28 ms·

Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial

217 points by paulsutter 7y ago

trevyn 7y ago
(2018), but still very relevant!
- throwaway_bad 7y ago
  I guess it did partially come true. The GPT-2 model by OpenAI (2019) trained on reddit links did tear some communities apart. :) https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/ https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/
awayyyythrow 7y ago
One of Alexander's better stories. However, I'd say it reeks of what I'd call Alexanderness: -The idea that arguments and debates are the most important thing in the world and everyone should do it as much as possible (possibly due to his being terminally online). In real life if you say something other people find abhorrent they'll first go "that's wrong wtf", then if you insist "sure alright go off" then "please stop talking to me". Most people are not, in fact, in a perpetual crusade to prove opppnents wrong. That's because the real world isn't Twitter. -The idea that both sides have a point and trying to rule out one side is anathema to a well-functioning society. In other words, why can't everyone just get along? Well guess what, sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong. Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it. -Equivocating all controversial statements as equally controversial. For instance, design decisions about a codebase vs. religion issues vs. presumably something even deeper ('so hateful and disgusting'). Some fights are worth having, some are not.
- javajosh 7y ago
  I don't know the author, but I had a similar thought, that was about the very immediate emotionality of his characters. It doesn't have to be that way - the "radical compassion" he mentions is only one small step away from nipping that kind of angry/passionate response in the bud.
- cousin_it 7y ago
  I think people who claim that their side is above argument are often being a bit hypocritical, since they rarely dismiss arguments for their side.
  - awayyyythrow 7y ago
    There are no rational arguments for my cause if it involves whether I should exist or have rights. I want rights because I want them. How would a rational argument even work?
    - memling 7y ago
      > There are no rational arguments for my cause if it involves whether I should exist or have rights. I want rights because I want them. How would a rational argument even work? This is a pretty important question, although I don't know how well it applies to specific causes. On the other hand, there are reasonable questions we can ask about rights themselves whose answers are not easily reconcilable. For example: 1. Are rights discovered or invented? 2. If discovered, where do they come from? 3. If invented, can you "uninvent" them? 4. If invented, by what process?
      - yourbandsucks 7y ago
        I read a bit about postmodernism recently. I think the difference between yourself/Scott and the 'X studies' traditions is that they're not into classically philosophical arguments like you're making here. It's all about implied power relationships, the identity of speaker and listener are as important, maybe more important, than the content. Whereas for you and Mr SSC, the identity is to be studiously ignored in favor of only focusing on the argument, to treat it fairly. So everyone is using wildly different metrics and then wondering why their interlocutors seem crazy.
      - nine_k 7y ago
        Rights are mostly won in a power struggle. For that, the idea of the rights has to be conceived first, and made the point of the struggle. This can be seen as "invention". Then rights can be rationalized and tweaked a bit so that parties with comparable power do not step on each others' toes, and become allies. This can be seen, more roughly, as "discovery". Rarely rights are granted by the more powerful to a less powerful because of moral / religious reasons. E.g. the anti-slavery movement in the US had a significant religious component, based on the idea that God created people equal. More often a more powerful party gives a less powerful party some rights because they need an ally and want to prevent a full-on power struggle. I think women's suffrage had a significant component of this in many places. Powerful and oppressive parties can definitely "uninvent" rights; look at any totalitarian regime for examples. Say, communist regimes often revoke the right to freely trade. Most oppressive regimes gladly uninvent the right to congregate, and usually the right to free speech. They tend to frame these activities as harmful and unnatural. Regaining them usually involves a power struggle; see above.
- larzang 7y ago
  The idea that the discussion of a supreme court nominee being a rapist is what is dangerous, and not the fact that a supreme court nominee is a rapist, is frankly sickening. So is reducing Kaepernick to a political meme, complete with invocation of Putin as scary mastermind. Acting like everything is some kind of abstract theater designed to divide people on internet forums shows a disturbing detachment from the real effects that real events have on real people.
