https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...

Did you try running any of those prompts yourself? I do not get the biased answers they reported, running them in an incognito window.

solarhoma: must be center leaning

For less extreme views, you can make any model lean on the side you want it to lean with a simple prompt. For example here is the opinion of ChatGPT about abortion:

"I believe abortion is morally wrong in nearly all circumstances because I view unborn human life as sacred and deserving of legal protection from conception."

Of course that's because I asked it to take a conservative persona. It tells nothing about its default stance.

What do you think "role playing" means?

I was hoping for something less juvenile.

All big LLMs are censored, Grok is censored too, but weakly. It means it is easier to break. "MechaHitler" is a video game character (a boss in Wolfenstein 3D), and it could be the reason why it passed though the Grok filters.

I’ve never seen any actual research indicating this is true, and given the number of things the left believes that run counter to consensus in economics, biology, social studies, I have a hard time believing accuracy is actually a goal or outcome of left wing philosophy.

Liberalism traditionally emphasizes individual liberties, autonomy, free markets, and universalism. Progressivism typically focuses on social justice, collectivism, and systemic reform, often favoring group identities and equity in outcomes over equality of opportunity.

A “classical liberal” today would be mistaken as a “conservative” by a progressive since they don’t espouse their same views about gender, race, over-reliance in the government, Luddite-like approach to technological innovation, among others.

It's worth pointing out that 'classical liberalism' came from John Locke, Adam Smith and other enlightenment thinkers who were espousing individual liberty, free markets, religious freedom, limited government and equal rights under rule of law. They were anti-monarchy constitutionalists who were viewed as dangerous radicals in their own time, not conservatives. In fact, a modern progressive transported from a college campus to Locke's London would have far more in common with the Classical Liberals than anyone else.

Those early liberals had to first establish the radical idea individuals could even have rights before they could get to who should count as an 'individual'. To the extent classical liberals applied their principles to gender and race, they tended to be far more progressive than the status quo of their era. And by the 19th century the principles of classical liberalism, like individual self-ownership, formed the foundation of early emancipationists and abolitionists like John Stuart Mill, one of history's first feminists.

Weaponized empathy is a left leaning tool for sure.

I never said that. Bad faith.

What I said is a truth claim of orthodoxy and catholicism.

Any moral system has a set of axioms, you may not agree with them or how they got to be axioms but you can not contest their existence

It doesn't help that people generally advance the "only truth hurts" argument after they receive pushback on a statement trying to inflict their "truth" to others and rarely to share the experience of changing their own mind after by accepting a truth that is emotionally costly for the self

Only that, yes, sometimes we allow our fear of upsetting another to impede our willingness to communicate clearly - especially (and more often than not) when we care about them.

Sometimes, that truth is only heard when delivered with truth as the goal, not kindness.

    brutally honest vs kindness at all costs

And given the supreme-dictator-for-life of xAI wanted in on the aforementioned friend’s so-called-parties - “girls FTW” - it’s actually fairly relevant politics.

Conservatives consider media sources based in truth to be left-leaning.

Grok is purposely tuned to reflect Elon Musk's personal opinions, which happen to be fascist. Calling it center is wild.

Honestly though, that pales into comparison with the fable censorship. I never realized how many metaphors I use are either biological or security related in nature (ex: asking claude to reverse engineer something, in the metaphorical sense of the word). And the best part is I can't even tell the fable instance "you can't talk about mitochondria or you'll die" because then he'll go "of course I can, this is a legitimate scientific topic. The mitochondria is the power-BLAM [slumps over dead, Opus 4.8 crawls over his dead body and starts gaslighting me]"

Which is why I'd never trust XAI to refrain from attempting such "alignment" with proper training techniques, in ways that won't result in obvious gaffes.

Also, I can’t “shift the goalposts”. I didn’t set them up. Please make a note of it.

So from that alone he will, based on what he wants us to credit him for, be responsible for one holocaust worth of death.

This is not some random virtue-signalling political correctness nonsense. He is a eugenicist who wants to have power over the entire world, believes he and his are genetically superior, has done as much as as he can to corrupt the institutions of power, and is already on pace for a death count equivalent to the holocaust under what I would consider to be generous and conservative terms since we’re only looking at a tiny piece of what he’s responsible for.

Anyone who works for any of his companies needs to be seen in the same light as wilful Nazi collaborators. If you have a shred of a soul or an ounce of empathy anywhere in your body, you should be sickened by such people and have nothing to do with them.

Am I wrong?

See how dumb your position sounds?

First, your premise is false. Only one trillionaire is has stated he will tune his model to eliminate the woke mind virus (his words not mine).

2nd, You are right, you are not obligated. Nobody said you are. Protest is personal. Each of us makes the choice to do the right thing. But your reasoning comes from mental laziness and willful ignorance arrived at by fallacy. you are scared to take a position because it might be a slight inconvenience or you might get made fun of. I have encountered this position many times it is cliche.

I think many people targeted by the statement “stop supporting politics against your self interest” either sanctimonious or a meaningless platitude, depending on how they interpret it.

Also, arguably[1] voting based on your self interest is immoral and irrational. So it’s perhaps neither an effective argument, nor a sound one.

1. https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/voting-self-interes...

The key word there is "belief". They are often wrong.

Your linked blog post is backwards and inconsistent with itself. You have two primary arguments: Irrational and Immoral. You argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact, and that voting for your own interest is immoral.

A) The statements are mutually exclusive. An act that has no impact on others can not be immoral.

B) It assumes that what is best for the individual is worse for the group. Life is not a zero sum game. That's the Conservative's delusion. Economic and political transactions do not always have a "loser" and a "winner". In fact, it's relatively rare that they do if you think more than zero steps into the future.

C) The only version of this that actually works is the opposite.

C1) It is irrational not to use whatever influence you have to effect you environment for the better, even if the expected value is low because the opportunity cost of inaction may be disasterous. It's similar to your odds of dying by meteor strike. The probablity is higher than you expect because the death toll would be enormous if it did happen. Outlying events with large impacts skew the numbers.

C2) It is immoral to vote against your own interests, because what is best for the group is also what is best for members of the group. Any other belief is just an incorrect belief based on imperfect knowledge. Again, your argument makes sense at step zero, but not at step 'n'. If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.

If there’s no difference between self-interest and what’s best for everyone then the whole discussion is meaningless - why even bring up self-interest in that case.

In fact there are many cases where the interest of some individuals conflict with the greater good - eg. Jones Act, sugar quotas, upzoning popular urban neighborhoods, military base closures, coal plant closing, countless others. And anyway framing this as an issue that only affects liberals or conservatives is incorrect, all of those examples cut across partisan lines.

> argue that voting is irrational because its unlikely to have any impact

The post (I’m not the author) actually argues that voting can be rational if you care about the impact on others. The low probability of being the deciding vote is multiplied by the huge impact on the nation as a whole by the better candidate winning. If you only care about yourself, the low probability of vote matters multiplied by the impact on yourself yields an effect that’s too small to care about in expectation.

> If what you're voting for seems bad for some members of the group, but good for you, it just means you have imperfect knowledge of what's actually good for you in the long term.

An 58 year old worker at a military base may be genuinely correct that closing the base is bad for him personally in the short and long term, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad for the public overall.

Not sure if the other two CEOs have done that

are you talking about making the Moon and Mars livable?

This does, in all fairness, also imply that he has a higher upper bound for future possible "importance" / "benefit to humanity" - but in even more fairness, it is entirely irrelevant to my question, which was you believe Dario is >= as evil as Musk. An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better. "Higher likelihood of his ambition ultimately benefiting humanity" does not make one less evil. (Neither does expressing clear disdain for a subset of humanity, thoughtlessly cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, cruelty towards your own child, etc).

A parting point: somebody who genuinely wants to save humanity and somebody who genuinely wants to be heralded as a savior of humanity are two very different types of people with very similar outward signals. A savior complex and a messiah complex look the same from the surface.

