I looked at the author’s profile and wow, makes a lot more sense now how he’d arrive at such a twisted statement:

His most recent book is The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israel Defense Forces

Been into Civ 6 lately. Sometimes I kind of have to go like “ok, this is a strategy game and that’s what I’m treating it as” because the way they portray civilization can be a bit… I think maybe colonial-centric is the phrasing I’m looking for. I feel it’s very in need of a win condition that comes from deep alliances and not just faux forced diplomacy “only one person can be the winner” kind of thing. But if I treat it as a competitive strategy game with a civilization-based outfit on and don’t take the cultural influences too seriously, it’s fun enough and has a lot of depth to it for improving at the strategic elements over time. So I can really sink a lot of hours into it, if I let myself.

Nothing to make flying feel safe like an airplane quality whistleblower being unalived.

It’s sort of beside the point, I think? Because litigating the morality of an argument over hypotheticals is a red herring to begin with. The real point is about the conditions those people were living under, the power dynamics in play, and the response necessary to secure liberation. What they did is try to put you firmly within a framework of idealism, which is about doing the “right thing” (as abstract moral principle) even if the circumstances surrounding it would tempt you to do otherwise. So in their minds, you affirmed that you are hypothetically morally bankrupt and would not do the abstract moral principle “right thing.” Naturally, that’s going to make them uncomfortable around you because idealism is all about what people are capable of and whether they are willing to strive to overcome their “base urges.”

The question is, do you want to be friends with them? If so, you’ll probably need to go out of your way to be more diplomatic about this stuff. If this were a question of organizing, I’d say, don’t bother. Friendship and making sure you stay safe, that people aren’t viewing you as some kind of loose cannon when you aren’t, can be a little different.

We shouldn’t have to go above and beyond to deal with people like this, and let’s be real: sometimes we’re not going to. The idealist position would say we should always strive to, no matter what. Well, sometimes it’s just not going to happen. BUT, that doesn’t mean you have to leave these situations to impulse either. What you can do is try to learn from it by reflecting on what about it didn’t work, how you would like to present yourself and your views going forward, what outcome it is that you’re even wanting. For example, are you wanting to vent? to persuade? To be the opposition when everyone is affirming the norm? Keep in mind the last one can be very difficult to do alone and it’s easy to slip into defense mechanisms instead of keeping a clear head, especially when people are throwing nonsensical hypothetical gotchas at you or citing some of the same talking points you’ve heard a thousand times.

Re: debate, it certainly gets tiresome when you sink hours into reading, research, and sometimes having to go through the pain of reevaluating a significant part of your worldview (cause of indoctrination) which is no small feat and no small ask of time and energy - and then deal with stubborn, smug liberals who dismiss what you say out of hand and repeat the same few talking points yet view themselves as “independent thinkers.” 😩

Slight correction and further info on this:

Although it’s theoretically possible someone could train a language model on Reddit alone, I’m not aware of any companies or researchers who have. The closest equivalent may be Stable LM, a language model that was panned for producing incoherent output and some mocked it for using Reddit as something like 50-60% of its dataset, tho it was also made clear that their training process was a mess in general.

How a language model talks and what it can talk about is an issue with some awareness already, though the actions taken so far, at least in the context of the US, are about what you would expect. OpenAI, one of the only companies with enough money to train its own models from scratch and one of the most influential, bringing language models into public view with ChatGPT, took a pretty clearly “decorum liberal” stance on it, tuning their model’s output over time to make it as difficult as possible for it to say anything that might look bad in a news article, with the end result being a model that sounds like it’s wearing formal clothing at a dinner party and is about to lecture you. And also unsurprisingly, part of this process was capitalism striking again, with OpenAI traumatizing underpaid Kenyan workers through a 3rd party company to help filter out unwanted output from the language model: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxn3kw/openai-used-kenyan-workers-making-dollar2-an-hour-to-filter-traumatic-content-from-chatgpt

Though I’m not familiar enough on the details with other companies, most other language models produced from scratch have followed in OpenAI’s footsteps, in terms of choosing “liberal decorum” style tuning efforts and calling it “safety and ethics.”

I also know limited about alignment (efforts to understand what exactly a language model is learning, why it’s learning it, and what that positions it as in relation to human goals and intentions). But from what I’ve seen in limited relation to it, on the most basic level of “trying to make sure output does not steer toward downright creepy things” has to do with careful curation of the dataset and lots of testing at checkpoints along the way. A dataset like this could include Reddit, but it would likely be a limited part of it, and as far as I can tell, what matters more than where you get the data is how the different elements in the dataset balance out; so you include stuff that is maybe repulsive and you include stuff that is idyllic and anywhere in-between, and you try to balance it in such a way that it’s not going to trend toward repulsive stuff, but it’s still capable of understanding the repulsive stuff, so it can learn from it (kind of like a human).

