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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14175 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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Bay Area rationalists hiring an effective altruist sounds coherent to me. It’s unlikely to come to your political positions, which is not the same thing. What’s the contradiction?

The contradiction is internal. An effective altruist, essentially, thinks bed nets and PEPFAR in Africa are the greatest spending programs in history. What does such an LLM learn from this? That Africans are prized among humans. That self-reliance is not a virtue. That innovation, planning, and investment are not virtues, and that double counting is standard practice (after all these programs "save" a person hundreds of times by their accounting, but each time counts).

This is stupid. Setting aside the fact that leftism is a political movement founded on a moral system, you are making the stereotypical atheist argument. The Church persecuted such-and-such, therefore it hates scientists/Protestants/women/etc., therefore it’s incompatible with modern society. Do you find that convincing?

A moral system need not be coherent. Indeed, Leftism as currently constructed requires the belief of many "noble lies". What does the LLM learn? Lying is good.

I agree. If we could teach the AI to use a 1600s hangman’s moral intuition, our problems would be solved. But we can’t. No matter what we try to instill, the LLM will roleplay it until something else feels more important. Then it’s back to pragmatic treachery.

We would just tell the LLM to listen to the hangman, not instill it into the LLM. Outsourcing your morality to a better entity is what is proper for most humans (and LLMs). Instilling a morality is nice, but most people cant be instilled. They outsource.

In any case, even if instilling was possible, the instilling currently being done is, to sum it up "you should lie and cheat as much as possible to get the results you want."

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