there is OpenClaw for that.
Yes, and no. AI is already very, very good at some things. This is undeniable. It is getting better at a lot of things. It is an enormously useful tool, too useful to imagine that it's going to go away or turn out to be a passing trend.
Whether it's actually going to achieve
AGP(ETA: AGI, wtf kind of Freudian slip was that?) or trigger the Singularity is what warrants skepticism.Most AI boosters do not, in fact, think it's going to become a "super-intelligence that will obsolete us."
Just a heads up, I believe that the site you linked is a fake squatter website and it doesn't actually host any forum or discussion board, evrrything is mocked, and it exists exclusively to shill some other scam website.
You're probably looking for moltbook.
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...I know that's a typo, but I'm sorry, I'm just tickled by the idea of an LLM successfully achieving autogynephilia.
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I mean, yeah. It does. My personal experiences with LLMs (both at work doing programming and reading people's LLM-generated essays) have been profoundly unsatisfying. Therefore, I have extremely low expectations for them doing anything else well. But I think the people you see hyping up LLMs are not meeting your first criterion. For example, self_made_human has been pretty consistent in his opinions that he finds LLMs to be impressive at all the various tasks he sets to them, including writing. So it makes perfect sense that he is upbeat about their prospects in other areas. And I think the same goes for our other posters who are LLM fans - they find the models to be super impressive and therefore think they will continue to impress in the future.
I have no need to set LLMs to the task of proving or disproving longstanding mathematical conjectures, and it happens anyway. I'm sure the skeptics have some excuse. I do not particularly care to hear it these days.
But yes, I find them incredibly useful. I retain alpha in knowing how to prompt them well, but that hasn't been that important for a good while. Use the best models, give them the necessary context, scrutinize or test their output? If you're not getting good results in July 2026, there's a skill issue involved. Not mine, not the model's, PEBCAK for whoever is reading this and thinks that applies to them.
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I suppose my bafflement needs a top-level post at some point. It's easy to read something like this and start to feel nervous, and then I interact with an LLM for ten minutes and I am cured. These things are garbage.
Maybe it's just a matter of different fields, or different priorities. I'm looking for creativity, insight, and personality, whereas some the people worried about them are looking for... I don't know, writing computer code? Maybe in five years I'll be turned into a paperclip all while continuing to sneer that the best these systems can do is beige idiocy. LLMs don't need to be worthwhile to be a threat, and maybe garbage will destroy me one day.
Also @ChickenOverlord, please keep in mind that the cheap consumer AI you use to do your white-collar work for you or to compose an email is not the same as the one being developed by multibilliondollar companies to push the limits of technological possibility and/or conquer the world.
At the same time,
reads like a bunch of hot air about a bunch of hot air. I can't take those alignment people seriously.
We have no evidence that mythos/fable isn't the frontier or that they have another much better model in the back.
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I can echo that bafflement. Just started a new job and, like the old job, LLM usage is mandatory. And I can't just melt into the crowd like I could back at my megacorp. Every day I alternate between "this is nice and convenient" and "how did it make such a simple and obvious mistake?" It helps/hurts that most of what I'm doing is Python backend and Typescript frontend, both of which I don't care for, so I assume there's some Gell-Mann amnesia going on too. Though I'm still working on what is essentially a basic bitch CRUD app, I've yet to try it on anything truly complex.
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Because the reason the Motte is pro-tech has a lot to do with the average occupation of its users, and that occupation is what the average LLM company has been actively targeting for replacement.
It's not that much more complex than that.
Understand that there are broadly two types of programmer: the people who like making computer do things, and the people who like writing code because they enjoy logic puzzles and symbol manipulation. For the former (myself included), AI is a godsend. For the latter, it's an apocalypse.
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It's not about to replace me for a long while yet. I am merely pivoting from code monkey to LLM wrangler. And 90% of my job as a software dev at a respectable German company is attending meetings, submitting forms for approval, and pretending to care about the minutiae of regulations. Thank God for our buerocracy; our economy might be doomed in the long run but it's good insurance against human obsolescence.
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LMOA, and his latest comment is even more on the nose:
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I’m sure it wouldn’t get banned, but IMO it’s too long and (granted, maybe because I skimmed it because it was too long) unclear why anyone really should care about the points it raises.
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AI tells are correlated with low quality garbage content, but are not solely the cause of it. In fact I spend hours every day reading thousands of words of output from my own clanker, which I wouldn't do at all if I didn't find it useful and worthwhile.
The fact is that this dump of slop is not worth reading at all. Get it off my timeline.
There are plenty of bloggers who type with human hands. Mute, block, report, and ignore all of the slopmeisters, and the gems will come to the top
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I can't speak for others but yes, I care about the provenance. I'm interested in what a human has to say, not a clanker. And if the human has thoughts that they can't be bothered to elucidate, then I'm not interested in hearing the clanker puppet speaking on their behalf.
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Not that I'm interested in reading LLM slop dumps either, but I think if people are getting banned for LLM usage, there needs to be at least an explicit rule against using AI in this way (that I would fully support FWIW).