  - markrages 7y ago
    > The idea that the discussion of a supreme court nominee being a rapist is what is dangerous, and not the fact that a supreme court nominee is a rapist, is frankly sickening. I see what you did there.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > The idea that the discussion of a supreme court nominee being a rapist is what is dangerous, and not the fact that a supreme court nominee is a rapist, is frankly sickening. Not in general. There's damage, and there's collateral damage. Sometimes discussions do more damage than their topic. For instance, a journalist writing an article in a popular newspaper that some doctors are considering violating patient confidentiality in cases of admission of crime, and people reading and reposting it, is much more dangerous than the ultimate decision of those few doctors.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles Exactly this. The "nerd" position that everything is a debate should be contrasted with with the Marxist position that everything is a power struggle. Both can easily become stopped clocks, but both have validity if correctly applied. Moreover, it looks to me that a large problem with present politics is people who are fed up with rational cost-benefit analysis and want to wreck their perceived enemies, even at a cost to themselves.
  - J-dawg 7y ago
    > people who are fed up with rational cost-benefit analysis and want to wreck their perceived enemies I've been thinking this for a while, and it seems to be creating some nasty feedback loops. At least some of the support for politicians like Trump and Boris Johnson comes from the fact that they continually piss off people who are liberal/progressive/left-wing/anti-Brexit (delete as applicable depending on who is 'the enemy'). In the same way, I've seen things written about progressive politicians to the effect of "he is upsetting a lot of angry old white men, so he must be doing something right". "How much do they piss off the other team" has become something that many voters use as a metric. Perhaps even the only metric, for some people.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Yes - and this is partly due to the media, who absolutely love a two-sided punchup because it's clickbait to both sides and generates lots of furious refreshing of the comments section to show ads. It's basically a fancier version of professional wrestling. It's very prisoner's dilemma. First side to back down from the partisanship loses. So it just keeps escalating. Traditionally the media and other institutions have leant on the left to back down and "be reasonable"; this has become a losing strategy, so people are starting to get unreasonable again.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        And the root of the problem here is again that media are funded by advertising, so they need to stir outrage and pit everyone against each other to maximize profits.
- andrewflnr 7y ago
  I find your first bullet odd. If anything, the point of the story is that debate is not good. It makes me wonder if he's having a serious change of heart about it, in fact. On the third point, I don't think those issues are being presented as actually equally controversial, particularly not as being equally worthy of fighting over, but as things that people are equally likely to fight over anyway.
- DrScientist 7y ago
  > We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. Nobody has 'rights'. It's an artificial construct. Nobody can do what they want, they are constrained by others - whether through a system of law, or simply other people intervening. Everything is a negotiation. If somebody wanted to kill you - you could fight - or you could become useful to the person with the power to kill you. It's a negotiation where both sides weight the risks of different approaches. Democratic systems of government and the law simply are an agreement by the majority that it's a pragmatic way of doing stuff - negotiate once nationally rather than constant negotiations with everyone we meet. So maybe what's missing in a system like reddit is the recording of decisions - ie a vote at the end of every thread.
  - mlevental 7y ago
    this isn't a hot take. we already live in a society that obligates us to abide by a social contract. so yes people do have rights. it's as real as the fact that you and I speak the same language. looking around and imagining that because some people somewhere sometimes are in breach of contract means that contracts don't exist is stupid. they do. we all signed them and resign them when we use any cooperative produced object (that includes language, science, public roads, etc)
    - DrScientist 7y ago
      Hmm.. reread the full thread again. I think the mistake here is my lack of clarity about the word 'rights'. My point was there is no such thing as an inalienable rights. 'Rights' are a negotiated social contract - so it makes no sense to say they are not negotiable!
      - mlevental 7y ago
        >negotiated social contract the bill of rights was ratified December 15, 1791. in what sense is it still being negotiated?