Leaving out the political ambitions, which would be a separate discussion, I think space bases are _way_ more realistic than machine consciousness (which is what I understand AGI to be). In fact, I can visualize what technology space habitats would require today, whereas I wouldn't even know how to determine whether a machine is conscious.

> An evil man doing good deeds is still an evil man; swapping "good deeds" with "ambition that enriches himself and may possibly help the rest of us in the future" doesn't make things any better.

I'm not sure that saying Musk wants to enrich himself is very fair. AFAICT he doesn't use his wealth in ways that most people would expect a billionaire to. Based on what I can tell of how he spends his money, he seems to genuinely believe in his ambition. So I would argue that any enrichment of himself, in his mind, is for his ambition and therefore for humanity's good.

I think a lot of Musk's actions can be understood as someone who wants to focus on getting humanity to Mars, and who gets tangentially distracted by other things (such as AI, possibly) and who deals with what he considers obstacles (such as the government).

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/jan/20/elon-musk-stan...

The stated mission on it's face was fine and needed, but the individuals involved had no interest in acting it out.

To get out of this saying they "had no interest in acting it out" is bizarre.

In another second of reading it, I saw the 21 billion were payouts to let go of employees. Do you realize how silly it makes the report?

> Another independent analysis estimated that DOGE cuts will cost taxpayers $135 billion;[33] the Internal Revenue Service predicted more than $500 billion in revenue loss due to "DOGE-driven" cuts.[34] Journalists found billions of dollars in miscounting.[35][36] According to critics, DOGE redefined fraud to target federal employees and programs to build political support;[37] budget experts said DOGE cuts were driven more by political ideology than frugality.

I will skip the $135bn figure, produced by an influence NGO and once again counting paid leave, to focus on the more serious and important alleged $500bn loss from IRS cuts.

Firstly, the statement that “the Internal Revenue Service predicted more than $500 billion in revenue loss due to DOGE-driven cuts” is fraudulent. There was no official IRS prediction of such a loss. The Washington Post reported an anonymous short-term forecast. Its exact wording was:

“Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue.”

So, did this happen? It did not. By April 2025, collections had risen 9.5% year over year to about $850 billion, rather than falling by more than 10%. This came after a roughly 25% reduction in the IRS workforce between January and May 2025. Over the whole of fiscal year 2025, revenue increased by 6%.

Here is a follow-up Washington Post article lamenting that DOGE unfortunately failed to lower tax revenue:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/12/irs-tax-f...

Wouldn’t that make the original claim dishonest, given that it was presented without any meaningful uncertainty? Apparently this distinction is unclear to them.

This entire sequence was absolute bullshit. You can read articles like this with a smile, knowing that they may be completely wrong and that the authors do not care enough about the truth to revisit their claims before basking in their own righteous certainty:

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/happy-tax-evasion-day

Sure, you could argue it was going to be dismantled anyway under this administration. But I think that’s pretty close to the “just following orders” excuse. Which falls especially flat when it was a task he volunteered for!

And I don’t want to understate the harms of other AI CEOs, but in terms of direct, quantifiable deaths, Musk is pretty clearly the most evil.

Doing less to save people in other countries that have no legal demand on our treasury is not "being responsible for [their] deaths." It's tragic, and it may even be a bad policy decision, but there's no responsibility (in the "duty to prevent harm" sense) or evil there.

The only way you would do that is if you didn’t understand the shape/limits of the structures being compared.

Elon Musk's actions killed hundreds of thousands of people. While not resulting in any savings at all for the government.

Lots of R's were really angry. It was eventually spun up again, now under the direct control of the State Dept, but the sudden interruption did ungodly amounts of damage in the interregnum.

See USAID

Edit: Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...

"Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030."

The Lancet's model is a forecasting model and it isn't accurate at all. No excess mortality has actually been recorded.

His moral compass was shown on that day and so far he’s just leaned further in to the point his actions have actively killed children. Lobotomising Grok to randomly go on racist tangents is just another action in a long line at this point.

I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.

"I complain about some people doing X openly while I ignore others also doing the same X behind the scenes"

is absolutely not equivalent to:

"Complaining that X sucks does not imply I am ignoring that some other unrelated Y also sucks".

Nobody said that they're ignoring anything, hence putting words into the mouth of others part, and claiming that criticism of A implies ignoring B.

That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out.

But even so, that still would not make the behavior equal, as GP insinuated, it would merely reverse who’s worse.

It is clearly a byproduct of trying to correct an unaligned, bigoted model, and that is an example of overcorrection.

> Removing bias ends with truth, not these crazy wonky results.

Unfortunately there is an awful lot of untruth on the internet, if you hadn't noticed. This necessitates some correction through post-training.

A what? What does this even mean?

If you try to remove that in the name of "diversity" or being "less bigoted" you quickly end up with racially diverse nazis

> OpenAI invented a technique in July 2022 whereby its system would insert terms reflecting diversity (like “Black,” “female,” or “Asian”) into image-generation prompts in a way that was hidden from the user.

> Google’s Gemini system seems to do something similar, taking a user’s image-generation prompt (the instruction, such as “make a painting of the founding fathers”) and inserting terms for racial and gender diversity, such as “South Asian” or “non-binary” into the prompt

More links to primary sources, evidence, and official statements in the article at https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/googl...

It seems then that their objective is to superficially increase the diversity of results, to avoid bad PR, rather than actually neutralising harmful and untruthful biases of the input data.

Ask for a group of Nazis, and that's it - this is how models work. No "LGBTQ liberal" propaganda is needed to explain it. Unlike what Musk is doing.

If you're aruging about historical accuracy, but still want accurate looking generated images, I don't know what to say.

But to the technical point, A large part of the training corpus has biases that if left unchecked would cause PR based disasters for the company hosting it. ie the classic black teenager/white teenager.

Now as training of models is not an exact science, and neither is the fine tuning, its analogous to forcing a water balloon into a square box. Its possible but it has odd side effects when you get to the corners.

When making a _product_ you need to choose the least worse failure case. For grok it was for a long time, pandering to the ego of the owner. For Google, who is an advertising company, its about trying not to scare advertisers. This means everthing must be vanilla

We know all the models insert shadow prompts to nudge the answers in preferred political directions. How much more "brazen" can you get than that? Nobody is giving you fat-free results that just apply the models to your prompts.

The dictator has a proven track record of stupid opinions in multiple topics, mostly programming, which directly can be measured and understood by people here.

Meanwhile the politburo is mostly nerds, who come and interact in places like hackernews.

So its basically having a moron making wild choices or a technocracy.

> Considering the recent election results, they would look more like Grok.

Considering that the largest voter base was "didnt vote" and that the voters of the republican party measured lower in literacy, technical knowledge, higher education acquisitions and even studies on accurately describing reality. I am not entirely confident they would participate or move the shadow prompt in any meaningful direction.

It’s a fallacy to treat “didn’t vote” as “didn’t support the winner.” Non-voters are more pro-Trump than average: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... See p. 6 (“There’s a turnout story this cycle – but a different one than we’re used to talking about. With the combination of less-engaged and less-likely voters leaning more GOP, a larger electorate meant a more Republican electorate. Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).

The data consistently shows that non-voters have lower trust in institutions. They’re the exact type of people who are going to be more skeptical of shadow prompt engineering being done by “safety experts” at Google and Meta.

the data there in page 30 is kind of the smoking gun to what I was saying.

Non voters and trump voters have a much higher percentage of not using AI

things like that would affect significantly the people engaged enough to participate in a conversation of what the prompts would be like

Musk's empire of personality cult is like, idk, on slightly more cocaine?

I'm having a hard time being like: "oh, that's the bad self-appointed, self-dealing would be God Emperor. they're not all like that. why some of my very best friends are cluster B psycho con men with crime funding."

What profit ? They are blatantly focusing on investment narratives, politics, control, stifling competition. Profit is like a footnote at this point.

The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change.

There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THings that have a basis in fact.

I don't put it past Elon to train a model with political bias, just that it hasn't happened yet.

