- Post in !techtakes@awful.systems attacks the entire concept of AI safety as a made-up boogeyman
- I disagree and am attacked from all sides for “posting like an evangelist”
- 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, “promptfondling evangelist”
This one I’m not aggrieved about as much, it’s just weird. It’s reminiscent of the lemmy.ml type of echo chamber where everyone’s convinced it’s 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 didn’t PT Barnum carefully enough, so didn’t realize.)
Oh yeah, they’re cunts. My very first comment there went ‘how lovely, this sneer club nonsense made the jump from reddit,’ and that was a one-step permaban.
Conservatism is not a political ideology. It’s tribalism. All they can do is perform loyalty to the ingroup. If you prove their reasons wrong, they will pick a different reason. This card-shuffling behavior will occasionally resemble a cogent argument… but they don’t mean it. It never predicts their future claims. The only consistent element is the conclusion: outgroup bad, ingroup good.
‘It’s not a debate club’ just means ‘we’re going to shout our opinions at you, shut up and take it.’ Fuck that. That’s naked bastardry before you even showed up. An entire instance for this enforced circlejerk does not deserve federation.
And then, because they learn these maladaptive ways of interacting with anyone who disagrees with them, any time they spend outside of the little bubble will feature people being hostile to them, which they will interpret as being oppressed which will reinforce the whole structure. Religion does the same thing, as does lemmy.ml.
Lemmy.ml is the most “so you hate waffles?” forum I have ever seen. As you said - they’ve got a dummy in mind, and you’re just the face tacked onto it. Your own words are like 10% of the argument happening in their heads. Trying to pick apart “that’s not what I fucking wrote,” without wasting six paragraphs they’re also not going to read, or falling afoul of the blatantly one-sided “be nice or else” threats, is an endless psychic vampire attack.
I was on reddit for fifteen years. I’ve been here for two. I am anything but averse to arguing, even with complete buttheads. But “be civil” 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 “oh fuck off” 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 nobody’s ever rude for a damn good reason. And also “this is abusive, I am leaving” 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 “rules” 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 “contextualized” and so basically, didn’t 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 wasn’t interested in the conversation anymore.
It only ever goes one way. Always. It’s 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, I’m sure they got reports.
Usually while demanding you read three volumes on theory, like they’re owed a book report.
This is where I disagree with you: they’re being consistent. They think you’re doing what they’re doing. This is what it looks like, when you win their game. You beat this guy. But that doesn’t mean he switches teams. That’s not how games work. It’s 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.
Hm… I think for this guy, it was a little more complicated than that. For most of the lemmy.ml people, I think you’re 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 didn’t agree with him was CIA propaganda, so there’s no way he could ever bootstrap his way out of what he believed. I didn’t get the vibe that he was just arguing in bad faith all around, I think he really believed it. That’s why I talked to him for as long as I did.