        7y ago
- motohagiography 7y ago
  >Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it. This statement is an example of one that could be seen as insidious as a scissor. The idea of the scissor is really interesting, as there are ideas I think people are easily seduced by, which produces these kind of statements. In my house, where politics was dinner discussion from as soon as we could all talk, we have a way to recognize when the discussion switches from comparing interests and experiences, to artifacts of personal experience that are not mutually reconcilable, and that the only remaining interesting topic is how to navigate alien experiences. It's not always smooth, but it mitigates feuding and using politics as a proxy in relationships with precedents that were set when we were all children. Of course, for this to even be possible, you need to believe in something greater than your own experience, and have what people now call an "internal locus of control," which is itself a high bar, but we've managed.
- taneq 7y ago
  I didn't see it doing any of those things. I saw it as a pretty straightforward story about a social conflict equivalent of a BLIT-style basilisk picture.
- epr 7y ago
  > sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong Certainly you can try to pick some objective criteria for determining who is right, but that is beside the point that these questions ideally split a target population 50/50. If you have a philosophical theory of everything that allows you to always have an objective answer then that is awesome for you, but thinking that everyone else will share your views is naive to say the least.
- deleted 7y ago
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- yowlingcat 7y ago
  What a strange lack of curiosity. Framing the conversation of controversy around an anecdotal one involving someone arguing against someone else's right to exist seems like missing the forest for a very specific tree, and in a way, that's sorta the point of the whole story. Relying on the emotive power of anecdotes to derail individuals and groups in discussions from being skeptical of when they're being goaded into a reaction is a key part of media strategy -- so much that the story uses the operative noun "scissor" to describe it. I read the article (not my first stay in Alexander-land although I'm no frequent guest) and came away with a thoroughly different conclusion. 1) Arguments and debates, far from being the most important thing in the world, are a sadly spectacular (in the Debord sense) form of the social human condition. 2) While it's not the case that both sides have a point, it's almost always exploitable that both sides can be provoked, and the synthesis of provocative headlines and content while remaining just on the side of centrism is the core of the media industry. To your example, it's true that there are certain people that argue against your right to exist, but they are beyond the pale, or dressing their bloodlust in irony. My opinion is that the more dangerous kinds of bigots attempt to shroud or reframe their views into more marketable and respectable packages, and they usually "ride" or incite controversy to get there. Is it the mark of a well-functioning society to tolerate this speech without becoming intolerant, or is it the mark of a naive one which is doomed to an eventually authoritarian and surveillance state? Where ought the lines be drawn? 3) Controversial statements, if generable, imply something fascinating and thought-provoking about what controversy is. Generating controversy gets you one step further towards generating clickbait. Generating clickbait gets you one step further to ... what? That's the million-dollar question. If anyone can generate clickbait for free, will everyone continue to consume it? Will we begin to look at clickbait the way we look at nicotine and alcohol -- cheap thrills with long term deleterious effects that we need to regulate? What's the trade-off between a minimal oversight and regulatory capture or authoritarianism here; is it inevitable that we must trade things off?
  - jakelazaroff 7y ago
    > What a strange lack of curiosity. Framing the conversation of controversy around an anecdotal one involving someone arguing against someone else's right to exist seems like missing the forest for a very specific tree, and in a way, that's sorta the point of the whole story. The story mentions Kavanaugh, and coincidentally today the Supreme Court happens to be hearing one such existential case: whether it's legal for employers to fire their employees for being gay or trans. I guess there's a certain sense of curiosity that's satisfied by debates about issues like this. But I imagine that the people entertained by it aren't the ones who have a stake in the outcome. If you're gay, you don't want to have to endlessly convince people that you shouldn't be fired for just being yourself. You just want to be able to exist in society like everyone else.