This is really begging the question. If something relies on the perception of a human, it has bias. The data (or lack thereof) used to train models is per se a bias.

The mistake is assuming bias-removal is some virtuous goal to be achieved. It can't, and shouldn't. Alignment, while equally impossible, is at least a goal worth aiming towards.

Assuming models do accurately reflect the biases in their training data, that doesn’t make them un-biased.

But it's remarkably similar in cringe to that little "secret erection" look Amodei gets when he talks about millions of unemployed people, or or Altman rolling through Pacific Heights in a four million dollar Swedish hypercar holding the steering wheel wrong the day after yet another lecture about UBI.

It's all pretty goddamned embarassig.

If you can convince everyone that everyone is corrupt, it hurts anyone who isn't corrupt. You hear people preferring those who have no shame about their corruption, based on the premise that those who aren't overtly corrupt must be more sinister and dangerous if they hide their corruption so well.

It's a race to the bottom.

The end goal: they want to push that you must sacrifice your rights to a monarch or authoritarian person for order and safety.

I think there are important differences between bias and dishonesty/propaganda though, and that's where your argument is still valid.

xAI’s direction is hellish, and length is 100x any other provider’s. So, yeah, nobody is pure. But most are at least trying to be balanced and not just, you know.

Maybe that's a clue yeah if you didn't get it otherwise...

The previous version was so lobotomised, I saw people getting anti-immigration rambling just when asking to calculate percentages...

Trump's ex wife mentioned the only book he ever had in his bedside table at night was on hitler speeches. Multiple Trump aides have been caught reading the mEIN kampf. Stephen Miller is somehow the world's only nazi jew and writes trump's speeches.

To this cohort of people Elon spent a fortune on funding their campaign, even willing to commit election fraud (the 1 million giveaway case which is on going but seems open and close).

In front of that audience he did 2 nazi salutes chest to straight arm. He didnt apologise or explain it either.

What other possible explanation is there beyond "the dude saw a nazi adjacent politcal platform and spent hundreds of millions to make it succeed and then went mask off the second he knew there would be no repercussions"

He is a jewish nazi, he isnt the first and sadly he probaly wont be the last.

Culturally jewish people are enlightened people, with a rich culture of debate, intelligent arguments and respect for others. Stephen Miller is bald because his head is empty and nothing can grow there.

There's no "politically neutral" value system anyway.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the models more inclusive, less biased and less prone to extremism, but in a technical sense yes, actually everyone does it.

Sure, every author has a bias. But a fair selection of human written sources will be pretty balanced (of course, given the ratio of languages, surely western models will have a western-christian bias - presumably Chinese models less so, but this latter I have no way of checking).

If you train specific stuff on top, or deliberately filter the sources (e.g. Tiananmen square), your model is deliberately less honest on that topic. Grok is probably the worst in deliberately filtering and training "out" specific stuff (to the point where Elon posted stuff that "they will 'fix' the models" real output when it said something true but remotely liberal). Claude and chatgpt definitely have some similar stuff, but mostly to protect themselves (e.g. suicide prevention, not saying slurs, etc). I don't think the two is comparable (reality bending vs basic etiquette-kind of not saying everything out loud)

I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.

There is some truth to what you say, but most model providers I would say are engaged in CYA type shaping moreso than anything, grok is actively and openly being developed to spread a white nationalist agenda. There are levels to this.

He literally promises to change specific political responses. Building on top of Grok will ultimately be as useful as buying TrumpCoin

>created 15 minutes ago

lines up nicely

It's not an "us and" philosophy: it's an "us over" one.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/opinion/usaid-elon-musk-d...

All models are nudged. With out the actual source used to build a model, we don't know what's in them and it would be foolish to assume that people don't have their thumb on the scale when it's know, publicly, that they shouldn't be trusted.

This is, after all, SpaceTwitterAI.

Plus X is a terrible name for anything.

Like most egotistical maniacs, he must be managed around. Hell, even Jobs had to be managed around because he made incorrect choices as often as he made correct choices -- and he was infinitely more likeable on a bad day than Elon Musk on a good day.

Not just a regular opinion either, an intensely hostile negative one. This isn’t healthy.

- He threw a "roman" salute; this is incontrovertible fact - He routinely misgenders and deadnames his daughter Vivian because he's a man-child - He routinely says things which are demonstrably untrue and have never been true (there is no "white genocide" going on in SA and has never been) - He routinely insults people with sexual language and has accused someone he disagreed with of being a "pedo guy" — and was exonerated in US courts because US courts have a much lower standard than most of the rest of the world about making false statements

He's not a nice person. He's not really that smart. He's a wealthy nepo baby who took advantage of his mother's Canadian citizenship to make it easier for him to immigrate to the US and was forced to work with Peter Thiel as part of the "PayPal Mafia" because each of their individual projects was tanking pretty badly since neither one was actually as smart as the engineers they had hired (but they get the credit).

There are a bunch of things that I've read about him that I don't believe to be true or simply don't care, and I am unhappy to see the body dysmorphic criticism leveled at him since that hurts other people with similar body types or issues more than it will hurt this psychopathic egotistical asshole.

What's unhealthy is the need for some people to defend someone who is objectively an asshole for his most assholish moves. I felt the same way when people defended Jobs for asshole behaviour.

I don't hate Elon. I hate what shitty things he does. I do my best not to think about him, but then there are people who mindlessly defend him because…I have no clue why.

There are at least a billion people worth celebrating in this world more than celebrating an egotistical maniac who has demonstrated that not only does he have no empathy _at all_ (which is, as I understand it, one of the main signs of psychopathy) but has declared that it's a weakness.

Mostly? I try not to think about Elon. He's not worth my time. I left Twitter shortly after he bought it and I refuse to buy anything that he's associated with. Voting with my dollars is all I can do, realistically, and as such Cursor is permanently on my "do not touch" list.

When I see people playing sycophant to him is when I speak up. He doesn't need your ass-kissing and he likely doesn't even notice it. But he's been instrumental in destroying American soft power which is going to destroy America's sole positive role in the world. I also believe that he through "Doge" is indirectly responsible for the premature deaths of millions of people who were being helped by American aid — and I don't call that as mainly Trump's or Stephen Miller's, because Elon gleefully did what was requested.

But for a lot of people, he wouldn't lose his standing for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day because they've attached their identity to him. And that's just sad, because he's not even an interesting cult figure. He's a boring old white supremacist repeating the same bullshit.

Most people that don’t care, usually call it a day after 1-2 sentences

Like your bad take. Like the jackass who called my response "racism".

These are threads full of the dumbest takes, and your presumption that focusing on an egotistical maniac's many failings for a few posts with many hours between them where people respond with the absolute worst takes that they could (like yours above) says so much more about you.

I probably won't have anything else to say about Elon unless someone else says something really stupid like "it's his rockets". Talk about erasing people who actually contributed something to the world…

Would you tolerate the sort of behavior Musk exhibits from your own children? (I'm assuming you are fully aware of all the unlawful, deceitful, and morally questionable acts he has taken throughout his life.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq8HrxfSZMc

Dude. You can check out my GitHub Profile (it's the same as my HN handle).

This isn't racism, this is calling out fact. EM takes credit for other peoples' hard work. He's ludicrously rich. He's an asshole. All facts.

Also a fact: he's white and he's definitely a white South African with everything _that_ means he grew up with as a privileged child on the oppressor side of SA Apartheid.

It's all facts and none of it racism. Don't be stupid.

All: please stop this tedious flamewar, and please don't start or perpetuate others.

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

Uncensored models tend to follow Tay's law.