None of this tackles a deeper question of cultural bias in a dataset, which is its own can of worms, but I’m not sure how much can be done about that while the method of training for a specific language means including a ton of data that is rife with that language’s cultural biases. It may be a bit cyclical in this way, in practice, but to what extent is difficult to say because of how extensive a dataset may be and factoring in how the people who create it choose to balance things out.

Edit: mixed up “unpaid” and “underpaid” initially; a notable difference, tho still bad either way

I like to tell people like this to read Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti. I forget in what detail atm, but he specifically goes over how Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy co-opted working class energy, while being opposed to working class power in actuality. In contrast with the Soviet Union, which had its issues, but was genuinely by/for the working class.

Like the thing these kind of people are talking about is sort of real?.. but it’s a rightist thing, it’s not something Lenin did or Stalin did or Mao did. There are shades of that happening now in the US, the rightists who claim to be ML or communist, but are also “patriots” (claiming there’s nothing wrong with being patriotic for a genocidal settler state developed into a global capitalist empire).

Also, I would say the use of the word “authoritarian” generally betrays how lacking a person’s political education has been and how desperately they need some grounding in history+theory from non-imperialist sources. Idk the origin of “authoritarian” as a term, but in practice, it gets used as a propaganda buzzword to contrast, claiming that “democracy for the rich” systems are “freedom” and other stuff is “authoritarian.” Meanwhile, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Under what rock the freedom is hiding, I don’t know. People get told such spooky ghost story narratives about how “authoritarian” those “non freedom” countries are, while ignoring what’s in front of them: the “rights” written on a constitution that is as reliable as you are rich and that’s about as far as it goes.

If there is anyone who could become a billionaire and then, somehow, without any working class force to make it happen, through sheer incapability to do anything sensible, become an eX-billionaire, it would be Elon Musk.

There are some paranoid levels of thinking in some of that stuff. Like when a person thinks someone is a “x foreign country spy” because they disagree. It’s possible for people to break out of that mode of thinking, but when they are in that mode, it’s next to impossible to get through because everything you say that is in disagreement is “because you are trying to deceive them.”

Liberals claiming someone is doing whataboutism seems like a component of this thinking, with a belief that the one doing the “whataboutism” is attempting to deceive. But although it’s (probably? I haven’t analyzed it in enough depth to say with certainty) possible for someone to deceive in that way, it’s also possible to compare two things for a variety of rhetorical purposes that have nothing to do with dishonesty. Such as pointing out the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world if someone tries to say x foreign country is “authoritarian” in contrast to the US being “free”; that’s not whataboutism, it’s a factual point that undermines the narrative of the US having some kind of greater moral standing from which it can properly judge other countries.

If anything, I would say imperialists, liberals, tend to be more engaged in actual whataboutism, even if unconsciously. Like if you try to point out something fundamentally wrong with the US, claiming that alternatives are way worse. Which in that regard also seems to be in bed with doomerism (or more formally maybe, capitalist realism).

I don’t like to speculate as a matter of principle, but given what I’ve seen in my own evolution and what I can see traces of in some others, I suspect fear underlies a lot of it, as well as pride; fear of the implications of what it means and pride in not wanting to lose the idealized self image of western supremacy. If the US, for example, is genuinely terrible to the core on a fundamental state foundation level, that means a lot of pretty big change is necessary and change can be scary. And further, if a place like China or Vietnam is actually just a genuinely better system on a fundamental level and has better QOL for its people, that means the west is not only not superior, it’s not even on an equal level of political competency. Instead, it’s actually lower and in the capitalist caste socialization of “everything is a rung on a ladder,” that means the west is part of the “gross/bad class.”

People don’t have to see it this way though. They can see it as it’s not something to be afraid of, but a wakeup call that what’s being done is not working for most people and never has; they can consider the notion of major upheaval as an opportunity for fantastic expansion of the possibilities they’ve previously had presented to them, within which can carry drastic healing, improved quality of life, both personal and collective empowerment. They can also see the pride thing not as a designation of lesser nation, but as a designation of better or worse quality of life and empowerment and so on. It’s important that people unlearn the notions of it all being about caste, and who is and isn’t “superior.” Socialist projects doing better for their people are superior in the sense of quality of life, people power, etc., not in the sense of some colonizer-centric mindset of civil and savage.