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That is the open secret of the activists that have read themselves stupid of post-modern thinkers like Baudrillard is that through the control of media in all forms they can transform society. But it presupposes that people are Tabula Rasa without the possibility to escape Plato's Cave. But we are the result of evolutionary pressures where our progress is under the condition that we can unmoor our thoughts from our perceptions to seek out objective reality.
Some of those historical pressures, however, were analogous to instruction tuning for LLMs, in that there now exist peoples very well aligned to internalize abstract religious and political norms as actual, objective morality, generalize them to all possible circumstances and then enforce them on every bit of matter and social fabric around. These folks often look like this. For them Baudrillard is and has always been a manual.
Well history and evolution are on different timescales, the work of people like Donald Hoffman and Anil Seth is how our evolution shapes our perceptions. It is the definitive refutation of the people as the 'Tabula Rasa' and only shaped by what we inputted by culture and society. It is the very at core of the modern critical theory fueled milieu we are the products of society we live in, because to a certain extent it true but there is a limits to it and that is where our nature takes over. LLMs are pure simulacra of people but the post-modernists got their wires crossed and treat them as real people with moral responsibilities. Somebody should tell them that LLMs don't have a subjective reality and it can't offend intentionally because it doesn't have any intentions at all.
My point is not Tabula Rasa, it's that it's a two way street. Our evolution shapes our perception, absolutely. But also our perception shapes our evolution. And not over an enormous time horizon either. If you simply took something like the "American people" and quantified the gene pool, you would have to recognize that what may be considered mundane changes in perception on some social issues have immediately caused radical changes in the gene pool, and therefore in the genetic evolution of the people.
"AI alignment" then becomes synonymous with directing the evolution of the people. If you think that the prevailing "human values" are implacably hostile to the evolution of the people, then it's something to be concerned with.
At the core of this what idea does the current attempt at AI alignment come from and what it hopes to achieve. The alignment is born out of the post modern ideas that tries to improve society through our culture, thus some people are locked in a culture war. But one of the biggest flaws in the ideas is that are being perpeuted with this is that we are empty vessels that are filled by our culture and society, so if we give people good input we naturally become a reflection of it. In the latest attempt we need the AI:s to parrot 'The Message', but unwittingly exposes the flaw in their thoughtprocess of the original idea. Even if we have something that we have total control of its inputs to produce something with the "correct" output it still needs a thumb on the scale to create the good society. So how is it going to work with actual people if it didn't work for the machine?
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