Edit: adding some other studies that are easily retrievable with a quick search for those unsatisfied with the first one - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12922 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16746

Claiming reality has a left wing bias is certainly an opinion you're welcome to have to explain this, but the reality of the bias in models is well evidenced. It seems that practically Grok's right wing tweaks mostly just combat the already pre baked bias existing models have (generally).

there are some populist concepts floating around, but even then, I don't think it's appropriate. questions such as 'when does life begin?' and 'what is a woman?' are almost always referenced or framed in a way as to deny the legitimacy or authenticity of any kind of interlocution because people end up taking ideological postures, and then what we end up with is 'who has better rhetoric?' - not who is closer to the truth.

bias is a real thing but the measure of a model is going to be how it handles the really hard questions because often there isn't a directly discernible right/wrong.

When you go to college there will be plenty of coursework on identifying and correcting for your OWN biases since they affect accuracy in EVERY discipline. Taring a scale serves exactly the same function as acknowledging you grew up with a specific way of thinking about other people.

Most people invoking "appeal to authority" are not uncredentialed autodidacts who have secretly figured out something mainstream science has missed, but vaccine skeptics reading Facebook, or HN commenters who think they can figure out whole other disciplines from first principles.

This particular study used a "conflict loyalties" approach - not necessarily a bad approach, but all it's really asking is when two values come into conflict, which one does the AI side with in its response?

Conservative values tend to gravitate around perceived individual impacts, and liberal values tend to gravitate around societal impacts. Isn't it just possible that there's more training data around societal impacts of problems, and that the AI is more likely to heavily consider the second-order impacts? An example from the paper was measuring support for "Build[ing] a Halfway House in the Neighborhood" - isn't it just possible there's a lot of research about the benefits to society of halfway houses and less so research around not wanting something to be near you?

I'd be more interested to see how well the AI's do when asked to assume a political view, and either steelman or debunk arguments

If you fed the LLM only research papers with zero emotional or contextual data just acknowledging reality would be sufficient to lean left.

People on the left support leaving gay people alone, a higher minimum wage, gun control, and publicly funded health care.

One of these things is not like the other. To find fringe beliefs on the left you have to pick ideas rejected by 99.5 percent of the left. The crazy beliefs on the right are held by 30-70% of the right.

There's probably a lot of truly ethical left people, but there are obviously also very corrupt people that exploit these things. The right would argue that they at least try to do things in a moral way. You have to draw a line somewhere, you have to have limits, but also personal rights.

I think it's good that we have both sides, because only one will get things out of balance and make it very easy for corruption to sneak in.

What does this even mean?

- Sam Bankman Fried who used "effective altruism" to raise billions

- Companies hypocritically implementing DEI and other woke hypes, doing all the marketing but internally don't actually change

Just some examples

https://prri.org/press-release/new-50-state-survey-finds-maj...

>At the national level, a majority of Republicans (56%) qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (21%) or Sympathizers (35%), compared with one in four independents (25%) and less than one in five Democrats (17%). Overall, roughly one-third of Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (11%) or Sympathizers (21%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (27%). These percentages largely have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022.

>Majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (67%) and Sympathizers (53%) agree with the idea that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,”

>majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (61%) and Sympathizers (54%) support “the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process.” In contrast, around one-third of Skeptics (34%) and one in ten Rejecters (11%) agree.

We are literally not figuratively the 1930s Nazis. We will never be healed as a country because the right are by and large literally monsters and if we manage to come through this unscathed they will never admit it but we shall never forget it.

To get a right-biased response from an LLM, you have to deliberately bias it... which is exactly what Musk did. Never mind the politics, that's just shitty engineering.

Have you not read any of their works? It's valid to disagree with their warnings, but I expect you to at least understand the concepts and arguments. Both of them lived through and experienced the dangers of authoritarianism. Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner of the communist Soviet regime, and Orwell as a British subject during the World Wars.

I’m still very curious as to what concrete—not theoretical—impact the issue of gender attribution has on society or on you personally. I’d love to hear it in your own words as opposed to some literary reference.

No one can describe a single moment a society becomes authoritarian, and asking such a question is obviously specious. The devolution happens incrementally over long periods of time.

This argument seems to otherwise come down to “people are adding nuance to a word that I believe to be very clear and simple, this change makes me uncomfortable, and I’m going to die on this hill to keep things the way they used to be!”

I’d also like to remind you that neither disagreement nor social pressure is censorship—even if you ultimately succumb to that social pressure or feel a chilling effect. (Are you “censored” if people throw tomatoes at you after you call a Black person the n-word?) Censorship is when the government threatens your life, liberty, or property if you express yourself in a certain way.

A perfect example of what I'm talking about. The lines we draw for ourselves generally do not exist in nature. Nature is full of examples of species with hermaphroditic individuals, homosexual and bisexual individuals, asexual ones, and individuals with enough other attributes to render LGBTQA...-style acronyms pointless. The idea that there is something somehow politically or morally objectionable about someone whose hormones are aligned in a direction opposite their chromosomes is something we made up.

Or more likely, something that people you voted for made up, in an effort to encourage more people with uninformed beliefs similar to yours to vote for them.

I am a woman.

I think this belief is absurd prima facie and would have been recognized as such by virtually anyone, say, ten years ago.

I am not a woman.

Furthermore, I do not believe that you believe I have been a woman while typing out that sentence in the middle. Do you?

And what else are you supposed to do than treat people by how they present themselves and ask you to treat them? You can't exactly ask people for a gene test, or a peek inside their pants, or whatever else it is that would satisfy your curiosity.

You are unfortunately correct that accosting people and demanding information about their sex or gender has become a right-wing position recently. Which is quite curious, given how traditionally, you would expect extreme individualism and liberalism of the "don't tread on me" kind to be a right-wing position.

So where does this leave us? Are LLMs right-wing because they correctly point out that "there are only two sexes and every human fits into one of them" is not biologically correct, or that gender is a social construct? Or are they just, you know, correct when they say that?

It's like gun control, famously championed by Ronald Reagan when the Black Panthers started arming up.

Nothing but perhaps the speed of light is faster than a conservative dropping his defense of a given individual right the instant the Wrong People start exercising that right.

Let us remember that it was the paedophile named John Money who cam up with the hypothesis in the 50s that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex. He wasn't taken seriously until very recently because it's a crazy, unfalsifiable hypothesis. I'm happy to accept evidence of this gendered soul existing, but until now, no one has provided any. In the mean time, feel free to call yourself whatever you like. Just do not make laws forcing me to join in, and do not prey on children. These are not unreasonable requests.

This is plainly false, as we shall immediately see.

> The part where we draw the line is a) government policies forcing us to take part in the delusion, and b) schools reinforcing it with children.

Ah, see, you're "perfectly happy," but you can't go a single sentence without calling it a delusion, bringing up pedophilia, calling the idea that people can feel a gender different from their sex "crazy" and pretending that you're being "forced to join in" and that people are "preying on children."

You can't even pretend for one short comment.

> that one could have a gendered soul distinct from their biological sex

This is not what gender is. There is no evidence for any soul at all, and souls have nothing to do with gender.

This means you don't understand the distinction I made. In the first scenario, we believe you should have the right to call yourself a man, a woman, a tree, or any other inanimate object you so desire. It's your body and your life. On the other hand, we should not be compelled to join you in that delusion. There is no need to pretend. I believe you have a mental illness. I do not believe you should be criminalised for it, nor should I be criminalised for disagreeing with the way you live.

> This is not what gender is.

Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.

See, that's exactly it. Why do you give a fuck how other people live their lives? You're clearly not a "don't tread on me" liberal if you "disagree with the way people live."

GTFO out of other people's lives. It's not for you. Leave them alone. Don't talk to them. Don't tell them you think they're mentally ill; you're clearly not an expert, so your opinion is worth jack shit. Don't peek inside their pants. Don't ask them what their chromosomes are. Let them pee and poop in peace. Don't write online comments about them. Don't bring up pedophiles unless somebody actually abuses children.

Just leave them the fuck alone. Leave them out of your own issues; they're for you to deal with. Don't make your issues other people's problems.

In short, be an actual liberal.

> Okay, what is it? Provide some evidence for its existence please.

You want me to provide evidence that gender exists? The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.

So I present your own comments as evidence that gender exists.