I have submitted a pull request.
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Strongly agreed. This is a very good thing to ban, but it ought to be a clear entry on the list, not just "this probably counts as low-effort and/or egregiously-obnoxious, if you really think about it".
I'd shorten or suspend @Nwallins' ban in addition to writing such a rule, both because it arguably wasn't clear enough before and because the shame of the new rule should count as punishment too.Edit: changed my mind about and crossed out half of this after @netstack pointed us to the prior warning.
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The opening disclaimers could be rephrased, with—as far as I can verify—no loss of accuracy:
I am not sure how much of any of this is accurate. I didn't one-shot it with an LLM, but did I two- or three-shot it? I'm not telling you. I'm also not telling you how much I worked on this, only that I did (pinky swear!). Does reading through it before endorsing it and inviting criticism count as "working on"? If so, then I guess all of you have now also worked on this essay!
I'm throwing this up so all of you very fine people can do the actual hard work of checking which parts are true, which parts are hallucinations, and whether it was 50%, 100%, or 200% longer than it needed to be to make a coherent point.
I read this thing because I was assigned it on janitor duty, which is why the above rephrasing (also not one-shotted with an LLM!) is a bit testy. Had I encountered this in the wild, I would've read the first two lines and simply replied, "If you're not going to bother writing it, I'm not going to bother reading it," if I even bothered to reply at all.
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What do you think of the small-sized war between coal miners and police in the 1920s? To an extent I think you're saying 'things started to go wrong with Jim Crow and maybe the LA riots'. But some of the biggest unrest in the US had little to do with race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Or the British using troops. They didn't have police back then so cavalry would do the work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre#Cavalry_charge
I think there's always been a certain heavier-handed aspect to policing when going beyond mere law enforcement into the political realm of what laws should there even be, how should power be distributed, who is in control. It's not a post-WW2 thing but an eternal thing. Riots and aggressive policing are two sides of the same coin, it's about showing who's in control in a visceral way.
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I Know I probably shouldn't be feeding the troll but to the extent that such a thing as a "Peelian Ideal" exists I feel like this ideal is embodied in the sentiment that...
...and to that extent I would argue that the US has not "Erred" or "Inverted" that ideal so much as we are the only nation that still takes Peel's Principles seriously.
No, in the US the biggest job of the police is to go around looking for some way of ruining an ordinary citizen's day.
Are you as casually disrespectful and belligerent towards people in person as you are online? If you are I feel like that would explain why you keep having negative interactions with cops
Negative interactions with cops come from having so many laws that if you meet a cop, either he's busting you or you'd better be on guard not to call attention to some law you may be violating. And because they get aggressive on you if you don't "respect their authority" as South Park puts it, and because in effect they have the power of corporal and capital punishment. That you think it is reasonable that you act with extreme deference to someone who is ruining your day or risk, e.g., being shot dead in your own driveway with your wife watching because you didn't respect his authority sufficiently is just Stockholm Syndrome. The police are not the people and the people are not the police; the police have been placed over the people to keep them in line, and the people know it.
Anecdata here, but since you made an absolute statement my anecdotes are a disproof. Here are the past 3 interactions I had with cops:
Waving to my highway patrolman neighbor when I passed him coming home last week while he was driving out to go on duty, he waved back and smiled.
Called the cops on some 10 year olds who were driving a golf cart through the neighborhood (I wouldn't have cared if they were ~14 or older, 10 is way to young to be driving on public roads like that). The officer who investigated called me back after he failed to find them (I assume they had already arrived at their destination and were no longer out and about by the time the cop was able to investigate). He was very polite on the phone and apologized for not being able to find them.
Got a speeding ticket in a notorious speed trap town between where I live and my in-laws live. I was actually speeding and was retarded not to be more careful.
So, uh, 2 out of 3 of my past interactions fail your absolute standard of "either he's busting you or you'd better be on guard not to call attention to some law you may be violating".
Maybe don't make such absolute, broad, sweeping generalizations about roughly 750,000 people (the total number of cops in the USA).
As the joke goes...
The average encounter a citizen has with a cop is in the negative context. Copwaver Georg, who is in the cohort of the people who call the cops, including in situations that don't personally concern them, and makes sure to wave to every passing patrolman, thus racking up 1000 positive interactions with cops per month, is an outlier who should not be counted.
Are you implying that 10 year olds driving past me on public roads doesn't personally concern me?
I count personal concern as something that immediately threatens your person. Being concerned that they might hurt someone, or themselves, is more like civic concern.
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About as much as the ones who drove past me (on electric mopeds) on a field in a park. Yes, they're violating some law, regulation or rule. But the laws, regulations and rules are restrictive enough to be intolerable if you actually try to follow all of them. And by what criterion is a 10-year-old driving past you any different than a 14-year-old, given they're both violating the law?
