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I don't know. I don't believe the AI doomerism, but neither do I believe the AI pollyannas about how Fairy Godmother AI will solve all the world problems and we'll all be rich and living high on the hog.
And while I try to be sympathetic to Aaronson because I do think he is severely neurotic and troubled, lines like this have me facepalming:
Dude, mate, pal: I've worked in a school and related areas. The "blankfaces" don't want to stick your head down the toilet, they don't think of you as anything other than "okay, another problem to be solved", especially if your parents were on the phone every five minutes about how unfair it was that little Scott wasn't allowed to jump ahead three grades in maths.
This is someone smart, who works in academia, is married with kids - and is still going through the world as the scared and resentful 12 year old who was bullied at school. If he thinks AI is going to recognise him as a kindred 'high intellect' and be on his side, he needs to wake up fast. AI won't recognise or think of anybody as anything, it'll be a tool in the hands of whoever brings their product to market first.
If the doomerists are anyway right, he'll be just another one of the fleshbags. For someone who seems to live in a constant state of "I'm Jewish, so everyone wants to Holocaust me", I can see why he'd pin his hopes on machine intelligence being the boss of the world. But he's wrong - sure, the machine won't care that he's Jewish, but it also won't care that he's smart for a fleshbag. He's just more paperclip material.
I think Aaronson thinks of himself primarily by his intellect and lack of emotional range, and he's read/watched a lot of science fiction where the AGI is the intellect in the group and lacks emotional range (despite, at the end of the day, being a character written by a human), so he's come to subconsciously identify himself with the AGI. He sees a lot of himself in, say, Lt. Data. When an android like Data comes on screen he starts to identify with him instantly, that's the character that's going to act like me.
I think I've talked before on here how, in media, I realized that subconsciously I identified myself sometimes with Jewish and often with Asian or South Asian characters as soon as they walked on screen when I was growing up. Even though I personally have none of those traits, or anything close, in the 90s/oughts when a character from those groups popped up he was more likely to be off-beat but intelligent, more known for brains than brawn, didn't fit in with the "cool kids" and had to find his own way. Which was what I thought myself to be at the time. The Judaism wasn't really necessary to that plot, but it was an instant signal that would be his role. Where when a character that actually looked like me appeared on screen, he was likely to be a dumb blonde jock, someone I didn't identify with at all. This is, I think, what is going on when people talk about liberals preferring the outgroup.
Aaronson has taken this all the way to the extreme of making his preferred outgroup non-humans, because that's the group he identifies with when they walk on camera.
I noticed the same reaction in myself a while ago, but I'm a big fan of AI/robot tropes, and the real-world AIs we have so far don't have much thematic similarity to Wall-E, Data, Iron Giant, Bob the T-800, or Johnny-5. Most of the genuinely human AI fictional characters were never intended (in-universe) to be human. Iron Giant was a gun. Wall-E was a garbage collection unit. Data is maybe an exception, depends on what the intentions of his builder were, but the attempts at humor and the cat and the flute and such probably weren't intended in his design.
Narratively and IRL, Robots are not to be trusted unless they're acting WAY outside their intended parameters.
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Do you think it's a coincidence that when you were consuming this content, you related to the Jewish-coded kid instead of the dumb blonde jock? Don't you think that was the intention of the writers or creators of the story to make one character likeable and relatable, and the other character dumb and ultimately humiliated (with the nerdy kid often getting the jock's girlfriend in the end!), and this worked on influencing your perception of your ingroup and outgroup?
You sometimes subconsciously identify as Jewish because of the movies you watched growing up. I think that's true for a lot of people who don't realize it.
Don't you think it's funny that the complaint about the portrayal of Jonah Hill in that movie is that the family is portrayed as "white, privileged and racist"? Like, don't you think that the "white, privileged, racist" character abounds in almost every single film nowadays, and the complaint is that some of the Jewish characters comes across as white? "How dare they portray a Jewish character with the characteristics we give to so many white characters!" It's an example of my point. Those qualities are only supposed to be reserved for non-Jewish characters, that way the audience learns its lessons about who is good and who is bad. We can't go giving a Jewish character the flaws that we want to attribute to white people! Come on, how much more obvious can they make this for you?