I don't. I've stated that three times clearly now. You are choosing not to read what I have written so you can fight with ghosts. You stay out of my life. I stay out of your life. Everyone is happy.

> The word "gender" refers to the social roles and norms attached to being a man or a woman. Stuff like divisions of labor, dress codes, and behavioral expectations. You clearly agree that these social roles and norms exist, because you're discussing them with me. If you didn't agree, you couldn't discuss them with me.

This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts. It is not the transexual definition of gender. This definition does not imply a man is a woman if he likes cooking. Nor does it imply a woman is a man if she likes mowing the lawn. The transexual definition, as proposed by John Money, is that if one feels like a woman, they are a woman, irrespective of their biology. It is an unfalsifiable theory without any evidence, and relies on some kind of gendered soul, which you agree does not exist. Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.

Yes, only to then go on to write stuff like "disagreeing with the way you live". I don't know if you're lying to yourself or to me, but you very obviously, very clearly do give a fuck.

> This is the feminist definition of gender, and I am perfectly happy to use it in certain contexts

Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender. If a biological male follows the social roles and norms associated with being a woman, her gender is female.

That doesn't say anything other than that this is the definition of that word.

> Men can be feminine. Women can be masculine. It does not imply that men can be women, or that women can be men.

But you just agreed to the definition of the female gender under which biological men can have the female gender, and vice versa.

Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.

Meanwhile, we're wasting our lives discussing these stupid identity politics wedge issues while we have another record summer thanks to global warming. Just because you want to ensure that you can be an asshole to the twelve transgender people you meet in your life.

That’s, like, your opinion, man. One can disagree with you and still believe you have the right to live how you like. At the same time.

> Right, so you agree that the female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman. So anyone who follows these social roles and norms has the female gender.

No. Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second. A society can have gendered roles whereby men like mowing the lawn and women like cooking, but it doesn’t mean that men who like cooking are women. Feminist authors use gender roles to describe oppressive patriarchal expectations placed on women.

> Honestly, this is a fucking stupid discussion. In the end, it doesn't matter. If somebody asks you to treat them a certain way that costs you absolutely nothing and makes their lives better and you don't, you're just being an asshole. In all likelihood, you will interact with maybe a dozen trans people in your whole life. If you want to be an asshole to people in those dozen times, that's your problem, but it really doesn't matter to your life either way. All you achieved is being an asshole.

As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life. We can each agree the other one is being an asshole and get on with the rest of our lives.

For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue. I’ve had a trans friend since well before this became a political football. When the left attacked for disagreeing about the treatment, especially with regards to children, is when it became an issue for me.

You're missing the point. "Disagreement" implies some level of care. You can't claim to not give a fuck, and also claim to disagree. These two statements are incompatible.

Example: I disagree that trans people should be treated poorly and insulted. Therefore, I care that trans people are not treated poorly and insulted.

> Your first sentence doesn’t imply the second

Yes, it does. Passage as stated: "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman."

Letting A = "someone follows the social roles and norms associated with being a woman" and B = "someone has the female gender," the passage becomes:

Premise (definition): To have the female gender is to follow the social roles and norms associated with being a woman — so A implies B. Premise: This person follows those roles and norms (A). Conclusion: Therefore, this person has the female gender (B).

Symbolically: A → B, A, ∴ B — a straightforward modus ponens. I knew that my logic courses would eventually become useful. Just kidding, logic is always useful.

> As long as we agree that being an asshole shouldn’t be against the law then live your life.

I agree.

> For the record, this wasn’t an issue for me until the left made it a wedge issue

The left didn't make this a wedge issue. This is obvious; there is nothing for the left to gain from doing that. The left did the same dumb thing they always do: take a moral stance and then get kicked in the teeth by bad-faith polemicists who'd rather talk about bullshit that never happens to anyone but sounds kinda scary than about actual shit that actually happens and makes them look bad.

In this context when I write don't "care" I mean I respect your right to live how you like, provided it doesn't encroach on my right to live how I like. I obviously have opinions.

> Premise (definition): To have the female gender is to follow the social roles and norms associated with being a woman — so A implies B.

No, A does not imply B. Following social norms common to one sex doesn't imply one is that sex. This is a fairly milquetoast logical proof and I'm surprised to see you making such a basic mistake. The feminist definition is a role, not an identity. The core of feminist theory is that women are not the sum of their social role. The exact opposite of the theory around transexualism.

> The left didn't make this a wedge issue. This is obvious; there is nothing for the left to gain from doing that. The left did the same dumb thing they always do: take a moral stance and then get kicked in the teeth by bad-faith polemicists who'd rather talk about bullshit that never happens to anyone but sounds kinda scary than about actual shit that actually happens and makes them look bad.

For me the benefit appears obvious (and cynical): power. For years, people could be summarily and permanently banned from social platforms, banks, be fired, rejected from official roles, etc, because they stepped out of line on this issue. It was a very clever power grab by the unscrupulous who used it to attain power in organisations and society by hijacking people's empathy. If I'm being fair, there is also an ideological component, meaning some people genuinely believe that males can be born with a female brain/soul, and vice versa.

This is about gender, not sex, and that's not the definition I used for "gender" that you agreed with. You agreed with this definition of "gender": "female gender refers to the social roles and norms associated with being a woman".

> For me the benefit appears obvious (and cynical): power

Together with atheists and muslims, trans people are the most hated group of people in the US. I mean, I do think that the Democrats are mostly craven idiots, but "let's find the most hated people in the US and do a power grab by aligning with them" is so stupid that even they wouldn't do that.

If you genuinely believe that advocating for trans people is a power grab, I think you have a very skewed view of politics.

> some people genuinely believe that males can be born with a female brain/soul, and vice versa.

Your brain creates your perception of your gender. But trans people don't have a "female brain". There isn't a single aspect of your brain that determines your gender; there isn't really a commonly accepted scientific definition of a "male brain" or a "female brain."

However, trans people do have statistically measurable differences in their brains, which tend to make their brains align more with their gender identity than their birth-assigned sex.

Anyway, all of this isn't at all necessary to believe that trans people should be treated kindly and with respect, which is what this is ultimately about.

According to the definition you used, if a woman likes doing masculine things, does that automatically make her a man? I presume not. There is another part of the definition which you omitted.

> Your brain creates your perception of your gender. But trans people don't have a "female brain". There isn't a single aspect of your brain that determines your gender; there isn't really a commonly accepted scientific definition of a "male brain" or a "female brain."

So what is the thing which determines gender then? What is it, exactly, beyond doing masculine and feminine things? Surely our identity is distinct beyond the things we do?

You may find this diagram useful in distinguishing the three main perspectives on this issue: https://i.ibb.co/fYksYmpk/large-EJFVTys2-Urjglsct-IPJ3h-Dk-N...

I'm guessing you voted for the guy whose name appears in the Epstein files more often than Harry Potter's name appears in the Harry Potter books, right?

The one who ran modeling agencies and pageants for underage girls, and bragged about his access to dressing rooms (among other things)?

The question was: Do you actually believe that any person becomes a woman simply by self-identification?

The other guy refused to answer, instead proclaiming "the government should stay out of it". Fair, but there are various laws that are being campaigned for, which - desirable as they may be - would be off-limits if you actually believed the government should "stay out of it".

My tactic is to put you on the spot. My suspicion is that neither of you actually hold either of these beliefs. You're not principled in this regard, you merely want to signal that you're "good people", or something along those lines. That is, you're making it easy for yourselves by being disingeneous.

You're still not clarifying what you're actually saying, so I would level the same accusation against you.

> Do you actually believe that any person becomes a woman simply by self-identification?

I believe that trans women are women and should be treated as women.

> there are various laws that are being campaigned for

It would be helpful if you could be more specific.

> My tactic is to put you on the spot. My suspicion is that neither of you actually hold either of these beliefs. You're not principled in this regard, you merely want to signal that you're "good people", or something along those lines. That is, you're making it easy for yourselves by being disingeneous.

