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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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In such a world, what is the point of writing on The Motte?

I think this analogizes pretty closely with the question "in a world with ample free pornography and sex toys, what's the point of having sex with another person?"

For some subset of the population the answer is "there is no point, I get the same dopamine release in either case, and the porn is easier and cheaper."

For others, there's some clear value-add for having another fully realized human with their own history, volition, likes, dislikes, and, I might suggest, element of unpredictability in the mix. An LLM may create an utterly convincing simulacrum of a given person, or even the interaction of many persons... but we cannot actually know what those people would do in the actual situation unless we have them actually interact.

I, personally, have come to think of this as the concept of "authenticity." I want to believe that I am interacting with someone in the 'real' world who is expressing their actual beliefs, and exchanging raw, unfiltered arguments with the particular rhetorical flourish that is unique to that person.

This ultimately implies that I should start favoring face-to-face interactions in person over any kind of digital communications, which are much more likely to be mediated by AI in some form.

And... that's the approach I'm taking. I'm actually very glad that themotte split off Reddit so that it is now substantially less likely that bots will overwhelm the discourse.

But... it is now officially impossible to tell if the text you're reading on a given forum is the direct result of human cognitive processes or not. So my days of 'suspending my disbelief' and assuming everyone reading these very words are human minds and all the responses are genuine statements made by someone who can be convinced via argumentation or at least may modify their own beliefs are numbered. And that number is probably in the double digits, at best, now.

So I'll retreat to even more restricted/gatekept forums, or groupchats, and eventually only personal, face-to-face interactions will satisfice my preferences.

So what's the point of posting on themotte? Eventually there won't be one, unless we achieve a way to technologically 'fingerprint' all the comments with a 'proof of humanity' or something.

"in a world with ample free pornography and sex toys, what's the point of having sex with another person?"

Well, sex is about power, so the point is a reward and demonstration of your ability to get someone to do it with you.

So what's the point of posting on themotte?

Increasing one's personal understanding and theorycrafting abilities about the operations and emergent behavior of the most dangerous megafauna that has ever evolved on this planet. Younger men tend to prefer more physical Leviathans to the abstract ones; which is why they show interest in other large animals (and dinosaurs), along with the largest and loudest vehicles (fire trucks, fighter jets, etc.). When the only heuristic one has of the power and threat of a thing is physical size (and to a point, rank) it makes sense that one would study the largest and most powerful; it's a survival instinct.

The interactions between posters, and what gets posted here, have been foundational to my own personal political theories (and, somewhat troublingly, religious ones); I don't get the chance to talk to many people who are particularly interesting in those regards (or who I trust enough). And I don't think the most otherwise-capable of LLMs measure up because their output is indistinguishable from the standard progressive or young adult contrarian, so if I ever want to hear those takes I can talk to the bot instead.

and all the responses are genuine statements made by someone who can be convinced via argumentation or at least may modify their own beliefs are numbered

LLMs still can't read technical drawings and likely won't be able to for a very long time; it'll be worthwhile for much longer to hang around people and forums built around doing actual work. South Park's recent episode had it right, but that show is not equipped to make this point.

LLMs still can't read technical drawings and likely won't be able to for a very long time.

Who knows?.. Multimodal GPT-4 is imminent.

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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."

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