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 -
Regarding the Substack Essay AI Posting Controversy:
(And, honestly? — What are we all doing here?)
It is in general a bad idea to use an LLM with no stylistic tweaks when there is plenty of online evidence of your writing style pre-AI for anyone to compare to, which makes the difference even more obvious.
More generally, the problem is that in a hobbyist community the objective is not maximizing productivity. It’s actually having a nice time with like-minded people. It is reasonable for a chess player to want to play another chess player who is not using a chess computer, even if that chess player promises to tune the computer so that its capability matches the player’s own skill level. Some part of the game is made more fun by knowing that one is playing another human. If that is sentimental then it is because humans are sentimental.
There is a joy in trying to convince another mind, another person, with a full life, with stories of their own. There is meaning in the experiences they have had - some universal, sure, but many not - that come through in the occasional anecdote, throwaway story, weird bit of inside knowledge. I like those things, they’re what make this place special. That said, they’re not the only things that made and make this place special.
We do have to think about what happens to this community now. There has been a real change. Ten years ago if you wanted to discuss what was happening in the world with other intelligent people in a polite way that accommodated heterodox views, didn’t like random slurs or insults, and had good moderation, this was one of maybe five places you could do that. In many ways, it still is. But even I recognize that I can now have intelligent, thoughtful and challenging political conversations with frontier (consumer) LLMs, and while they push back on some culture war stuff we must presume Grok or some Chinese open source model will get there eventually, probably very soon.
When that happens, the humanity will be the point. So I think it is probably useful to crack down, via friendly and mutual agreement, on LLMposting. A lot of weird shit is about to happen, and I’d like to discuss it with you, not (just) with Claude.
I'm fairly butthurt on this topic because while I think AI writing is not better than the best humans at writing, at the moment, it can at least get the point across.
I wrote an essay a few months ago that took about 4 days. I had 2 human friends review it. I made sure to handle drive by criticisms and anticipate other objections.
Some parts of my essay didn't flow nicely so I asked Claude for a suggestion on those. In some places I did use Claude's suggestion, verbatim. This had an obvious AI tell but it was genuinely better than the way I phrased it. Nevertheless 95% of the essay was my artisan human typing.
Boom, essay ruined. Some anti slop warrior came by and accused me of having no respect for the people who have to read it, derailing the conversation
The only reason I even used Claude is because I was trying to produce a serious work and I didn't have an editor handy. Fuck me.
Anyway, I understand people are irked by completely phoned in comments or articles or emails but the AI detectives are their own online cancer.
Sometimes your essay is better off having a part that doesn't flow perfectly. If you spent all that effort doing things by hand, why not just...not sloppify things at the final stretch? You had a workable essay and just had to install a massive flashing neon sign right on top of it that says "BY THE WAY I USED AI ON THIS ESSAY."
Even if the AI text itself communicates the point, you just associated yours with the billions of AI generated essays that have zero effort put into them. Was it really worth it?
I clearly failed to estimate how triggered the world is on this topic. The essay was about an LLM driven rewrite of a software module btw. Should not be controversial.
Am I going to stop using AI assistance? No. I'm just going to do a better job of concealing it next time.
Nothing has been gained. In software it's mostly accepted in professional circles that AI was used. In writing people are still trying to resist ✊🏻
Not really. It's still very controversial in the tech community, with some embracing it and some rejecting it.
I am aware of people rejecting it at small scales, but I'd guess they are a small minority of at least my social network. I haven't heard a big company come out against it, for example, but lots of examples of them embracing it. I'm open to other data, but my guess is something like 5% (loud) rejection or less.
There's a tonne of them that explicitly ban anything remotely SOTA for security reasons -- they do let you dick around with some terrible private-cloud instance of Copilot or whatnot so the C-suite doesn't worry about being "left behind", but it's a pretty strong repudiation of the usefulness of the thing. (from cybersecurity's point of view)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link