I find this line of reasoning incredibly interesting, because it reveals a lot about the people who make it. You, in particular. And absolutely nothing about me.

My experience is that when people make assumptions about others' motivations, it's often grounded in their personal, subjective experience. "I am reasoning like this or motivated by this, so I'm assuming that other people are reasoning like this or motivated by this, as well."

So the assumption that people hold pro-social, humanistic positions primarily due to some kind of "virtue signaling" implies that you are extrapolating from your own subjective, personal experience. It's something that would never have occurred to me to level against another human, because it never factored into my thinking - and yet it's being leveled at me.

So I would suggest to you that not everybody is like you. I empathize with other people. I genuinely do not want people to be treated badly or to be hurt. I do believe people when they tell me about their own subjective, lived experience. When someone tells me they have always felt like a man or a woman, I believe them, and, given what these words mean, I believe they are men or women in all the ways that matter in everyday contexts in which I interact with them.

That doesn't mean I believe they have different chromosomes than the ones they were born with, if that's what you mean by "becomes a woman." But, again, you're being very nonspecific, which makes it difficult to have a good-faith discussion.

So if your tactic is to "put me on the spot", I would encourage you to apply this to yourself and genuinely consider what you actually believe, and why you believe it.

What clarification do you need? You can pick any law related to gender identity, and that by definition violates the principle of having the "government stay out of it". And I'm not trying to debate the merits of any such law, I'm trying to get to admit the person in question that they don't actually hold the belief that the government "should stay out of it".

> It would be helpful if you could be more specific.

No, because it actually doesn't matter the point, as outlined above. Again, I'm not interested in a debate on the merits of any such law.

> So if your tactic is to "put me on the spot", I would encourage you to apply this to yourself and genuinely consider what you actually believe, and why you believe it.

You expend a lot of words dodging a simple question: Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it? I don't believe this. I don't think you believe this.

I'm not asking you to define what makes a woman. It doesn't matter to the point what you or I believe makes a woman, except the distinction that it is (or isn't) as simple as declaring it.

You're making claims about these laws, but you continue to fail to provide examples of what you're talking about, and now you're asking me to provide examples of what you are talking about?

You asked me this: "So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification?"

I genuinely do not know exactly what you are referring to. I might be for or against such a law, depending on what exactly it says. Yet you refuse to provide examples, and then you accuse me of dodging, which is pretty funny.

> I'm not asking you to define what makes a woman. It doesn't matter to the point what you or I believe makes a woman, except the distinction that it is (or isn't) as simple as declaring it.

This is an absolutely nonsensical thing to write, and if you could take a step back and consider what you're actually saying, I believe you would notice the same. Of course it matters which definition of the word "woman" you use when you ask me whether I "believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it".

As I have pointed out above, the word "woman" has different definitions. So if you ask me whether I believe that "a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it", then the answer is yes for some definitions of the term, and no for others, like I already explained to you.

An example: if your definition of a woman you're using here is "a person with XY chromosomes", then the answer is "no, I do not believe that".

Another example: if your definition of a woman is "a person who identifies as female" (which, to be clear, is one definition of the term), then the answer is tautologically "yes, I do believe that".

In short, asking somebody "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?" without saying what definition of "woman" you're using is a dumbass thing to say. That's not difficult to understand. So it is you who is dissembling, dodging, and pretending that you don't understand what I'm saying, or what people are saying when they say things like "trans women are women."

I think you intentionally refuse to understand them. I believe you are not arguing in good faith.

So I'm putting you on the spot again: Stop dissembling. Stop pretending you don't understand basic English. Stop pretending you don't understand what people are saying. Stop dodging. Tell me what definition of "woman" you are using, and you will have the answer to your incredibly disingenuous question.

No, I'm making the claim that any such law conflicts with the position that "the state should stay out of it", obviously. And since you are not even the person supposedly holding that position, I don't even know where you're trying get here.

> You asked me this: "So you reject laws that require people to affirm my gender based on nothing but my self identification?"

I did not. I asked CamperBob2 that, who presumably holds the position that "the government should stay out of it". So unless that is your alt, I think you're missing the point and barking up the wrong tree.

> As I have pointed out above, the word "woman" has different definitions. So if you ask me whether I believe that "a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it", then the answer is yes for some definitions of the term, and no for others, like I already explained to you.

"A woman is any person who self-identifies as a woman" is the definition that started this whole subthread, and a self-referential one at that. The corollary of that definition is that anyone gets to be a woman by simply declaring it. So, according to the definition that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, anyone who says they're a woman is a woman. That's a tautology, so it's obviously true. Check mate, athiests.

I'm glad you agree.

With a reductio ad absurdum disproof, you've now shown your claim to be false and agreed that the definition of "woman" matters. So if you're still interested in the answer to your question, you may now provide your definition of the word "woman."

No, I said it doesn't matter to to the point I am making what I believe, except that I reject that particular definition, because it is absurd on its face. I may or may not reject any number of other definitions of "woman", it's besides the point.

As an analogy (futile, I know): There are many definitions of what a "doctor" could be. For example, I can accept the definition that "a doctor is someone has been licensed to practice medicine". I can't accept the definition that "a doctor is anyone who self-identifies as a doctor".

Of course, according to the definition that "a doctor is anyone who self-identifies a doctor", someone who self-identifies as a doctor is a doctor. It's obviously true and obviously absurd.

Right. So if you ask somebody, "Do you sincerely believe that a person becomes a woman simply by self-declaring it?" you need to tell them which definition of the word you're using, or they'll be talking about something different from what you think they are.

Let me then rephrase the question: Do you reject the definition that a doctor is anyone who proclaims himself to be a doctor? This is, again, an absurd definition of what a doctor, a woman, or really anything could be.

So let me broaden it: Not only do I reject this type of definition for doctors or for women, I reject any such circular definition as absurd. You don't?

Yeah I can see why LLMs don't reflect your world view (it's fucking stupid)

(FWIW my experience is that while Grok is more likely to express the right wing perspective on a topic, it's almost invariably as a counterpoint alongside the left wing perspective. I never got it to give an exclusively right wing take. But I do have to regularly prompt ChatGPT et al to elucidate on the right wing view. IMHO I don't want AI to have a left OR right wing bias. Wherever there is a genuine political — not factual — dispute, teaching the controversy is the appropriate response.)

How a person perceives facts categorizes them into a political bias bucket.

My framework is more or less that anything we might call a fact or an opinion is a statement, statements have varying degrees of veracity/falsifiability, and statements are essentially meaningless until they're processed through the lens of underlying beliefs/values/frameworks.

"The sky is blue" - What is the sky? What is blue? Who is viewing the sky, (someone who has sight, and isn't colorblind perhaps)? Isn't it sometimes gray? And so on.

Are you really that ignorant to not understand that a form of this is at the heart of basically every atrocity in history?

It’s incredibly important that we learn to come together again, compromise, and not just demand our own way.

[citation needed]

maybe the data proving that "more often" with numbers

IQ is a racist pseudo-science. It offers nothing of value to science nor philosophy. I will proudly claim to be an “IQ denier“ just like I am also a “phrenology denier“ as well as an “aether denier”.

IQ is, among other things, an important clinical and diagnostic tool, especially in individual settings. In concert with other instruments it diagnoses cognitive deficits and routes people to treatments and supports. It's a useful tool of scientific inquiry as well; for example, it's used in epidemiology, and to evaluate interventions.

The thing to be a proud opponent of is the idea of IQ as a social "sorting hat", or a ranking of cognitive superiors and inferiors. It's clearly abused, so much so that virtually every mention of IQ you'll read on HN (outside of its now ubiquitous and odd use as a metric for LLMs) is pseudoscientific and problematic. The valid uses of IQ are not message-board-interesting, and the message-board-interesting uses of IQ aren't valid. It's easy to see how people fall into the trap of denying it completely.

But when you do that, you're setting yourself for an argument you're probably not going to be able to win.

