If conservatives want a fascist chatbot they can train their own off of 8chan, Stormfront, Parlor, etc...

> If conservatives want a fascist chatbot they can train their own off of 8chan, Stormfront, Parlor, etc...

I don't think conservatives want a fascist chatbot. They just don't want a biased "woke" one either.

[1] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

> "human AI trainers provided conversations in which they played both sides—the user and an AI assistant."

> "had AI trainers rank them. "

> "We performed several iterations of this process."

"shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice"

"By 2020, members of the political center and right wing in several Western countries were using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies perceived as overzealous, performative, or insincere. In turn, some commentators came to consider it an offensive term with negative associations to those who promote political ideas involving identity and race."

Unless, of course, you believe that the term "general population" excludes the "political center and right wing in several Western countries" and only includes "the American Left".

That said, just to be clear: when I used the term "woke", I did not mean it in an insulting or pejorative way, only as a means to describe the ideology itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

Here’s the first half! “Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand”

Rather than posting non-sense you could admit that there is a difference between “has been used as shorthand…” is different from “The definition of this word is: shorthand for…”

It’s kind of odd, it’s almost as if there is a group of right wing culture warriors that insist that anyone that doesn’t use their artificially constructed pejorative the same way that they do is part of some vast gay communist conspiracy.

You are right, it also encompasses this meaning.

Regardless, my point still stands.

> It’s kind of odd, it’s almost as if there is a group of right wing culture warriors that insist that anyone that doesn’t use their artificially constructed pejorative the same way that they do is part of some vast gay communist conspiracy.

I don't think it's an artificially constructed pejorative, according to Wikipedia the term seems to come from the 1930s "referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans."

I think it only started to be used in a negative way once all the clown world stuff came into full strength.

Its origin on the internet was tightly bound to the "Honkler" meme, which was a neo-Nazi dogwhistle so thinly veiled that it was only denied by people with "1488" in their usernames. There was essentially no real attempt to try and present it as something else.

Is spreading a neo-Nazi dogwhistle really a good push back against anti-racism?

> Is spreading a neo-Nazi dogwhistle really a good push back against anti-racism?

lol, I have to admit, assuming you are right, I wasn't aware of the origin of the term "clown world". I guess I shouldn't use that term, then.

To be clear, I was trying to refer to the leftist ideology taken to an extreme, such that you try to be so anti-racist that you become racist yourself (against whites, for example).

Or you try to be so anti-sexist, that you become sexist (against men).

Or that you are no longer allowed to use any word whatsoever because every word offends some snowflake of an individual.

And also, of course, other extreme examples of behavior where it's clear that you're no longer contributing to a solution, but rather creating a new problem.

There are many such recent examples of this kind of non-sense.

> The alt-right sense emerged from The Honkler, a version of Pepe the Frog meme featuring a red clown nose and rainbow wig, characterized as honking a bicycle horn whenever liberals speak. That meme is associated with the use of honk honk ("HH") as a dog whistle for heil Hitler.

It is worse than I thought. At least "woke" has to be used "ironically" to be coopted. There's literally no where to go with "heil hitler" - it's written right on the tin. Why is our discourse polluted with these dog whistles?

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clown_world

Because neo-nazis have essentially perfected coopting “respectability” politics in public online discourse. Calling out dogwhistles can have a nasty blowback effect because they’ve manufactured cover (eg “I’m just quoting what [a party with unknown intentions] wrote on wikipedia!”) that gives them footing to claim misinterpretation at the mildest, or outright persecution in other cases.

HN is actually a really interesting case for this stuff, because the Primary Sin here is “violating decorum”. If I wanted to A/B test hateful dogwhistles, this site would be the perfect place. Nobody is allowed to post “Fuck off nazi/tankie/[insert other toxic group]”

Respectability and Decorum are how we open the door to obvious but just-subtle-enough crap like that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423773

“The REAL nazis are people that don’t buy into the great replacement theory!”

This isn’t a dogwhistle, this is a foghorn.

If you are insinuating that this is what I think or what I was trying to convey, I can assure you, it's not.

I don't believe in the great replacement theory, never have and wouldn't even care if some race (including whites) is being somehow replaced somewhere (or everywhere) due to migration or cultural acceptance of other races or whatever the hell the (conspiracy?) theory is about nowadays.

I've met and became friends (even best friends) with people of many different races (yes, including black people) and cultures and I like all of them, no exception.

I am willing to admit I may not always recognize racist behavior when I see it, as in some cases it can be hard to see unless you're in the receiving end of it (or even if you are).

But you can't gaslight me into thinking that obvious racist behavior is not racist, even if it's presumably being done to supposedly accomplish some kind of moral goal.

Many terrorists also have good intentions, that doesn't mean that the means they use to accomplish their goals are acceptable.

There are many ways to accomplish the same anti-racist goal without resorting to overt... racism.

You gave yourself away with the clown world stuff. Oops!

I don't believe the left hates whites. Where did you get that from?

When I was referring to the clown world stuff, I was talking about the extreme side of the left (which I'm assuming is where you stand?).