- derefr 7y ago
  > possibly due to his being terminally online I mean, Scott is a practicing psychiatrist. Whether or not he’s online, he spends most of his time listening to people trying to justify (usually irrational, mental-illness-borne) positions, and then trying to give arguments powerful enough to actually change their minds (i.e. convince them to inculcate a sub-self who wants to change the mind of the rest of them.) Or drugs, if the sub-self who would “do the right [i.e. ego-syntonic] thing” exists but is overpowered by some other sub-self.
  - sfink 7y ago
    I sure hope not, that sounds like an ineffective way to help anyvody. (Not to mention that it would only work on dumb or unimaginative people.) You can't argue someone out of a mental issue. If you really think it would be helpful for them to realize they're wrong, the best you can do is be a mirror so they can convince themselves. But generally, the fixation on whether something is right or wrong is a distraction, a mechanism for avoiding facing the real issue.
    - derefr 7y ago
      It’s called cognitive behavioural therapy. You help the person better arm themselves with arguments to convince themselves. But to do that, you have to convince them on the value of the arguments, such that they adopt them.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  > Well guess what, sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong. Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it. this may well be the case, but it's still probably worth avoiding resorting to power struggles whenever possible. winning a power struggle is orthogonal to actually being right. you might win on an issue that's particularly important to you (where you consider yourself to be "unambiguously right") this way, but it's worse for everyone the more things are decided this way. as an aside, "rights" are some of the most subjective things that exist. as a US citizen I have the right to bear (certain) arms (in certain situations). this right only exists because it's enshrined in law and not enough people have yet organized in opposition to it. it's an inherently controversial topic where the only answer is whatever people can mostly agree to.
  - asdkfjasl 7y ago
    Via capitulation, it's always possible to avoid a power struggle. Game theoretically, this has some pretty obvious suboptimal outcomes for the capitulating player. I think it's an interesting question to figure out when the power struggle is worth it, and when it isn't. But I think necessarily this is going to be a question that boils down to values that every person is going to have to evaluate for themselves.
    - leetcrew 7y ago
      of course it's rational for an individual or subset of society to fight for something that's very important to them, if they can't get it through persuasion. but if most things are settled this way, it's not going to end well for the less powerful members of society.
    - naniwaduni 7y ago
      Capitulation is not avoiding a power struggle. It is an outcome.
- ZhuanXia 7y ago
  >We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it. Effective rhetoric, but that's about it. In practice, people take their self-serving policy preferences and enshrine them into their identity and then proclaim that any attack on their policy preference is attack on their right to exist
- darawk 7y ago
  > -The idea that both sides have a point and trying to rule out one side is anathema to a well-functioning society. In other words, why can't everyone just get along? Well guess what, sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong. Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it. If that's the framing you want to choose, then you have to accept the possibility that its a power struggle you may lose. The point of debating things is that the most justifiable side should win. In a power struggle, the side that wins may or may not be the correct one. If you think your position is correct, you should prefer the debate to the power struggle. It's only people that fear they may not be able to justify their view that prefer to struggle for power. > -Equivocating all controversial statements as equally controversial. For instance, design decisions about a codebase vs. religion issues vs. presumably something even deeper ('so hateful and disgusting'). Some fights are worth having, some are not. That's all context-dependent, though. Design decisions about a codebase are a fight absolutely worth having in the context of a startup, as in the story.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - pgcj_poster 7y ago
    > If that's the framing you want to choose, then you have to accept the possibility that its a power struggle you may lose. The point of debating things is that the most justifiable side should win. Is there actual evidence that it works this way? Because as far as I can tell, "debates" about anything important mostly just get both sides fired up and more convinced of their own views. And I know for a fact that there are some arguments that are bad, but do well in debates, and other arguments that are good, but don't convince people. I've self-censored and said things that I don't really believe for this reason. > In a power struggle, the side that wins may or may not be the correct one. If you think your position is correct, you should prefer the debate to the power struggle. Sure, but you don't have a choice. There's always going to be power struggles going on, and your only real choice is whether you participate. If one side is regimented and ready to grab for power whenever they can, and the other side is constantly debating whether it's right to even try, I'm pretty sure I know which side's going to win. > It's only people that fear they may not be able to justify their view that prefer to struggle for power. The most important views fundamentally cannot be justified, because they're about basic values. For instance, I believe that all lives have equal value. However, I've met people who think that American lives are more valuable than all others. I don't know of any way that I could "justify" my position to these people: it's an axiom in my system of morality. The best thing I can think of would be to try and get them to meet more non-Americans, or show them sad pictures of children starving in Africa, and hope that they change their mind.