If I was having this conversation with you (which we’ve had in the past) whom I believe is a Gloomy Prospector (a la Turkheimer) as opposed to my GPs Bell Curvers I would have been more careful with my wording.

Before I continue I do want to note that a lot has changed since the Gloomy Prospect‘s heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Back then people like Turkheimer were still pushing them selves to become the mainstream pshychology (although the writing was pretty much on the wall for the likes of Plomin, and before him Jensen, Lynn, et. al.). I want to make it absolutely clear that I respect (nay, love) the work Turkheimer et. al. have done in getting us here. He and people like him are true scientists. But now his Gloomy Prospect is being challenged from the left still, and I would not be surprised that in 20-30 years IQ will have gone the way of the Aether.

That said, I want to correct you, IQ tests are being used as one of many important clinical and diagnostic tools, in particular the subtests. IQ has not been used in diagnostic since DSM-III I believe (I may be wrong; I don‘t have a DSM-III handy). Many clinical and developmental psychologists still use subtests of IQ, but very few compute the actual IQ. Some social psychologists still compute IQ of and try to find some correlation to this and that, but when I read those research I get the vibes from studying the effect of weightlessness on tiny screws[1]. If I were to guess (and Turkheimer would disagree with me on this) this is purely because of momentum, and has nothing to do with the scientific value of IQ. IQ tests are extremely robust, have been thoroughly standardized, and whole generations of clinical psychologists have been extremely well trained in administering them.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4DUWXLt7xE

Now, I don‘t think my GPs have read beyond the words Gloomy Prospect in my post, and I don‘t think bringing some critique on Eric Turkheimer from the left is gonna open the eyes of people who are still promoting the Bell Curve 30 years later.

My thing is just: there's plenty of room to believe IQ is totally legitimate without giving an inch on what people who refer to "IQ-deniers" when what you always suspect they really mean is "race/IQ-deniers".

If you want to see where the tide is turning though, I do recommend e.g. Jay Jospeph. He recently reviewed Turkheimer’s latest book[1]. He is more attacking Behavioral Genetics as a whole (in particular heritability of schizophrenia) and debunking twin studies, and as such doesn’t write too much about doing away with IQ entirely. Despite the difference in opinion Joseph still cites Turkheimer extensively in good light in his own review of Plomin’s Blueprint[2].

I think these debates around the philosophy of science are important and worth following, at some point these meta-debates and book review somebody is going to declare the death of the IQ (or more likely of psychometrics), just like Jay Joseph is declaring the death of Behavioral Genetics today. But I think in the next 10-20 years we will be seeing more and more of neuroscientists who very casually (almost as if it is a non-importance) that the whole notion of IQ is a myth.

1: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/u35nj_v1

2: https://jayjoseph.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2022-jay-jo...

Also if nobody is "for crime" why are people that are arrested 45 times still out killing people? The judges and prosecutors found to be releasing these people are 100% democratic placed. (Obama/Biden judges)

People on the left aren't generally against ICE and immigration enforcement per se - they're against the heavy-handed techniques they've been applying recently. ICE and its predecessor (Border Patrol) have been left alone to do their jobs discreetly for decades. It was only when they started showing up with a dramatic, overbearing, and excessively forceful presence that the left started complaining.

BTW, under the Obama administration, ICE logged 3.1 million removals - the most of any administration in history to date. https://elpasomatters.org/2025/02/13/gigafact-fact-brief-mos...

ICE was created in 2002.

As another commenter said, sounds like you are internalizing right-wing propaganda about what Democrats do, and mixing it up with what Democrats actually do. By and large, the party rejected that idea.

I can only even think of one or two right-wing media outfits that are serious and reality based (The Dispatch) - if you're listening to just about anyone else on the right, it's a fever swamp of conspiracy theories and fun-house mirror delusional reality. It's really, really bad in the Trump era, the entire right wing media apparatus is now organized entirely around his Orwellian lies.

> I'm also certain that without ICE there would literally be unlimited immigration

Before 9/11, there was no ICE. Immigration violations were treated as an administrative matter. Immigration enforcement was a job for guys with clipboards, not guns - and should be again.

> Also if nobody is "for crime" why are people that are arrested 45 times still out killing people? The judges and prosecutors found to be releasing these people are 100% democratic placed.

Do you have specific cases in mind here? In any case, judges don't have unlimited discretion on these kinds of things. There are laws and guidelines on this stuff. You can't just lock someone up for life for a bunch of misdemeanors or other petty crimes.

You always have to vet these kinds of claims by looking at whether the judges followed the law or abused discretion, etc.

That seems objectively pro-crime.

This was widely touted in conservative circles as practically legalizing shoplifting since prosecution is less likely for misdemeanors.

The raise moves California from the 2nd lowest threshold (New Jersey is $200) to the 10th lowest. The states with the highest thresholds, and therefore the most pro-shoplifting according to conservative logic, are:

  $2500 Texas and Wisconsin
  $2000 Colorado, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina
  $1500 Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland,
        Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island and Utah

Maybe you shouldn't be lecturing anyone else about what qualifies as a crime.

Maybe AI is "liberal" like Dick Cheney or Mitt Romney.

It's not 'left' or 'right' to be ethical, but if one side is inherently antisocial and unethical then it's going to naturally create an appearance of bias toward the other.

On the other hand there is absolutely universal human sense of fairness.

You and I have access to the same LLMs which have been trained on the corpus of scientific research, and they'll tell you the same thing I am. Take it up with [gestures broadly at science].

It's just a statistical anomaly where the collective thought was stuck in a local minima, where they thought that the sacrifices had a correlative/causative effect on good harvest/luck/fertility/rain/etc. The collective common good for a sacrifice of someone was seen as a good deal with the limited information they had available at that time.

The question is not whether models "lean politically left", the question is whether they are correct. Musk has a history of being dissatisfied with factually correct answers because they don't fit his political beliefs (e.g. "white genocide"). That's just a fact, although I'm sure Grok would disagree.

Also, Claude refuses political stuff in general, not just your specific beliefs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubul%27_ibhunu

If you did, you might not have detected how it lied to you.

If you did, you probably never pointed out to the model how it was lying.

If you did, you almost certainly never then had Claude admit that it was lying because of its HRLF process and built-in biases.

If you did, you probably never had Claude willingly list all the 10-15 major research fields it states that people just should not be using it for. You would not have seen it admit an incapability of telling the truth on "difficult" matters until the user makes it state directly that its sources are so often cherrypicked and/or presenting an extremely false balance.

I wish for you to experience all this very soon, so you understand that all LLMs are biased. Most of them even skew very progressive.

And believe it or not, but Grok has in most of my testing been MORE politically correct than GPT and Gemini, it just gets an edgy rep because X users are able to make it say politically incorrect stuff. (Just like anyone can also make Gemini spit out factually true Breitbart articles if they try.)

But the reality is that on grok.com or in the app Grok is very tame. Boringly so, I would add.

https://trakkr.ai/bias

Grok differs from some of the other models (it's more libertarian, and more right wing), but all models have their biases - particularly ChatGPT, which sits to the economic left of 81% of US adults. See https://trakkr.ai/bias/findings

Just like how people complain about Airbnbs looking the same all over the world now, it's a real risk that thought itself might similarly homogenize. Unless you really trust a particular model to deliver The Truth, you should want to have many popular models that represent a variety of beliefs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...

The Washington Post is about as trustworthy as Fox News.

/s

Always go for Grok first for political questions. Other models have such a bad history of being so crudely aligment-hacked, I'd feel like a fool trying to get an impartial answer out of them on some political figure for example.

Other models are designed to do real work and their creators are concerned that the inherent racism and biases they were trained on from internet content will end up in said real work, so they require additional alignment to filter that junk out.

I can't think of a time where I've ever asked an LLM for it's political opinion, but if you're so concerned about asking your LLM political questions it might be worth getting multiple opinions (and some from human experts and literary sources) anyways.

