You met me at a very strange time in my life

I don’t disagree, but don’t pretend you haven’t effectively set up the equal and opposite thing here. No mods will ban anyone but other than that every comment section is an implicit competition for best pro-Palestinian talking point, even when decency demands otherwise. We don’t talk about Oct 7, and if we do it was friendly fire, and if it wasn’t it was a natural consequence of Israeli policy in Gaza and that is the real issue. Yeah fine we admit the attack was not a hundred percent morally sound if you insist so much, but we don’t assign a moral weight to it or linger on it because hey when you make innocents suffer, you sow the wind and eventually reap the whirlwind, oh sure Hamas’ response was ugly but what can you do, you know, be a bastard and it comes around. Now it is our moral duty to call loud and clear for a ceasefire – the cycle of violence must stop.

I know what you’re thinking: that’s not fair! That’s not my opinion! Yeah, the circlejerk doesn’t care about your private opinion. You know better than to contradict any of the above around here in writing, and that’s enough. I’m sure a lot of people privately think “oh… tbh that last IDF strike was unconscionable” before posting on /r/worldnews the part of their opinion they know the crowd will like better.

I understand your resentment but the restaurant manager is a different user

fuck it, go full mathematician. Serve an empty bowl on the grounds that it’s a vacuous fruit salad, every ingredient in it is a fruit

The “you will all submit to RTO and like it” machine has finally found a way to package this message in a way that wide eyed internet activists will support. Congratulations to them, I guess.

Think of this like one of those steam reviews: 4,000 hours played, do not recommend

Excellently.

I got invited to an interview at an absurdist variety show with these weird ethnic undertones (this would be a hassle to explain, just imagine that part of the show is that everyone there is putting on an exaggerated redneck act). They apparently got wind of some scientific publication I was involved with and for some reason decided it would be a great piece of entertainment to have me on. My colleagues were thrilled about this ‘now or never’ opportunity but I had a strong gut feeling that these people weren’t about to laugh with me. Thought about it for a minute and then responded nope, hard pass. Still probably one of the best decisions of my life.

The prime problem is that every social space eventually becomes a circlejerk. Bots and astroturfing exacerbate the problem but it exists perfectly fine on its own – in the early 2000s I had the misfortune of running across plenty of gigantic, years-long circlejerks where definitely no bots or nefarious foreign manipulators were involved (I’m talking console wars, Harry Potter ship wars, stupid shit like that). People form circle jerks in the same way that salts form crystals. It’s just in their nature.

The thing with circlejerks isn’t that there’s overwhelming agreement on some subject. You’ll get dunked on in most any social media space for claiming that the Earth is flat or that Putin is a swell guy, that in itself is obviously not a problem. What makes a circlejerk is that takes get cheered for and upvoted not in proportion to how much they are anchored in reality, but in proportion to how useful they are in galvanizing allies and disrupting enemies. Whoever shouts “glory to the cause” in the most compelling way gets all the oxygen. At that point the amount of brain rot is only going to increase. No matter how righteous the cause, inevitably there comes the point where you can go on the Righteous Cause Forum and post “2+2=5, therefore all glory to the cause” and get 400 upvotes.

Everyone talks a big game about how much they like truth, reason and moral consistency, but in the end when it’s just them and the upvote button and “do I stop and honestly examine this argument that gives me warm fuzzy feelings”, “is it really fair to dunk on Hated Group X by applying a standard I would never apply to anyone else” – the true colors show. It’s depressing and it makes most of social media into information silos where totalizing ideologies go to get validated, and if you feel alienated by this then clearly that space isn’t for you.

The write up Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments explains the underlying dynamics pretty well: by saying “I like this one thing Peterson said”, you assign him karma points and now everything else about him will be viewed more positively. That’s just how people work, and people will assume you know that and are exploiting it.

For example: by linking that post, I effectively supported the effective altruism movement – even though I’m really not a big fan of it – whether I like it or not, because the author is heavily associated with them. That’s how it works, sadly.

I do exactly this kind of thing for my day job. In short: reading a syntactic description of an algorithm written in assembly language is not the equivalent of understanding what you’ve just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of having a concise and comprehensible logical representation of what you’ve just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of understanding the principles according to which the logical system thus described will behave when given various kinds of input.

This is an issue that has plagued the machine learning field since long before this latest generative AI craze. Decision trees you can understand, SVMs and Naive Bayes too, but the moment you get into automatic feature extraction and RBF kernels and stuff like that, it becomes difficult to understand how the verdicts issued by the model relate to the real world. Having said that, I’m pretty sure GPTs are even more inscrutable and made the problem worse.

no ethical people without explainable people

blade runner 2049 - baseline test

Jules Verne wasn’t a technical expert either, but here we are somehow. Don’t underestimate a keen and observant imagination.

The 0th order Dunning Kruger effect is mere stupidity. The n+1 order Dunning Kruger effect is the observation that the more you are subject to the nth order Dunning Kruger effect, the less you believe yourself subject to it. The observation that the effect holds true for all n > 0 is itself the ω order Dunning Kruger effect, and so on. There is a Dunning Kruger effect for every ordinal.

Clearly a very controversial comment I’m replying to here but I say it has the right idea. Whenever you see a claim consider the source of the claim before you import it and its implications wholesale into your world-view. If only people practiced this attitude more.

You should see why this is important no matter if you lean pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. On a subreddit that I won’t name, a highly-upvoted response to one of the atrocious images that emerged of the attack aftermath went: “that image is fake, there was a twitter community response to it saying so”. A twitter community response! That’s settled then! If your credulity for believing things is a function of how much you want to believe those things, you will only become stupider with time.

I know enough to condemn Hamas purely based on facts that are not in dispute. All those festival-goers are not somehow secretly active IDF combatants. They are not somehow magically alive. Israel did not fabricate the dead babies.