site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13820 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Ironically if the tranformer architecture came out in like 2030 instead of 2017 and compute was abundant relative to today we might have seen a FOOM

Unlikely, I do think you are missing something fundamental. One of the big changes these days from the early days of yore, is that now there is money in creating and curating hard-expert level datasets. Back in the day if you wanted data to train some model, you spend money scraping the internet for data that was not explicitly designed for ML and then money labeling it. It is expensive and time consuming. This is the ImageNet stuff. These days because transformers and the like have demonstrated such a fundamental capacity, and the business folks and VCs finally see dollar signs, there is a strong business case to create data explicitly for ML research. They literally hire experts to write Question-Answer pairs with intermediary steps for model training. It costs orders of magnitude more time and money to do this. But it produces order of magnitude better models. How much of the scaling we have now is because of this is opaque but it is significant.

This makes FOOM just as unlikely in 2030 as it did in 2017, because models would still have needed to demonstrate the business case for creating those datasets as they do now. They weren't just "discovered". That limits the FOOM speed.

They literally hire experts to write Question-Answer pairs with intermediary steps for model training.

I've done that. I don't work on AI. I design electronics. At work there was a volunteer opportunity to train AI avaliable for people with graduate degrees in STEM. I solved a bunch of college textbook style problems with intermediate steps. And reviewed other solutions and critiqued them for accuracy. No idea if I was fact checking fellow humans or AI output.

this is a fair point but I'd counter that even without the AI use case there are business incentives to create and curate well tagged data for marketing and social media uses. I don't want to argue too much in defense of specifically how late the transformer model would need to be discovered to make FOOM possible, the path didn't go as Yud predicted. In theory this there could be some other architecture that would have different features but that's unfalsifiable.

create and curate well tagged data for marketing and social media uses

Possibly, I don't really have any insight into the sort of data that is used for these purposes but my gut intuition tells me it is likely significantly more qualitative than the level of quantitative data used for model training. It's likely not QA-pairs + reasoning steps.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats