- Post in [email protected] attacks the entire concept of AI safety as a made-up boogeyman
- I disagree and am attacked from all sides for āposting like an evangelistā
- I give citations for things I thought would be obvious, such as that AI technology in general has been improving in capability compared to several years ago
- Instance ban, āpromptfondling evangelistā
This one Iām not aggrieved about as much, itās just weird. Itās reminiscent of the lemmy.ml type of echo chamber where everyoneās convinced itās one way, because in a self-fulfilling prophecy, anyone who is not convinced gets yelled at and receives a ban.
Full context: https://ponder.cat/post/1030285 (Some of my replies were after the ban because I didnāt PT Barnum carefully enough, so didnāt realize.)
Lemmy.ml is the most āso you hate waffles?ā forum I have ever seen. As you said - theyāve got a dummy in mind, and youāre just the face tacked onto it. Your own words are like 10% of the argument happening in their heads. Trying to pick apart āthatās not what I fucking wrote,ā without wasting six paragraphs theyāre also not going to read, or falling afoul of the blatantly one-sided ābe nice or elseā threats, is an endless psychic vampire attack.
I was on reddit for fifteen years. Iāve been here for two. I am anything but averse to arguing, even with complete buttheads. But ābe civilā is the biggest gift to trolls anyone has ever devised. It lets them spit whatever dishonest contrarian nonsense they want - and the obvious and necessary āoh fuck offā is what gets the boot. You will participate in legitimizing their hot take, because some cult of moderators thinks trolling is means name-calling. Like nobodyās ever rude for a damn good reason. And also āthis is abusive, I am leavingā counts as rude, because go fuck yourself.
Not that long ago, I got in a huge argument with someone on lemmy.ml, and they were furious that I refused to play by the ārulesā of engaging at length with every one of the 3-5 new things they would bring up in every new comment while refusing to provide sources for any of it, and also saying that any of the sources I was citing needed to be ācontextualizedā and so basically, didnāt count.
Eventually, he tried to pull rank on me saying he teaches this stuff IRL and listed his number of students, as a way of saying why I needed to listen to him. As it happens, I was a teacher of teachers for a living, and when I pulled rank back on him, he wasnāt interested in the conversation anymore.
It only ever goes one way. Always. Itās always that you need to play by the rules, but they do not.
Edit: I should say, to the credit of the lemmy.ml mods, nothing I was saying got me deleted or banned, even though we were dealing with a hot-button topic. Maybe the moderation is improving. I was seriously a little surprised and impressed that they left it alone, Iām sure they got reports.
Usually while demanding you read three volumes on theory, like theyāre owed a book report.
This is where I disagree with you: theyāre being consistent. They think youāre doing what theyāre doing. This is what it looks like, when you win their game. You beat this guy. But that doesnāt mean he switches teams. Thatās not how games work. Itās how arguments work. And however argument-shaped his sentences were, he was never telling you why he went from premises to conclusion. He was just shuffling cards.
Hmā¦ I think for this guy, it was a little more complicated than that. For most of the lemmy.ml people, I think youāre right. I think this guy was very sincerely believing in what he was saying, he just had a sort of self-referential way of looking at reality, where anything that didnāt agree with him was CIA propaganda, so thereās no way he could ever bootstrap his way out of what he believed. I didnāt get the vibe that he was just arguing in bad faith all around, I think he really believed it. Thatās why I talked to him for as long as I did.