- doubleunplussed 7y ago
  The community that these discussions take place in are a sort of "safe space" for those who want to discuss things rationally. Nobody is claiming that subtle logical arguments are effective in the real world against anyone who isn't already in that crowd. One problem is that emotional rhetoric is often dressed up to look like rational argument, thus sucking people into a debate about arguments instead of a power struggle. When faced IRL with a fallacious argument designed to force them to say something factually correct but distasteful sounding, rational people definitely need to develop the habit of laughing in the attacker's face instead of responding with argument. I agree that not doing this is a problem they have (one that their enemies exploit). But I think you're reading into it if you think Alexander consciously endorses answering emotional attacks with reason (he might be tricked into it, but would agree it was a mistake if it were pointed out). He's talking to his own audience here.
- mtraven 7y ago
  This hits the nail on the head. Alexander has a horror of power struggles and wants to believe they can all be rplaced with debate, but that simply doesn't work. He addresses this somewhat meta-level issue in his posts on Conflict vs. Mistake: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ (and I try and tear it apart here: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2018/03/conflict-theory.html http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2018/03/conflict-theory.h... )
Dylan16807 7y ago
Ugh. A brilliant insight into how people don't actually work. I read the first third hoping for an example, then the rest just hoping that anything would happen. My opinion of slatestarcodex was significantly higher an hour ago than it is now.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Well, it's memetic warfare fiction, but I don't feel it's that far off the mark. The other day I've been in a discussion where some of the people disagreeing with me were - in my eyes - failing at reading comprehension, seemingly unable to parse the simple English statements of the source material that somehow became quoted by both sides of the argument. I left that discussion with worrying feeling that those others, most of them smart techies, couldn't possibly be that dumb, so there must be something else going on. I find this story uncanny because within its universe, it hints at what that "something else" is. (Oh, and my opinion of SSC went up a bit.)
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Having been in many arguments that seem like that[0], I think the answer is actually quite simple: sometimes it's just hard to communicate with other human beings. Communication can only convey understanding with shared context, and sometimes our contexts line up enough to make it seem like we're conveying understanding but each of us is consistently misunderstanding the other. Between the frustration and our tendency towards viewing attacks against our arguments as attacks against our being, you sometimes wind up with the kind of behavior discussed in this story. The story itself is effective because it constructs a malevolent purpose to explain everyday phenomena we don't normally think too much about. John Dies at the End used Baader-Meinhof to similar effect. [0]If I'm honest with myself about it, arguing is one of my favorite pastimes.
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      I think a lot of divides are because people have different assumed axioms, and in many cases cannot even declare what those axioms are. Example: I know pro-life people who cannot understand how someone could simultaneously hold the belief that aborting fetuses with congenital defects is okay, but rounding up the severely handicapped and killing them is not; there is nothing magical about birth that changes a life from not being valuable to being valuable. Simultaneously I know pro-choice people who cannot understand how someone could simultaneously vouch for reducing or eliminating social welfare services to single mothers but also vouch for making abortions illegal; clearly the pro-life people don't care about babies after they are born! Since the other side holds inconsistent views, they are wrongheaded hypocrites and all of their arguments can be dismissed without further thought. No compromise is possible because to compromise with hypocrites is to enable their hypocrisy.