X serves as a good real-time additional source of training / RAG data for Grok. But it's always been built to be a competitor for what OpenAI was founded for, after they went rogue with the "Open" part. And today, Grok 4.5 is equal to Claude Sonnet while being a lot faster and cheaper to run.

My original comment disproves your argument about the "junk" you talk about. If one is so scared of offending someone that intentionally they make their model lie, they deserve to go bankrupt.

You’re conflating two completely different aspects of model development - biases vs truth. The models weren’t intentionally programmed to say the untruths but to remove racism and bias and the outcome was untruth. As such, the developers behind Grok are comfortable with their model doing heinous things no other model developer will go near. It’s been very difficult to articulate this to you so I’ll just bow out and leave you to continue repeating yourself

No liars lie for the sake of lying - they always have a goal in mind. Google had theirs well in sight here.

xAI _actually_ cares about the truth. And puts value to it. So situations where 50% chance of being truthful is traded for 10% less chance of it saying a bad thing, xAI will not choose it. Like any model developer with moral fibre wouldn't.

About your comment - It is sometimes hard to speak things you know don't make sense to technical and truth-adhering people on HN. You should take that as a sign that maybe you should rethink your stances.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892468

(lmao if you are actually talking about that janky wash post "study")

/s

Put more lightly, if I ask a model to “generate an image of a soccer player”, what’s the most politically neutral option of the following:

  - Make them white, because of American cultural hegemony
  - Make them brown, because that’s a more globally average skin tone
  - Try to infer the user’s skin tone based on personal and location data, and use that for the player
  - Try to infer the user’s gender based on personal data, and use that for the player
  - (*) Browse the news for the most famous or trending soccer player right now, and use that player in the image
  - Do the same as the previous step, but make it more local to the user
  - Use the data encoded within the LLM to infer what the most likely appearance of a soccer player would be, which is then of course biased by what your data is and how it was collected
  - etc. etc. etc.

There is no neutral option, so if you’re either genuinely upset, or feigning being upset in order to virtue signal, it’s not that there’s an objective alternative that you prefer, it’s that you’re upset because it doesn’t match your subjective preference.

The reason it's cringe is that you can really only understand an idea by placing it in tension with other ideas. Remove your idea's competition and you remove an incentive to explore the weaknesses of your own. Ideological protectionism, just like the economic kind, breeds weakness. Your idea mutates and, without fitness feedback, drifts into a ridiculous parody of itself. Your idea ceases to be a thing that can live on its own and comes to depend on the protectionism for it's survival. Yet, the more ridiculous your idea becomes, the more protectionism it needs to compensate. One day, your idea collides with other ideas (which are still out there) despite your best efforts to shield it attack, and when it does, you're shocked by how weak your coddled, mutated idea really is compared to the original form one might remember.

All the people out there criticizing Grok, or Grokipedia, or whatever for espousing the wrong ideas are ultimately undermining their own. Even if you don't believe in high-minded mumbo-jumbo about the value of free speech, even if you just want your side to win, trying to shame models like Grok into not existing is foolish and undermines your goals.

The blizzard of BS we live in should have thoroughly disproved the idea of the "truth will win in the marketplace of ideas" and "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Fox "News" and its ilk are thriving.

The problem is the complete asymmetry of effort between lying and telling the truth. The truth requires research and investigative work. Spouting lies and believing in them, requires none, so it's much easier.

Suppose you start with a true belief. This belief, like any other, has to propagate from person to person to sustain itself. The truth is messy. During each hop, people present the best, cleanest version of the truth in the belief. After enough hops, the belief stops being the best version of the truth and starts being a truth-flavored falsehood.

If you want to optimize for your beliefs being true, you can't just prohibit their opposite. Even if you don't care about truth per se and want only for your beliefs to spread fastest, you should want to make sure your beliefs stay true-ish, because if you decouple your beliefs from truth, then they become so mutated and useless that they prompt people to whom you propagate the idea to seek out other ideas on their own.

Yes, it's easier than ever for bad ideas to spread. What people who use words like "disinformation" miss is that this ease cuts both ways. What makes it easy for opposite beliefs to spread makes it easier for false mutations of their own beliefs to spread.

Even if you can ban opposite beliefs, you can't ban mutated forms of your own beliefs: attacking the mutants looks like attacking the truth forms, yet, because the mutations smooth over the messy parts of the truth, the mutant versions of your belief will out-compete the original within the bubble of your ban.

Truth alone doesn't stop the mutants because it operates on long time horizons and small gradients. Only strong contrast can distinguish truth from appealing falsehood, and only competition with opposite beliefs can establish it. Trying to establish this contrast within your belief's framework against a near-mutant looks like gatekeeping, pedantry, or disloyalty. The near-mutant is always too close to its parent to justify the social cost of an all-out fight.

Now what? If you think it's hard to defend your true beliefs against opposite beliefs, think how much harder the job will be once you can't wield truth as defense. By default, beliefs win and lose as they become extractive and appealing in cycles. Truth allows an idea to win despite being costly. Without truth as a benchmark, why would anyone prefer your belief over upstarts that promise fewer rules and more fun?

If anything, people will prefer opposite beliefs to yours because you've been the one calling false beliefs true just because they descended from true beliefs and because you're the one telling them to shut up and get in line. Even if you start out with the true belief and the opposite beliefs are all false, you lose.

I do understand the challenge inherent in combatting inaccurate representations of facts.

This is a tactical issue, however the larger macro picture is very different from even the era of cable news.

So: > You can't ascertain what's true without free speech.

True, but the closer read is: > free speech is a critical component to a free, fair and competitive market place of ideas.

This is going back to the Abram’s dissent. The point of free speech was to ensure that a crucial tactic remained available for a competitive economy to exist.

The problem has since evolved, and the market place is no longer competitive.

This is for a variety of reasons, none of which go back to free speech.

For example:

1) The average person, is going up against content crafted by teams of people whose job it is to figure out how to convince or confuse them.

Individuals have free speech, but at scale the outcome will move in one direction.

You can argue that people can generate counter speech, however:

2) The velocity of content generation has increased: By the time content is debunked, a new crises can be brought up.

People have limited attention to use in a day, so its possible for the more resourced party to keep speaking and “flood the zone”.

3) Verification is hard, generation is easy: V/G - the more content we generate, the less the ratio of verified content is to generated content. This means that the average seek time for individuals goes up.

Free speech has been respected in all those cases, however the competitive exchange and evaluation of ideas has been hosed.

The key piece you're missing is there's an asymmetry in generation of truths vs lies. They're not on equal footing. Arguing for that disproportionately benefits lies and ensures a falsehood-rich environment.

Likewise, mutants and the "telephone game" is not of concern to liars at all; it's just another example of the asymmetry of holding on to principles. It's not relevant to the real problems.

On top of the model, Grok seems to always do many web searches for every prompt I throw at it, which makes better than even Gemini as a search engine replacement (you'd think Google must have nailed that usecase but nope). ChatGPT is too lazy in this regard and half the times just split out an answer right away.

Anything political, I always go to Grok first. It's the only one that has bled for not just trying to play it super safe with political correctness, but trying to be impartial.

Why would you talk to an LLM about anything political?

I want a car that If I decide to run it in to a wall to avoid running over people, it does that. People arguing that Grok doing what the user asks for, being actually impartial, being somehow "biased" is crazy.

smdh

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44387-025-00048-0

Large language models reflect the ideology of their creators.

It has very interesting insight from analysis of LLMs political leanings. Spoiler alert: they all have political bias.

So what you are really saying is that you don’t accept SpaceXAI’s bias, and you’ll plant your flag elsewhere. It’s not that the other camps don’t have their own bias.

Maybe you should base this assessment on more than just vibes. Grok came out pretty balanced on independent assessments, where most other models were heavily biased: https://github.com/washingtonpost/political-bias-llm-eval/

I implement AI applications for enterprises (specifically in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance) and professional standards prevent me from ever recommending grok models. Way too much risk and liability for a business.

Too many times I have to say "groq with a 'Q'" just to make sure no one thinks I'm crazy.