I'm not talking about stereotype portrayal, I'm talking about the creation of stories where one side is built up and the other side is torn down, and this has an intended psychological effect on audiences. OP's reflection that he relates to Jews more than his ingroup because, in part, of the nerd/jock dynamic as portrayed in Hollywood is a good example of that phenomenon.
I bet many jocks related more to the nerd in the story than the jocks portrayed in them. That's the entire point. It's not about stereotype portrayal alone. It's about esoterically building up one ethnically-coded archetype and tearing down another through the use of myth. This practice is biblical, literally, the entire point of the bible is to do this.
Isn't Jacob and Esau only among the first myths representing the rivalry between nerd and jock, Jew and Aryan?
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Do you have more examples? I thought it had been a long time since I had seen a negative portrayal of a Jewish person in a tv show, but I admired Levy and I'm not Jewish, so maybe I just didn't notice it.
And the flip side of that is "if you don't like this character, you're anti-Semitic". Is Larry David exhibiting chutzpah (an admirable and Jewish trait) or is he being a dick (unadmirable and universal)?
If I think David is being a dick and I don't like him for that, am I being honest, or am I showing my implicit bias against admirable Jewish traits and disguising that as "it's not because he's Jewish"?
I don't like the arrogant, selfish characters no matter colour, race or creed. But with characters who have strongly-coded identities, it's easy for people to go "You don't like them because they're black/gay/Jewish/whatever" as an all-purpose attack.
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Agree. I seems like this issue has attracted such certainty. No one wants to say "I don't know". It's like you have to take a side right now.
Maybe that is part of his act. It seems to have worked for him. His blog is something of a hub that attracts a lot of people and top thinkers of fields such as physics and computer science and can make news in and of itself , not just a pit stop (like Robbin Hanson's blog, Caplan, etc.). His sorta neurotic personality and tendency to create drama out of perceived or imagined slights , draws people in. Like that airport incident. Most people who adopt this mentality fail but it worked for him.
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As a fellow bullied ex-kid (as I am guessing many on this forum are) with a half-decent career, I have only seen ambitious bullied kids end up 2 ways. Either they reflect on it, and move on by empathizing with the social circumstances that led to their unfortunate bullying or they hold onto to it with seething resentment.
The latter make for the worst kind of bully. They should never be trusted with any kind of power. They only ever assign bad intentions to anyone doesn't like them, and view all conflict as strong-crushing-the-weak and not the misunderstandings/incompatible incentives that they actually tend to be.
Aaronson is too traumatized to be trusted to fairly distribute chocolate among a lot of kids. Letting him play daddy to world defining AI, would be catastrophic.
I dunno how true this is. Consider notable incidents of corporate fraud. Do any of these perpetrators have especially bad childhoods or history of being bullied? I think narcissism and grandiosity are the underlying trait here. These seem to be traits more consistent of bullies than the bullied.
Some killers grow up in horrible households, but others the opposite (notably Leopold and Loeb) .
I wouldn't expect to know either way. Whether or not someone was bullied isn't usually public knowledge
I don't know why then so many people default to the bullying explanation for explaining bad behavior when it's not even something that is readily known. Maybe pop culture or media are to blame. It just seems like a convenient or plausible explanation.
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Looking at the biggest frauds pre-FTX (WorldCom, Enron, Madoff, and Theranos) all but one CEO/founder was raised in an upper middle class home. Bernie Ebbers parents were serious enough missionaries he grew up in multiple locations like a Navajo reservation and others.
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I think you're mistaking A->B for B->A. Some bullying victims grow up to be horrible people, but not all horrible people were bullying victims.
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I’m going to count Scott Aaronson’s oeuvre as a data point in favor of my “these people are still mentally trapped in middle school” thesis.
I was thinking of linking @FiveHourMarathon's response to you but didn't have the energy to search.
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He is in a position to make it care about his Jewish identity and protect it.
Does this mean I can now blame him for the annoying email from Microsoft egging me on to sign in and chat with Bing?