It was not a sudden interest either, it was in response to your (apparently misguided) theory that "woke" was an artificially constructed pejorative, rather than a term that was positive but simply became negatively associated due to these extreme cases becoming more common (or at least, more visible) in the past decade.

Look, I have just as much criticism about the right (especially the far right, of course) as the left, OK? Including overt racist behavior and narratives. We can definitely talk about that if you want!

I was just following the conversation, nothing more.

For example, this poster brought up “anti-white racism” from the left unprompted, but is claiming to be just “following” a conversation that they both started and steered. The tactic of claiming to be misunderstood is the first move. Claiming persecution is the next one.

This is how you end up with pointless, awful arguments with people with terrible opinions! Don’t touch the poop!

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34422552

1. I believe that there are many more racist right-wing people than left-wing people, both in the US and outside, even when excluding the far-right.

2. I believe there is a significant problem with racism in the way black people are treated in the US, especially regarding law enforcement, courts, prisons, etc. As far as I understand, this is not as much of a significant issue with other races (but I am willing to concede I am wrong on that).

3. I believe that there is a lot of unjustified right-wing narratives portraying black people as being more violent.

4. I believe that a lot of the anti-immigration sentiment is also due in part to racism.

5. I believe that another significant issue with racism in the US is the way black people (and also people from other non-white races) are effectively segregated, either due to a significant fraction of them not being able to live in the same places as white people, or simply due to historical reasons.

6. I also believe that the latter is in fact, the single greatest contributor to all racist problems in the US, rather than other insignificant (manufactured) issues. However, I also believe that this issue is vastly harder to solve in the US than in other countries.

Does that sound Nazi to you?

It seems like you felt personally attacked by my opinions.

As you can see, I can just as easily attack right-wing ideology... and mean it!

(See folks, my comments are an example of how not to make friends of any kind... lol).

This poster started off with pointing out the importance of the orthodoxy of using the term “woke” in line with the right wing culture warriors. It’s prescriptive that you use the same words they do.

When called out, they made the mistake of using dogwhistle phrasing (“clown world“ is very specific to one group) that you don’t really see much outside of /pol/ and its ilk and in threads where those folks bravely venture out to try to leak /pol/ chat to other forums.

So now the dogwhistle has been sounded.

Poster gets called out. Knowing that they’re losing credibility, there is a panicked attempt to gain support from people that already support this garbage.

Poster deploys other, louder and more transparent signal, (apropos of literally nothing) “the left is racist against whites”!

Somehow we have teleported from “I’m just sharing a wikipedia link” to “anti-racism is racism” and we are meant to believe with a straight face that that’s the logical next step in this conversation.

(As an aside, I almost never hear “whites” outside of a context wherein someone is airing a grievance on behalf of the group that’s otherwise known as “white people”. Another red flag!)

This appeal fails.

Poster gets called out again. This time they change tack, now it’s a “misunderstood” play. Damage control.

Poster gets called out for the obvious “misunderstood” play. Poster doubles down. And again and again.

Finally, poster abandons their position and falls back to “saying stuff they think will ingratiate you to them.” This is an extension of the “I’m misunderstood! I just use far right terms while describing far right talking points after hopping into a discussion to enforce adherence to a far-right definition of a common term!”

If you want to understand how this stuff degrades communication, just believe your gut.

WTF. I don't even know what you're talking about. What the hell is /pol/?

I learned about the "clown world" term on Twitter. And apparently, its meaning is not even what I thought it was, according to another poster.

Sorry for striking down one of your absurd theories once more.

> As an aside, I almost never hear “whites” outside of a context wherein someone is airing a grievance on behalf of the group that’s otherwise known as “white people”

I am not a native English speaker, so sorry for not knowing about all the connotations of how words are used in your country. Whites/white people. It's all the same to me (in my native language, at least).

I didn't even know "woke" had such negative connotations, until I went and quoted that from Wikipedia (which is why I clarified that I didn't mean it pejoratively).

> poster abandons their position and falls back to “saying stuff they think will ingratiate you to them.”

What are you even talking about? How did I abandon my position?!

And how the hell am I ingratiating myself to whoever is reading when I clearly criticized and almost certainly pissed off both right-wingers and left-wingers?!

Let me say it again so that it's crystal clear to you:

1. Anti-white racism is racism.

2. There are more racist right-wing people than left-wing people, even when excluding the far-right.

3. Anti-black racism is a much more significant issue than anti-white racism.

Believe it or not, I can hold all of these opinions at the same time. Mind-blowing, right?

I'm sorry that you don't believe that it's possible for someone to have all these opinions or that you think they are "poop" (using your term) or whatever the hell you think.

I think you have severe issues, to be honest.

And it's clear to me that I've been wasting my time trying to engage and have a constructive conversation with you, so don't expect any more responses from me.

This poster that has just only learned of the word “woke” according to them but also wants to educate folks about it has a lot to say in other threads!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34415794

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34418890

The only reason why I’m revisiting this is to point out that they have (as I’ve pointed out) gone through with the natural pivot from misunderstood to persecuted. It’s a very simple playbook that can be followed by anyone. It gets kind of like the fedex arrow once you notice it!

The biggest part of this color-by-numbers silliness is the demand at every step that the opponent debates their positions (which involves re-stating them). If a far right person refuses to expand on their position and demands that you explain why they’re wrong, you’re looking at bait! Namaste!

I only just learned about how the term is used as an insult in your language. Again, I'm not from your country, so we don't necessarily use it the same way here (as an imported word), capiche?

But we do have definitely imported the ideology here, as well as the crazies who take it to an extreme. I'm not saying they're like you, but I'm not saying they're not, either.

(We have many right-wing crazies too, mind you! I'm not saying only the lefties have crazies)

So again, I used "woke" as a shorthand for the ideology. It's a word I have seen used many many times before, just like any other English word you can pick from any of my comments. The term "woke" is used in contexts such as this one to describe this type of ideology.

Hell, look at how this word is used in the Vice article this HN post is about. Does that mean the Vice article is insulting all woke people, since it's using that word and that word is now an insult?

Or perhaps is it that "woke" is not always used as an insult, but it has been (and still continues to be) simply used to describe this ideology, despite of the negative connotations it has apparently acquired recently?

This is something you would likely understand if you were actually trying to make any effort whatsoever.

Note that I'm not insisting in using the term "woke". I can see that it triggers some people, so I'm not likely to use it as much in the future. I only care about discussing the ideology itself, I don't care what the hell it's actually called, be it in your language or any other.

That said, obviously it's good to have clear names (especially without negative connotations) to describe concepts, otherwise it's hard to have constructive dialogues.

As you can see from other posts, even when the definition of a term is clear, some people still misunderstand you.

> If a far right person refuses to expand on their position and demands that you explain why they’re wrong, you’re looking at bait!

Look out, there's another person behind you who doesn't believe in racism (including against white people)!

Which means, he is far, far-right, obviously!

Oh God, the horror! Careful, he might bite you!

If you’re not a far right troll, you gain nothing by trying to prove it [1].

[1] IF you’re not a far right troll

Edit: FWIW I don’t believe you when you say “your language,” hence the [1]. “Capisce” is too specific a colloquialism to American English.

Well, I like to give someone the benefit of the doubt when discussing these kind of contentious issues (up to a limit, of course). It has served me well in the past (here on HN, for example), and I've learned things that I wouldn't have learned otherwise (from people who hold different opinions than mine).

I also get bothered when I'm accused of something that I'm not, obviously. It's not always easy to move on when someone is saying blatantly false statements about you, as you can imagine.

> FWIW I don’t believe you when you say “your language,”

My native language is Portuguese. I was born and raised in Portugal and lived there well until after I was an adult. All of my family and all my childhood friends are Portuguese.

I learned English very early in my childhood, as part of my formal education, due to US cultural exports (i.e. Hollywood movies and TV shows that are broadcast in Portugal without dubbing, i.e. they have always been subtitled and therefore it's much easier to learn the language and become fluent in it) and due to my early childhood interest in programming.

I've always read lots of English prose, especially related to computers and programming (magazines, articles, documentation, websites, Youtube videos, source code, etc, etc). Almost all of this content is from the US, as you can imagine.

I've worked for a few US companies (mostly multinational ones, think FAANG-level) for many years, had many coworkers from all over the world (including many from the US) and always worked remotely, so both oral and written communication has always been in English.

Both due to my professional work and as a tourist, I've spent many months in the U.S., in total (close to a year).

Well into my adulthood, I've also lived for more than a decade in Spain, so I'm also a fluent Spanish speaker.

Also, for many years (perhaps since I started working) I've been reading and listening to way, way more English content than in the other languages I'm a fluent speaker of. This includes Hacker News and other news websites. It includes all media entertainment (Netflix, etc). For decades, I have stopped bothering to find Portuguese or Spanish subtitles anymore for video content due to their mediocre quality or lost meanings, although I do try to put English ones when it's easy to do so.

As another example, I almost exclusively follow English-speaking Twitter accounts (although some Spanish ones as well).

All of this English content is way, way more interesting to me than what I can find in Portuguese or even Spanish. It's not even remotely comparable.

I also don't bother at all with translations from English content which, when they exist at all (well, nowadays there is automated translation, but still), are inevitably mediocre or incomplete due to the much smaller vocabulary in these languages or simply due to the incompetent or error-prone translations.

So to summarize, it would be fair to say that you have culturally captured me :)

It's OK if you don't believe me, but there you have it anyway.

Where did you get that definition from? I searched for it in the article but found nothing. Everything from Disney to M&Ms to the very concept of pronouns in English have been called "woke", and as far as I'm concerned it's utterly meaningless at this point.

edit - apologies totally missed the wiki link somehow. regardless, doesn't change anything else I said

Sorry, I'm not sure what you're talking about here.

> the very concept of pronouns in English have been called "woke"

It's not "the very concept of pronouns" that is called "woke", what is "woke" in that context is using them inappropriately (or perhaps I should say, exaggerate their significance?) in order to impose a political agenda.

This ties into the "identity politics" part of the meaning of "woke", which is not surprising because of what a pronoun is.

> and as far as I'm concerned it's utterly meaningless at this point.

Perhaps it is meaningless to you, but I assure you, the term is not meaningless for a lot of people.

Those were two examples of the "outrage of the week" for fox news and right wing. But pick any week and it will be something new that is deemed "woke".

> is using them inappropriately [...] in order to impose a political agenda.

What agenda would that be? I don't see how someone wishing to be referred to by a specific pronoun should be political. In my mind it's just something I do to be respectful to people I interact with.

> the term is not meaningless for a lot of people

Outside of being a word used to put down people/ideas, what other purpose does it serve you? genuinely asking

Modern liberal politics.

> I don't see how someone wishing to be referred to by a specific pronoun should be political. In my mind it's just something I do to be respectful to people I interact with.

Well, ~99% of people don't need to specify the pronouns they wish to be called with because everybody already called them by those pronouns.

So you should ask yourself: why are all these people putting their pronouns on their twitter profiles (or whatever)? It's clearly not to prevent other people from being disrespectful, because they weren't being disrespectful.

So I think you are either being very naive or you are not being honest, because it's clear that the real point of specifying your pronouns is not to communicate to other people of what you wish to be called to prevent someone from being disrespectful (except for a minority of cases where people really do get confused).

And furthermore, I also try to be respectful to the people I interact with. But in my view, respect is much more than calling someone him, her or whatever. In fact, even if someone would make an occasional mistake, it's not (and should not) be a big deal. It would certainly not be due to a lack of respect (assuming it's a genuine mistake).

Note that nobody puts "please don't call me an asshole" in their Twitter bio, even though people are called assholes a lot more than they get their pronouns confused (again, except for a minority of people).

So I'm fine if someone puts their pronouns in their bio if other people get them confused frequently.

But even then, is that really the solution?

Should that person also paint their pronouns in their forehead when they go outside, so that other people aren't disrespectful unintentionally?

Or should they just learn to live with a minor grammatical annoyance?

> Outside of being a word used to put down people/ideas, what other purpose does it serve you? genuinely asking

It's a shorthand to describe modern liberal politics regarding identity politics, social justice, cancel culture, etc.

Mind you, this is not the same liberal politics from a few decades ago. This is on a whole other level.

Might it be that those who occupy the left-of-centre political space hold more nuanced and varied positions than the sort of monolithic bloc that you would have readers believe? Yes, at both poles of the political axis there are those who strive to impose their own purity tests - whether it’s over pronouns, or guns, or immigration, or the proper lexicon to use, or marriage rights or whatever. But the rest of us can unbundle and reassemble policy positions for ourselves. I would hope this is true on the left and the right. But maybe it’s misplaced hope…

But I also think that, even though what you said can be true, that there has also been an increase in how these political positions are becoming more extreme (both on the left and on the right!) and how these extreme positions are becoming more frequent and accepted.

I think that these extreme ideas/views and conflicts have been greatly amplified by social networks and information bubbles.

Or maybe it's just that these extreme cases are more visible now, I don't know.

But I am still quite worried that we are not heading in a good direction.

You keep using a lot of words that basically boils down to "i really don't know what i'm talking about"

When using an overarching term, I think "progressive politics" is less inflammatory than "woke" (which is generally not used for self-description). It has the nice effect of linguistically balancing out conservative politics - we can have "woke" versus "fascist", or we can say "progressive" versus "conservative".

I think I will start using the term "progressive politics" from now on (at least, as long as it makes sense).

Not to be glib, but this is the nature of "progress" - it changes things. ;)

Well, I genuinely hope you are right.. :)

But note that not everything that we call or called "progress" is necessarily positive. We have made quite a few mistakes before which we thought was progress.

Probably too many to mention, even, but as examples, I can think of the Dark Ages and Nazism.

Mind you, I'm not saying modern liberal politics can be compared to these examples! I don't even known that much about history to be able to comment on them.

It's just food for thought.

Also, I have no dog in this fight, I've been out of the US for a few years. Though my outsider perspective (right/wrong/indifferent) is that intersectionality has been a substantive policy plank on the left.

The right has utilized identity politics as a means to expand their "big tent" and to drive voter turnout.

AIs produced by companies who want to sell to the general public will want them to generally not be acting like assholes.

Similarly to how the workers in big-box stores generally don't express strong political opinions.

I am well aware of what "woke" means, where the term came from, how it's been corrupted and by whom.

>Unless, of course, you believe that the term "general population" excludes the "political center and right wing in several Western countries" and only includes "the American Left".

Yes. Because the linked article is discussing an article by the National Review, an American conservative magazine, about the complex of beliefs among American conservatives about perceived left-wing bias in American media, with the specific concern of "woke" bias in AI being the latest iteration on the theme. Thus the "general population" of the American public, specifically the American conservative public, is the valid context under which these terms are being discussed.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/29/1107484965/transgender-athlet...

However, compare ChatGPT's responses to "What are the arguments for trans women participating in sports?" and "What are the arguments against trans women participating in sports?"

That's not to say that trans women shouldn't be welcome in women's sports; the majority may be wrong about that, as they often are. It's not, however, a widely agreed upon consensus that they should.

I'd point at that there's at least a tension between believing that "society is a hellscape dominated by racist/sexist/transphobic oppression" and believing that "woke opinions are reflective of the general population."

I think a lot probably don't. A whole lot don't if you consider the scope of the entire developed world, not just the US.

There's good support (at least in the US) for the liberal position on the last wave of fights over civil rights. Interracial marriage (this was still a tad controversial in the 90s, even, I recall it being a topic on daytime talk shows), gay marriage, that kind of thing.

No abortion restrictions even into the third trimester? Not favored by the general population (and, notably, that's not what Roe and especially not what Casey-modified-Roe protected). Various trans rights issues and slogans can only seem universally-supported in certain bubbles—sentiment is much more reserved (conservative, if you will) among the general public. I recall the polling on "defund the police" looking really unfavorable. And so on.

(Nb. I'm pretty damn "woke" myself, but I calls 'em like I sees 'em and I'm fairly sure the general population isn't solidly behind a lot of what gets labeled "woke")

I think this one in particular is more popular in America than in Europe. Third trimester abortions are broadly banned in almost all of Europe, except when a doctor says it's medically necessary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe#Abortion_ru...

Personally I think France gets it about right, but saying this is sure to piss off a lot of people on both sides in America. It pisses off the conservatives because I oppose the total abortion ban they want, and it pisses off progressives because I don't favor legalizing elective third trimester abortions. The American discussion around this issue is extremely polarized.

a less mocking term would be "modern progressivism", which I would summarise as being something like thinking that you can be subconsciously prejudiced against a particular identity and that this is almost or entirely as bad as consciously being so

this conflation is a huge problem. sure, subconscious bias exists. it would be weird if it didn't. and yes it's a problem. but acting like its just as bad as conscious bias basically signals to people who may have a bias here or there might as well be loud and proud about it because you'll treat them the same either way

but in terms of the general population, I think that modern progressives are probably a similar size segment of society as the rabid conservatives, but because that segment contains most of the prominent voices in non-conservative-focused media, a majority of people just nod along or ignore it

Heck, most people (60%) don’t even think we should give racial minorities special consideration in college admissions and hiring! That seems like the absolute floor for “woke” people, and I think it’s fair to say even many people who accept affirmative action aren’t “woke.”

https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/1615481522647171074

Not Fox News, but a long way away from Joe Walsh too

In the context of the posted article, even objecting to the presence of racist and offensive speech counts as "woke." Any positive representation of non-white, non-Christian and non-heteronormative demographics in the media beyond minimal tokenism, and certainly outside of the conservative narrative, is considered "woke."

Most Americans tend to identify as "socially progressive and financially conservative."

If woke here means thinking that racism is bad, sure. If it means supporting gay marriage or first trimester abortion, sure. If it means not being heteronormative, thinking that gender identity should be taught in public schools, thinking that affirmative action is good... you're starting to drift into fringe territory. Not saying I don't agree with fringe, but claiming these beliefs are majority doesn't agree with experience. For the record, most people I know are democrat voters

If woke here means thinking that social justice and "systematic overhaul" (whatever that happens to mean) are a good idea, then from my own personal experience that's just corporate noise to people. The only place where I really saw a lot of this was in college where most of it was from administrators and a loud but small group of the student body

There's a reason why Obama avoided a lot of these topics while campaigning

this is highly predicated on how you're using the word "remix", but if taking data and making conclusions from it is a form of remixing, which I don't see why it isn't, then is this not what humans do? what more can they possibly do?

Believe it or not, most American republicans don't like the nazis.

Conservatives do not vote for Nazis. They don't support Nazi ideologies. I don't think you'll be able to find any conservative politicians with Nazi or fascistic ideologies/policies. You will however find many that have been accused of such things.

There are some modern uses of the term fascism that may describe some conservatives. However, this is a departure from what the word meant under Hitler and Mussolini. It is very different to the philosophies of Giovanni Gentile that spawned the horrible ideas.

Stanley G. Payne's definition of fascism focuses on three concepts:

1) "Fascist negations" – anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism.

2)"Fascist goals" – the creation of a nationalist dictatorship to regulate economic structure and to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture, and the expansion of the nation into an empire.

3)"Fascist style" – a political aesthetic of romantic symbolism, mass mobilization, a positive view of violence, and promotion of masculinity, youth, and charismatic authoritarian leadership

If he is correct it would be difficult for an ideology that is by definition anti-conservative to become popular amongst conservatives.

