A large group of people trying to have a peaceful protest could easily stop a few individuals who start smashing things. But from the looks of it, the reaction often seems to be the opposite - people applaud it or even join in. Even here in the replies, there’s someone excusing it with “who cares about Google,” and another one justifying the looting of ampm so apparently, in their mind, it’s not a problem. The fact that this exact same tactic is used by the aforementioned agent provocateurs should only further encourage self-policing within these protests.
I don’t understand why these protests so often end up with people destroying cars and shop windows - and then, in many cases, looting as well. Whatever legitimate cause you may have had loses credibility pretty quickly after that, and it becomes hard to sympathize with the protesters, let alone criticize the riot police for stepping in. A cynic might say that some are just looking for an excuse to cause havoc.
Isn’t this kind of like ridiculing that same Atari for not being able to form coherent sentences? It’s not all that surprising that a system not designed to play chess loses to a system designed specifically for that purpose.
I doubt most LLM haters have spent that much time thinking about it deeply. It's part of the package deal you must subscribe to if you want to belong to the group. If you spend time in spaces where the haters are loud and everyone else stays quiet out of fear of backlash, it's only natural to start feeling like everyone must think this way - so it must be true, and therefore I think this way too.
I don't block entire instances, but I block every single community I'm not interested in - which probably adds up to over 500 by now. I tried blocking all the mean or extremist users, but that ended up completely killing my feed, since that seems to be about 80% of active commenters. So nowadays, I use content filters to screen for keywords in comments and posts. My list of keywords is quite substantial and keeps growing every week. At this point, I'd say about 50% of the threads on my homepage get filtered out. While I can’t know exactly how many comments are being hidden, I’d imagine it’s about the same.
Funnily enough, even after all that filtering, a significant portion of what still gets through is full of mean, snide remarks, tribalism, toxicity, negativity, doomerism, hopelessness, and that classic crabs-in-a-bucket mentality. A smart person would probably just give up and bail - but I guess I’m not that smart.
To me, happiness describes a subjective feeling, whereas faking or pretending it refers to something you try to display outwardly despite not actually feeling that way. Kind of like bravery. You can't fake it because faking it is bravery.
I also suspect that usually when people say "happiness," they're actually referring to the feeling of being content.
Yeah, I have no problem with that. I also think LLMs are far more intelligent than the average social media commenter gives them credit for - and that includes emotional intelligence as well. It’s just that, to me, it sounded like you were implying they can experience empathy from the subjective side, so that’s what I was responding to.
A huge amount of people on social media are conditioned to hate everything AI to the point where even asking a genuine, non-critical question gets you downvoted. A large part of this is people who haven’t really thought deeply about the subject - they’ve just absorbed the popular sentiment from the spaces they hang out in. AI is often seen as a symbol of big, greedy, unethical corporations, so any engagement with it is treated as suspect by default.
On top of that, there's also a kind of tribal signaling at play. Being anti-AI has become a way for some to show they’re on the “right side” of issues like workers’ rights, art ownership, or tech overreach. So even curiosity can be read as siding with the enemy.
LLMs have way more empathy and respect than humans do
LLMs are almost certainly unable to feel either of those emotions. Their responses are definitely more empathetic and respectful than those of your average social media commenter, but that doesn’t imply they have any subjective experience of such emotions.
I pay almost no attention to the scores on other people's posts, but admittedly, I do sometimes feel disheartened when I see what I consider an extremist view getting heavily upvoted. As for downvotes, I have those hidden, so in that sense, they’re a non-factor for me. But you're asking whether I care. Of course I care and anyone claiming otherwise is lying. We're social animals - we care what others think of us. That’s why I hid the downvotes in the first place: so they wouldn’t affect me. Mean comments are enough to deal with; I don’t need to hear the audience booing too.
My perhaps unpopular opinion is that while the voting system itself should remain, the scores should be hidden for everyone - and I mean both upvotes and downvotes. Downvotes don’t mean you’re wrong, and upvotes don’t mean you’re right. They’re just indicators of how popular your opinion is with the audience. That dynamic encourages people to self-censor unpopular views and, conversely, to post meaningless one-liners just for the applause.
Being conditioned to think racist thoughts is essentially what racism is. Nobody chooses to be racist - you become one as a result of your genes and environment. That pretty much applies to your entire personality. I'm more in the camp that believes drunk people are just being honest. But I'm also in the no-free-will camp, so I don't guilt people for being who they are. That doesn't mean I like them or want to be around them, but I don't act as if they could have been any different. Still, that’s not to say people can’t change - they can, if they want to. That’s the key difference between what you want and what you want to want.
A large group of people trying to have a peaceful protest could easily stop a few individuals who start smashing things. But from the looks of it, the reaction often seems to be the opposite - people applaud it or even join in. Even here in the replies, there’s someone excusing it with “who cares about Google,” and another one justifying the looting of ampm so apparently, in their mind, it’s not a problem. The fact that this exact same tactic is used by the aforementioned agent provocateurs should only further encourage self-policing within these protests.