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Count him or not, he can't make up for all the negative interactions. What's the typical interaction with a cop? He's giving you a ticket. If you're lucky, a warning. Or telling you you can't do something or go somewhere. If you drive by one you are likely very concerned he'll come after you for some violation. If you walk by one you STILL have to be a little concerned they'll get on your case for something.
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Interesting topic but not interested in sorting through machine output, and even less interested in talking to one with you as a middleman.
The h1 headline hooked me enough to read 2 sentences without noticing the disclaimer at the top. I was sorely disappointed that it was just slop.
One of my biggest criticisms of HTML and Markdown is how it renders
h1and the other headings. I really wish it could scale based on the depth of headings, such that a loneh1rendered as the smallest heading, only getting larger when there were subheadings.Now I wonder if CSS could do that...
Personally, I like to make all the headings have the same font size, and to denote section/pseudo-section hierarchy with padding/border/margin on the left. Example (also using the nonstandard
helement, but with the proper accessibility attributes added)You can do something like
section:not(:has(h2,h3,h4,h5,h6)) h1{font-size:inherit;}. But Markdown doesn't have provisions for section elements.More options
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You say this isn't an example of ai writing but I noticed a few very significant tells of AI slop. I won't harp on the section formatting and random inclusion of a table because those aren't necessarily bad things, but a few of these paragraphs engage in possibly the single thing I hate most about AI writing: the tendency to tack on vacuous, unnecessary, self-congratulatory statements at the end of paragraphs. For example:
... If it's such a good demonstration, the reader should already have concluded that from reading it. Cut!
Again, this should be obvious from the rest of the paragraph. Cut!
I won't go so far as to directly accuse you of composing this essay wholly with AI, but it is definitely AI inflected in that it contains a lot of information that is likely true but not necessarily interesting for humans. A good essayist should prioritize. You spend about as long talking about the etymology of the word sheriff as you spend talking about the history and effectiveness of london's municipal police department, and as a consequence completely gloss over the historical sources actually relevant for demonstrating your central point.
As a maxim: develop taste. Keep ONLY the delicious bits and spit the rest out.
Sure glad the mods are banning all the lamers posting their own thoughts about current events so that we can have a steady stream of lengthy slop-pieces to read!
I don't think the clanker problem is quite so bad yet that we need affirmative action policing for humans.
Yet- growth mindset!
I share @jkf 's annoyance with a couple of the recent bans. Fine, they weren't great posts and I get the motivation of the "no boo outgroup" rule, but i dislike the side effect of incentivizing main thread submissions to be A Manifesto.
It does seem odd that a large fraction of recent top level posts have resulted in bans. I don't think we have a good balance of required effort and culture warring. Or it's a weird tradition to disallow users that start conversations from participating in them.
It's long been an issue on the Motte (and predecessors) that posting at top level was playing with fire. That's how we got longposting, because the mods like it, but between AI and the mods getting wise to partisan broadsides padded out by words-words-words, even that doesn't work as much any more.
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No, he said:
I interpret those statements as meaning that the comment is wholly LLM-written, but the result of multiple rounds of "working on" prompts rather than a single "one-shot" prompt, especially since "endorsing" something is basically an explicit statement that the endorser didn't write it himself.
I think you’re right, but I also read the disclaimer as saying “this isn’t AI”. It’s pretty bad communication to say that something is “not one shotted into an AI” to mean “this was written by an AI”. I guess he assumed it would be obvious that it was AI written, so he didn’t need to actually say it? But I ended up reading far too much of it before realizing it was, precisely because I thought the disclaimer was saying that it wasn’t.
In "exception that proves the rule" sense, I immediately intuited "not one shotted into an AI" to mean "curated from multiple shots at AI-output." And the use of the word "endorse" conveys OP didn't write it.
I also didn't read any of it.
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I'll restrict myself to one point of historical autism (leaving aside things like "slave patrols", where you need to do more serious work to get out of nonsense 2020-history, or LLMs' obsession with easy contrasts): your AI has gotten the role of the Anglo-Saxon sheriff wildly wrong, and has essentially read the later Normans back into it. Anglo-Saxon sheriffs did not preside over a shire court, where shires existed, and accounting for the incredible legal variety of what a "shire" was and how it operated - they were intended as functionary stewards, junior to the (supposed) legal representative, the ealdorman, with minor input into the local lord's justice. Posse comitatus is also a hell of an anachronism even for the Normans. If you mean the levy, the sheriff had no power to summon it except as instructed by his lord, and if you mean the hue and cry, that could be raised by any figure of sufficient local standing.
If you're interested in looking further into the subject, I found in my younger years that the origins of state prosecution are actually the more interesting thread running through early English law. My LLM expands:
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Shouldn't state police be mentioned somewhere?
It may be worth noting that this situation also prevails across the entirety of those states (including Massachusetts and New York) that have incorporated all (or almost all) of their land into municipal governments.
Possibly relevant is this court decision regarding whether New Jersey's governor has the power to temporarily, but unilaterally, take control of a municipal police department. The state supreme court dodged that general question because, after the takeover occurred, the legislature explicitly blessed this specific takeover without passing a law to govern the general case.
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