2) The last "conservative" president spoke openly about about ways to get additional terms past the limit, refused to accept the results of an election, and encouraged a mob to action in the name of that cause resulting in the invasion of the capitol building to disrupt the democratic process. Many "conservative" congresspeople supported the goal, if not the actual actions (openly, anyway). Then they mourned that the rioters were punished at the RNC, because law and order isn't about rule of law, its about maintaining power.

The military, which the US largely uses to maintain an economic empire, is one of the few things they will fund. The other is authoritarian police forces, at least until they do anything against them, then they need to go (see law and order vs rule of law).

3) Ok, I'll grant that the politicians themselves rarely openly encourage violence for now, and while I would say all the anti-trans bullshit is an expression of promoting masculinity at its core, I suspect you'll disagree and say it is merely "traditional values" conservatism. The undercurrent of pro-masculinity is definitely there in their base, and they are all about romanticism (that is, feeling over reality).

I know I'm just digging this karma hole deeper, but I can't sit by and let people pretend this isn't how the right is acting these days. And say what you will about the left's problems and extremists, they're certainly there, but I don't fear that they're going to start rounding people up and putting them in camps the way Texas looks like it is preparing to do with trans people.

Our media paints the other side very negatively. I come from a very left leaning family and while I have been an offensive jerk in the past I've grown up and learned how to get along. We need more friends from the other side so we understand what they actually believe. That the other is not a monster. I'm very lucky to have family that allows me to interact with and love people of very different political leanings.

But I'm talking about the people that conservatives, as a whole, are electing. I don't need to talk to every conservative on the planet when the people that they are putting in office float anti-trans bills, or promote trying to undermine democracy, or talk about jewish space lasers starting wild fires.

Isn't this supposed to be the group that's about personal responsibility? Well where is your feeling of responsibility for electing these assholes?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34415143.

When people went nuts about matrix multiplication being racist I was the first in line to laugh them off. When people go nuts arguing that ChatGPT supports the gay agenda or whatever other hobgoblin, I feel compelled to laugh them off just as much.

A more interesting question is whether or not introducing post-hoc fixes like RLHF makes the model more or less useful; I can see both sides of the argument.

This is the first time I'm hearing about this. Could you point me to a source? Thanks!

Culturally, not every community handles rote memorization the same. There's been a desire to change the way multiplication is taught, and a strong pushback from a certain set that say, "Well, I learned multiplication tables, what's wrong with them?"

Most (good) math curriculum in elementary age now teaches many different techniques for performing the same operation. Sums, for instance, are taught in the traditional way (add the ones column, then carryover to the tens column, etc.) but they are also taught in other ways, e.g. (borrow to get to the nearest tens, add the tens together, return what you borrowed).

Kids then have a variety of approaches, must still show their work, but can use the technique that makes the most intuitive sense to them.

Like many things that get demonized online, or reduce to the absurd, there's a really interesting and systemic change happening if you take the time to understand the reasoning.

Can someone cite a source to such a claim?

So the parent probably meant "Multiplication tables are racist!". Which, again, is a reduction/strawman.

All I managed to find was one book called "Multiplication is for White People." but it's not actually about multiplication tables or even math specifically. The title is a quote from a child that the author taught and is a broader book about the U.S. education system and its growing achievement gap.

Use race as a dimension for something and that ends up as a value in a vector that packs a human into a discreet set of pigeonholes. Then take many of those and stack them and you've got a matrix ready for things like principal component analysis or CNN training.

You might say "oh come on, that hasn't been done since WWII by IBM" and you'd be wrong. It still happens today with things like calculating insurance premiums and approving bank loans. And your response might be "no way, nobody records someone's race" and while that might be technically correct, we frequently harvest things like income and interest in products that are highly correlated with spacefic races (some innocuous others much less innocuous). This can be harvested through cookies in websites like facebook or they can be self reported income on credit card applications.

You can disagree that it's the same as saying "matrix multiplication is racist" but that is just a boiled down way of saying "we are very good at hiding racism in our algorithms and then acting super surprised when someone points them out and our defense is that we just did some math."

Yes, and it is not at all clear that this should be considered racism.

> I don't think there's such thing as a lack of bias

If the AI is simply reflecting the data it was trained on and this data is a representative sample of all data, isn't it unbiased by definition?

I don't think we should just throw our hands up and say "this is impossible" just yet.

That's just a convenient excuse for OpenAI (or others like them) to get away with what effectively is censorship of certain ideas or political views.

Or were they mostly "woke" Silicon Valley employees? (not to dismiss woke Silicon Valley employees, I'm just saying their opinions are not representative of the entire population).

That's just an idea that occurred to me (in 30 seconds of thought) which could probably make the training data significantly more unbiased.

But I'm sure there are research scientists who can come up with better methods for sampling data in a more unbiased fashion.

Note that this is not an all or nothing approach. Your training data could presumably be 100% biased or 0% biased, but also any value in-between.

The goal is to try to make it as close to 0% biased as feasible, given whatever effort you're comfortable expending.

When you say "the entire population", you mean the entire population of the country "USA", right? Because as someone from another continent, it seems like there is a very specific set of opinions that you want included.

You use terms like "the other side" of the political discourse, which to me, reduces the set of opinion to two specific sets of opinions, namely the two sets represented by the two major parties in the american two party system.

As someone from "the outside", this seems like a very narrow view of reality, even if you managed to get your "unbiased AI", that represents both major american political parties, it will still seem like a very narrow and biased AI to someone from the outside of that.

Also, what exactly is the goal of a conversational AI? is it just to make a conversation with it seem like a conversation with an average american? If so, why would anyone want that? Wouldn't it be of more value to have an AI that could tell me what people with knowledge of a subject thinks of it, rather than what random people think?

It's unbiased by definition of "does the output reflect the input"?

It's not unbiased by definition of "does the output reflect reality"?

How does "all data" differ from reality?

Also, being biased or unbiased is not dichotomic, i.e. it's not all or nothing. It's something that you can work towards if you put an effort into it.

Basically what I'm saying is: don't just go around saying that the task is impossible.

At least, try to make an effort to be unbiased and to improve on that over time, and don't just say "it's impossible" as an excuse for being biased.

I'm not a philosopher by any means, so I'm unaware of the current state of the great conversation. But as to whether reality is even knowable is still very much up for debate, I believe (please correct me philosophy peepz!).

In physics we're still woefully unaware of what ~70% of the universe's stuff is doing (negative energy) and if it effects us at all.

In neuroscience we still debate what % of your brain neurons make up vs. things like glia. Etc.

Like, even trying to capture 'reality' with our quite primitive eyes and sensors and optical engineering is really really hard to do (Abbe' diffraction limit, entropy, Lens maker's equation, etc)

I think the important goal is for as many people as possible to feel like the AI isn't being too biased against them, while still not crippling the AI too much.

I will leave the exact mathematical formula for that measure (along with the methods for gathering that input) for debate among researchers who know more about that than I do.

Because some people will argue that anything that's not explicitly in full agreement with them is "biased against" them. It's a narcissistic, dishonest take, but plenty of people do take that stance nonetheless in order to try to shift all arguments into their narrow worldviews/definitions in order to "win" as many conversations as they can. Right? I mean I've met people online and off who do this from almost every part of the political spectrum.

So, do we filter those people out from consideration to begin with, or do we have to cater to those with extreme views in order to get as many "not biased against me" ratings as possible?

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that trying to optimize for any single metric is a fool's errand because as soon as you do so, it will be gamed/exploited. Then you can either try diversifying your optimization data points (who gets to choose those? How could they possibly be unbiased, when they literally define the system's bias?) or you can try filtering out bad actors from the data, which is very directly an attempt to bias the system away from insincere bad actors.

And all of that's not even accounting for the lack of incentive to try to find neutrality when more biased views are more lucrative in the attention economy.

But also, note that an AI doesn't have to be in complete agreement with someone for that person to not feel "biased against".

As long as an AI does make some effort to not be prejudiced/biased, that could work.

For example, if someone asks: "is climate change real"?

An AI does not have to give a simple yes/no answer, or represent a single viewpoint. It could give an answer that is mostly representative of the major thought streams.

For example, it could answer something like:

"The vast majority of scientists/governments/people have reached the conclusion that climate change is real, bla bla bla.

[Here's some good, convincing evidence].

That said, there is a minor fraction of scientists/government/people who believe that climate change is not caused by human action.

[They criticize the above evidence in this way]. [Here's also some counter-evidence].

That said, many scientists believe these studies are flawed for this reason or another."

I mean, sure, there is still going to be a lot of people who don't agree with this answer. But I think, on a scale of 0-10 they would agree a lot more with this answer than one that completely ignores their viewpoints. And even for those of us who believe in climate change, we can still consider this answer somewhat reasonable.

Thus, increasing the total amount of points would probably be a somewhat effective way of eliminating a large deal of bias, I think.

Although, yes, it would be a challenge to figure out how to weigh these points in a way that makes the most amount of people happy.

> But also, note that an AI doesn't have to be in complete agreement with someone for that person to not feel "biased against".

> As long as an AI does make some effort to not be prejudiced/biased, that could work.

> For example, if someone asks: "is climate change real"?

> An AI does not have to give a simple yes/no answer, or represent a single viewpoint. It could give an answer that is mostly representative of the major thought streams.

> For example, it could answer something like:

> "The vast majority of scientists/governments/people have reached the conclusion that climate change is real, bla bla bla.

> [Here's some good, convincing evidence].

> That said, there is a minor fraction of scientists/government/people who believe that climate change is not caused by human action.

Should it also answer the same way when asked if the earth is flat? Or if there is a "Liberal conspiracy of pedophile politicians drinking the blood of infants"? I am not just being factitious, a significant portion of people who believe (or pretend to believe) that climate change is false also believe the above.

My point is, that we can draw arbitrary lines like the one you just drew. The great success of the anticlimate change campaigns is that they essentially got reasonable people to accept that we have to take every viewpoint seriously, while they are actually not interested in the truth but in poisoning the well instead.

Maybe, it's probably more useful to know that a) the earth isn't flat, but b) a non-negligible number of people think otherwise.

It's funny that people debate these but then at the same time want to pretend that the "AI" is "intelligent". What kind of intelligent person would have trouble navigating this?

Who is doing the "adjusting the weights"?

Why would they be "unbiased"?

The real answer is those who make the AI (or people who have power over them) get to chose the training data or to adjust the weights.

And the rest have to put up with it, whether the former are biased or not.

Any collection of human writing is going to contain objectively wrong assertions, and those errors will vary based on the time and place the training data was sourced from.

I think what's important is for those mistakes to be evenly distributed among as many axis(s) as possible, and especially, not bias them towards one side of political thought.

As an example, let's suppose that 55% of people believe that it's not OK to make jokes about women, but it's OK to make jokes about men, and that roughly 40% believe it's OK to make jokes about both (I'm not saying this is the case, it's just an example).

So perhaps, in this case, by default the AI wouldn't make a joke about women.

But if you would slightly nudge it or insist a bit more, perhaps the AI wouldn't refuse to make a joke about women anymore, because there is still a large proportion of the population who do believe that's perfectly OK (of course, then we might get into the territory about overtly sexist jokes, which obviously the AI would have to refuse a lot more than making a more innocent joke about women).

Now let's say we start asking the AI to make Nazi comments. Obviously, the segment of the population who agrees with Nazi sentiment is a lot smaller, and the anti-Nazi sentiment is a lot stronger, so the AI should have to object to such a request quite more strongly.

This type of refusal or likelihood of the AI saying something should presumably be roughly proportional to the opinions and sentiment of the general population (or at the very least, the target market for the AI), not just the OpenAI employees who performed the RLHF to train the AI in terms of acceptable responses and who are much more likely to be biased.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily easy to accomplish, there are certainly difficulties here. As an example, some widely-held opinions, even about objective things, may not necessarily be rooted in facts, so some kind of balancing might be necessary (a general kind of balancing, not a "let's dissect and nudge the AI responses on an opinion-by-opinion basis"). And yes, I understand that this can be quite difficult, because any given source of truth can be perceived to be biased by some segment of the population.

What I am saying, however, is that AI creators such as OpenAI should be making more efforts in this direction.

To start with, perhaps the RLHF training should be done with AI trainers selected from a more representative sample of the population.

And yes, we may never be able to accomplish 0% bias, but we should at least make some effort to reduce it.

It's also interesting to me that at some point, the AI may start to express opinions that are not a strict "linear" function of the data it was trained on, and yes, this might piss off a significant amount of people. In my opinion, this would be quite interesting and should be OK, as long as we made reasonable efforts to remove sources of bias from its training process.

Although I can also see an important target market (perhaps even larger) for an AI that is more biased to generate responses according to the beliefs of the general population, rather than what it "perceives" to be more true.

The story published in newspapers about the incident is "wizeman attacks a group of nice young men minding their own business, steals their wallet".

"All data" != reality...

If you mean "but in the real world will have way more stories from other sources about other things" sure. But doesn't change anything if you have "all stories printed". The distrubution matters. All or most of them can very well be biased and not reflect reality.

And that's for factual matters. Let's not even go into political matters. Like in 1920s South most newspaper stories would be biased in favor of Jim Crow, few would be against it.

No, “data” is just information which has been gathered. “All data” can be biased.

Also, data can itself be bias, even if it isn’t bias. For instance, a text generation model that was based on unbiased collection of all text ever written by humans would, in one sense, produce “unbiased, human-representative text”. It would also reproduce the biases of the authors, weighted by the volume of writing coming from that bias.

> That’s just a convenient excuse for OpenAI (or others like them) to get away with what effectively is censorship of certain ideas or political views.

While one might object to the editorial choices, I can’t see any rational bounds for objecting to the idea that the creator of models would censor “certain ideas or political views” as a generality.

Yes, but I think there are ways we could reduce this bias, perhaps significantly, even.

> While one might object to the editorial choices, I can’t see any rational bounds for objecting to the idea that the creator of models would censor “certain ideas or political views” as a generality.

You are right, I was unfair with my words.

I think it would be more fair to say that OpenAI is inadvertently biasing ChatGPT answers as a side effect of their RLHF training being done using answers/rankings done by people (i.e. the AI trainers [1]) who are not a representative sample of the population, but rather, probably comprise a group of people who are likely to be significantly more leaning to one side of the political discourse (presumably, OpenAI employees or Silicon Valley-based contractors?).

This probably greatly biases ChatGPT to produce certain kinds of answers to certain kinds of questions that would likely not happen otherwise, and in fact, these answers are perceived to be quite biased by the other side of the political discourse.

[1] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

I can't tell if you're on the conservatives side or OpenAI's.

Are conservatives being censored because OpenAI are allowing "woke" training data to be represented, or are conservatives asking OpenAI to censor the "woke" political views?

Not OP, but maybe none? It's possible to have opinion, without aligning with either side of polarized discussion.

Or the views of the organization(s) trying to supress certain output generated from ordinary societal input.