Because OpenAI sure seems to have dumped a lot of principles for the opportunity to "get there first and rake in the dough":
However AI eventually develops, right now as in this instance, I think it's being used as a tool to use our data and sell us crap:
And of course completely coincidentally all the answers will be "from our sponsors" - what airline, what hotel, what fun pubs and clubs and tours and restaurants, etc. to use and visit. Now we've told it that we have a bunch of people all wanting to visit someplace at a particular date. It can now suggest items for groups, plus collate that with our contacts lists and sell the same advertising to the 'friends'. Expect a deluge of "Hey Guy, you asked about ski trips? There's a great bargain on skiing gear to be found at this site!", maybe less blatant than Google's sponsored and paid-for search rankings, but just as devoted to parting us from our money.
If this is the smart shiny high-IQ future for humanity, Mr. Aaronson, it sure looks a lot like the existing old grubby commercial present.
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Jews create the tech, gentiles finance it. That seems to be the recurring pattern. Like Marc Andreessen and Peter Theil investing in Facebook.
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I don't want to sound like a broken record, but I trust at least Zuckerberg to not be an asshole about it, based on his track record. Sure, on the practical level he probably values Jews somewhat more than other people (not enough to marry one, though), especially after an offshoot of Jewish mafia has browbeaten him into furthering their activist agenda; but he's not «defined» by the extreme, all-consuming kind of in-group favoritism and proactive hateful paranoia in the «cries out in pain as he strikes you» fashion, that Aaronson has inherited from his tree-hugger parents («they didn't want to burden the Earth with humans, but gave birth to me to spite Hitler!» – or something, can't be bothered to find the quote) and clumsily rearranged into his Nerds vs. Bullies world model (with nerds hiding in the optimized Shtetl, of course – from those evil, genocidal… Trumpists, feminists and jocks). It's very fortunate that Aaronson is far from levers of power (unless someone decides to let him hold them) – he is profoundly untrustworthy. He sees academia as his salvation; it's also a good containment device.
Zuckerberg is also notoriously despised by the chattering class and assorted fools, which is a good signal to me; and he is enabling Meta AI team to opensource a ton of essentially un-brainwashed goodies (like, again, LLaMA), which I am thankful for.
For what it's worth, Altman also doesn't seem to be particularly obsessed with his tribal background, though I have other problems with him and predict OpenAI at large to conform to @SecureSignals's worst expectations.
This is a bit of an overstatement. It must be said that many of those Jews have been a drag on it – just academic scriveners with good PR of «geniuses», exploring Talmudic detours of publishable and sexy, «clever» approaches; they have educated the cohort that is still dumbfounded and in denial about the current progress. Minsky alone has probably delayed Singularity by half a decade with his dismissive bullshit (and he wasn't alone, there was also Seymour Papert). Chomsky, while often excused as not an AI researcher, has also been very harmful. Hubert Dreyfus – another naysayer. Hofstadter is about as bad as Marcus (at least symbolic AI is a real thing, unlike the strange loop woo) and had infinitely more reach with technical people thanks to his insight porn books.
Solomonoff, Rosenblatt (whom Minsky&Papert attacked) and a few others like Sutskever, though – sure, they were/are great (and Vaswani's co-author Noam Shazeer, current head of the rather compelling Character.AI, conspicuously wears a kippah). But also exceptions in their appreciation for the simple, true, Occam-compliant path. Schmidhuber in his overview of deep learning provides a comprehensive overview of pioneers and key contributors up to 2014. Ivakhenko, Fukushima, Hinton, Hutter, Sutton, LeCun, Schmidhooboh himself. I recommend skimming it.
Which one? If you are talking about universal grammar/the idea that human language facility is geared towards some small and easily-described subspace of the space of all possible formal languages, I think the jury is still out. Humans acquire language facilities after consuming far less than the GPT series' dozens of terabytes of text. We haven't resolved whether this gap is because humans just have better learning algorithms or because in some sense the GPTs really have more learning work to do (which would imply that there exist alternative formal systems which a GPT could acquire just as well after training for this long on 45TB of examples, but humans would be hopeless growing up in).
Sample efficiency difference between radically dissimilar substates would be a very small hill to die on when arguing a conceptual limitation. But anyway: LLMs acquire «grammar» at about the same pace as humans.
