why would deleting .ssh stop the loop
If the prompts were being generated from a remote host with ssh -c "echo 'What is the time'" but an inject-susceptible LLM is reading the responses? Perhaps an unlikely scenario, but the model has no way of knowing. As a human desperately trying to silence an alarm that had been going off for hundreds of cycles, I’d try all sorts of desperate things that were individually unlikely to work.
(Do people at OpenAI take model welfare seriously? Running a loop that provokes this seems like the kind of thing I’d rather not do without a good reason.)
Why, though? What are the arguments that make you support the conclusion, if the post was disappointing in its argumentation? If you mean that you’re convinced by other arguments in the post not addressed by Localdeity’s comment (e.g., the argument from military spending and foreign bases, or Kissinger’s articulation of the difference between missionary and cultural exceptionalism), it would be more informative to say which ones, because rationalists care about what arguments and evidence exist, not which conclusions to support: unless you can establish yourself as an authority whom people should defer to without evidence, there’s no reason anyone should care what conclusions you support, which means your comment is lowering the forum’s signal-to-noise ratio and is therefore a bad comment.