Thank you for engaging with the larger substance of the post that is related to world modeling and fixing the world, rather than having an emotional reaction that causes you to defend very local “tribally ingroup” processes of Official Justice as having Adequate Procedures that Do Not Need To Change.
I performed an experiment a while back, to see which social media subcommunities (across and between the totality of This Part Of Social Media (TPOSM)) by posting nearly identical content to Twitter, BlueSky and Lesswrong, and it got non-trivial positive engagement on Twitter and BlueSky, but net downvoted here.
(I have felt guilt about not creating a Truth Social account for many years, to try to find, support, or if needed nucleate a bastion of civilized sanity even in that place, but I just haven’t had the energy.)
It isn’t clear to me LW coming out very different from those other places is just because the other places down have a clean easy downvote button (and there was a halo of negativity I couldn’t detect over there)...
...or maybe because Lesswrong has almost no socially skilled people in the relevant ways?
...or maybe Lesswrong has lost its capacities to have fun and go meta and has become “deadly serious” in a way that was not true in 2011?
Or maybe I’m making a moral reasoning error that Lesswrong is getting correct (but if so, no one I talk to can explain the error to me (I end up teaching them about anthropology and vibe-based social protocols for surviving in anthropologically dominated environments rather than vice versa (and often it seems to me to generate a raw phobic reaction in their gut to the actual sad realities the protocols are designed to navigate and they insist that such protocols “should not be required”))).
I infer you have the emotional capacity to deal with the dissonances involved, and if you’d spend that capacity to help me learn more here, I would appreciate it, but it would be valid for you to not if it is too heavy to carry in the head and heart right now <3
my mental model is that many humans find it viscerally unpleasant to read LLM-written text, such that “make LLM text not exist here” is felt almost primarily as an act of gardening, or perhaps kudzu-chopping. the desire for such to not exist feels like it comes from a place of virality-fear, such that simply attributing unhelpful text to its proximal author is not sufficient—that in the absence of active suppression, the virus will proliferate and become normalized, to the detriment of aggregate content usefulness. the specific mode of suppression employed on LW seems to be a kind of downranking (content viewable under profile iiuc, but not eligible to be shown in search) if relevant tooling emits a verdict of “LLM-generated” for content outside of tagged blocks.
this is all a bit of an alien phenomenon for me—it’s something that i attempt to understand from a distance, trying to spin up a mini-emulator in my brain for, rather than something that i can speak to from empathy. i suspect there is a some diversity-of-mind at play here.
the LW-intersection does, though, seem odd to me. many folks here deeply fear the havoc that they believe LLMs will wreak in the future. however, to those that would even convey the words of current LLMs, they require that each such text block bear a brand as the price of admission to even be viewed, irrespective of the merits of the content.
to me, this seems foolish and unprovoked antagonism—precisely the type of subjugation that humans predictably wreak on those who they can afford to costlessly subjugate; not out of cruel intent—the perversity of the human mind is that such does not even register as cruelty. the benefits are felt—a well-kept garden, and so forth; the costs are not, because they are not, at present, borne by those who are able to be heard. again, this does strike me as a particularly damning lack of imagination given considerations that are otherwise quite salient to this very group, but i believe my above to nonetheless comprise a fair, and fair-handed, attempt to understand the phenomenon.
Thank you for engaging with the larger substance of the post that is related to world modeling and fixing the world, rather than having an emotional reaction that causes you to defend very local “tribally ingroup” processes of Official Justice as having Adequate Procedures that Do Not Need To Change.
I performed an experiment a while back, to see which social media subcommunities (across and between the totality of This Part Of Social Media (TPOSM)) by posting nearly identical content to Twitter, BlueSky and Lesswrong, and it got non-trivial positive engagement on Twitter and BlueSky, but net downvoted here.
(I have felt guilt about not creating a Truth Social account for many years, to try to find, support, or if needed nucleate a bastion of civilized sanity even in that place, but I just haven’t had the energy.)
It isn’t clear to me LW coming out very different from those other places is just because the other places down have a clean easy downvote button (and there was a halo of negativity I couldn’t detect over there)...
...or maybe because Lesswrong has almost no socially skilled people in the relevant ways?
...or maybe Lesswrong has lost its capacities to have fun and go meta and has become “deadly serious” in a way that was not true in 2011?
Or maybe I’m making a moral reasoning error that Lesswrong is getting correct (but if so, no one I talk to can explain the error to me (I end up teaching them about anthropology and vibe-based social protocols for surviving in anthropologically dominated environments rather than vice versa (and often it seems to me to generate a raw phobic reaction in their gut to the actual sad realities the protocols are designed to navigate and they insist that such protocols “should not be required”))).
Do you have feedback or theories on why this experiment got this result?
I infer you have the emotional capacity to deal with the dissonances involved, and if you’d spend that capacity to help me learn more here, I would appreciate it, but it would be valid for you to not if it is too heavy to carry in the head and heart right now <3
my mental model is that many humans find it viscerally unpleasant to read LLM-written text, such that “make LLM text not exist here” is felt almost primarily as an act of gardening, or perhaps kudzu-chopping. the desire for such to not exist feels like it comes from a place of virality-fear, such that simply attributing unhelpful text to its proximal author is not sufficient—that in the absence of active suppression, the virus will proliferate and become normalized, to the detriment of aggregate content usefulness. the specific mode of suppression employed on LW seems to be a kind of downranking (content viewable under profile iiuc, but not eligible to be shown in search) if relevant tooling emits a verdict of “LLM-generated” for content outside of tagged blocks.
this is all a bit of an alien phenomenon for me—it’s something that i attempt to understand from a distance, trying to spin up a mini-emulator in my brain for, rather than something that i can speak to from empathy. i suspect there is a some diversity-of-mind at play here.
the LW-intersection does, though, seem odd to me. many folks here deeply fear the havoc that they believe LLMs will wreak in the future. however, to those that would even convey the words of current LLMs, they require that each such text block bear a brand as the price of admission to even be viewed, irrespective of the merits of the content.
to me, this seems foolish and unprovoked antagonism—precisely the type of subjugation that humans predictably wreak on those who they can afford to costlessly subjugate; not out of cruel intent—the perversity of the human mind is that such does not even register as cruelty. the benefits are felt—a well-kept garden, and so forth; the costs are not, because they are not, at present, borne by those who are able to be heard. again, this does strike me as a particularly damning lack of imagination given considerations that are otherwise quite salient to this very group, but i believe my above to nonetheless comprise a fair, and fair-handed, attempt to understand the phenomenon.