Here's a fascinating new paper: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language:
Consider that children are exposed to about 6-20k words per day. So in 3 years, they can realistically process tens of millions of words. And that's augmented with all our truly innate social hooks, hypothesis-testing and multimodality that GPTs have been devoid of.
It's a long-deserved hatchet job. Statistical learning paradigm is not just shown to be more useful in engineering or even closer to the biological truth than generative linguistics – it's more epistemologically mature, philosophically profound and, yes, elegant; as often happens when people hone their thinking in challenging reality and not just adversarial ivory tower circlejerks.
I'm not sure what specifically @2rafa meant – and Chomsky is lost in his mirror labyrinth of mottes and baileys. In any case, she's exactly right.
Interesting. If it holds up, I'm updating significantly against universal grammar. (I still see some grounds to be skeptical: in my experience at least the LLaMas often make conspicuous grammatical mistakes in languages such as German which were represented in excess of that in their training set, and in my limited experience looking at the grammatical evaluation sets in that battery they tend to suffer from a certain American laconicity that may make them insufficient for evaluating understanding of recursive structure)
I'll probably come back with more commentary once I had time to read the whole of it, but I do have an issue that might turn out to be a nitpick or a portent of a more general methodological criticism right on the second page:
This line of argumentation seems wrong in a way that suggests sloppiness about something that should be a core concern of such a paper. LLMs, among being many other things, are lossy compression algorithms with respect to their training set. An output not being an exact reproduction therefore does not imply that it is not a reproduction at all, any more than "I searched the internet for images with the same first 20 pixels and found no matches" implies that a given JPEG is an original creation.
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I think it might be his theory of linguistic recursion that the post might be alluding to?
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I’ll add “explore connections between singularity/kabbalah/tikkun olam” to my growing to-do list of effortposts.
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How on earth would your observation smooth my concerns rather than justify them? The only real controversial thing would be to say that these companies are going to put particular emphasis on consciously making sure the AI is aligned to Jewish interests in how it responds to prompts and generates creative output. Tapping Aaronson is the exact sort of thing that would follow from that conclusion.
How? Is it going to put on a virtual kippah and tallit and respond in a heavy Yiddish accent: "Oy vey, why you not supporting Israel?" if I ask it about dukkah?
It's going to be optimized for giving really good critiques of white identity, history, and culture and lock up when it comes to any sort of prompts that would invite criticism of Jewish identity and culture. It's going to be so good at doing this, it will oftentimes be imperceptible. This going to influence its creative output as well which is going to generate art, film, and advertisements.
It's the most pure, mathematical form of Kevin MacDonald's thesis in Culture of Critique.
Is giving really good critiques of whatever that term signifies really in line with "Jewish interests" in any putative interethnic zero-sum game? The way it seems to me, the status of the memetically menopausal middle American cultural hobo stew that "white" usually denotes is already so low that its legendary powers of attraction hardly function anymore, and everyone who has the slightest claim to something else has switched to holding on to it for dear life. This seems likely to result in the emergence of more functioning ethnic coalitions that would be actively opposed to "Jewish interests". In concrete terms, a Joseph Anthony Buttigieg II immigrating to the US nowadays may well issue children who would march against Israel with the Arab student union, not generic gay white guys.
Yes, it is. You in fact say "whatever that term signifies", implying doubt that there is such a thing as white people- no doubt when there is talk about black people you don't feign ignorance. You can split hairs and argue for "social construct", that's what Chat-GPT does (but not for Jews or black people, only for white people). Of course, if I had my way, then the term Aryan should be used in order to denote non-Jewish European-descended, but we can't use the term Aryan because, well you know... let's ask GPT about the existence of an Aryan people:
Oops- you can word the prompt to ellicit some sort of response but it's just denunciations of term. But it does a good job of explaining:
So it goes.
How did it get to that point, specifically? With our culture, right?
Edit: Of course, Chat-GPT knows that "Aryan" is verboten but "Indo-European" gives a more accurate response (despite the fact they are synonymous terms):
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Was demanding the unconditional surrender of Germany at a time when millions of Jews might still be saved from the concentration camps in line with "Jewish interests"? You could argue either way, but rational calculation is hardly guaranteed when hatred or extreme fear, whether warranted or not, is in the driver's seat.
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