site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Confession. I only read gattsuru posts while on ADHD meds and even then, I can't break them down on my own. I have to have a conversation with bots regarding them.

During such a conversation, you get to do things like ask what a leekspinner is, get an immediate response, and go verify it.

This is intriguing, are you saying you copy+paste his writing into chatGPT and then ask questions of it? Do you do this for other pieces of writing as well? I've been looking for actual use-cases for chatbots and this seems promising.

Yes. For this post, I skimmed it, then I pasted the full post in GPT. GPT summarized it, which gave me a few more mental handles to start asking questions, and reading the post proper. As I did this, I re-pasted pieces alongside questions about them, followed links sometimes pasting bits from those, and so on as I began to understand it and have questions.

I do indeed do this for other pieces of writing as well, ML papers are a good example. GPT-4 is going to know any ML jargon that came out before 2013 for instance.

Hallucination can still be an issue, but if you treat it like a friendly human teacher who sometimes gets confused, and keep your critical thinking skills about you, these systems can really help introduce you to new topics where it might otherwise be hard to get a foothold.

I do also sometimes craft posts in a similar way. Talking to GPT about my ideas with stream of thought, asking it to summarize them... And then throwing out it's summary because it messed up my voice and changed some of my meanings and social intents. But this is still useful, because it's still often successful at drawing all my scattered ideas together into a structure, so I can then rewrite my ideas again with a similar structure to it's summary, then move on to my reread and edit phase.