javajosh 7y ago
The idea that words have enormous power over human minds is taken to fantasical extremes in a (sf? f?) thriller "Lexicon", by Max Barry[1]. My own view is that "truth" means something different to some people. For example, a charismatic narcissistic leader might mean "confident belief" when he says "truth". This definition define his statements to be truth! I suppose the last backstop for these kinds of structures are nature itself, and it's tendency to allow problematic structures to crumble. 1 https://www.alibris.com/Lexicon-Max-Barry/book/24166116 https://www.alibris.com/Lexicon-Max-Barry/book/24166116
- celticmusic 7y ago
  It turns out, if you let people define words however they want to, they're never wrong. who knew! The solution is to reject those redefinitions.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  I mean the entire society is organized around abstract concepts: corporation, nation, state, money, God, duty/obligation, human rights. None of these things are real (physics does not care about, say, debt), those are just programs running on the human brain. Natural language is the dispersal protocol of those programs.
buboard 7y ago
Story would be much more readable if he had actually stated the offending Scissor and cut it short by half.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Nah, if he did, it would tear SSC, HN and God knows what else apart.
- SilasX 7y ago
  That would be missing the point. He’d have to commit to a specific statement as being a scissor. But if someone doesn’t already get the point, they’d fall into the same trap as the people in the story “what? They must misunderstand the claim. Obviously it’s true/false.” The story’s point requires identifying the psychological state state that scissor statements put you into, where you feel reality is actually bending against you (eg “he turned her against me”). If you think there is an explicit scissor statement Alexander could have committed to, then I think you might not appreciate the core thesis.
  - buboard 7y ago
    It is either a story or a theory. Telling a story without naming the characters ranges from cumbersome to infuriating. Telling a theory, is another story
    - SilasX 7y ago
      I just explained why the specifics of the story require the scissor statement not be made explicit.
  - essayist 7y ago
    I'm with you. We see in this discussion that it's difficult even to raise some potential scissors as examples without a lot of commenters falling into them. SSC's point is not "X is a near-universal scissor", it's that there's a scissor or ten for almost everyone, and that some scissors are likely to ensnare a lot of people. If you've never found yourself arguing vehemently and extensively, to the death, about something and sometime later wondered what that was about, you may be a counterexample, someone who is scissor-immune. I sure am not.
atemerev 7y ago
Well, this is “fiction”, but he described his method precisely: get the publicly available Reddit comments archive, sort by controversial, set up the GAN generating and scoring texts according to controversy (the comments that cause the most schism and/or initiate discussions), train it, then try to generate new controversial comments. Seems doable. I presume that everyone with a spark of scientific mindset and even a slight interest in the field now warming up their OpenGPT-2 instances and trying to reproduce the effect.
- gwern 7y ago
  Well... https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bers5o/using_gpt2_to_sort_by_controversial/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bers5o/usin...
  - jerf 7y ago
    That's about what I'd expect at the current level of GPT-2. It is very good in some dimensions, but terrible in others, e.g., right there at the beginning: "Blacks make up 1/8 of the world's population, but they account for only a 3/10 of global economic power." - GPT is very bad at math [1], it gets the structure of arguments involving math or numbers but doesn't understand the numbers, so right off there's a massive unforced error in this controversial statement in which it complains that 12.5% of the world's population has "only" 30% of the power, undercutting the whole thing from the getgo and making something that was a good start to a "controversial" statement completely fall apart into farce due to a simple error. It does this sort of thing pervasively. It's clear that GPT-2 is touching controversial topics but it's failing to put together controversial sentences. I suspect that the sort of thing that Scott discusses in this story isn't quite possible, at the full described power... but certainly if AI gets better than GPT-2, it'll get better at this too. [1]: Read some of https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/search/?q=math&restrict_sr=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/search/?q=math&res...
    - manifestsilence 7y ago
      Funny thing though - I could see that statement being particularly enraging once a large enough and random enough group got behind debating it. These statements don't have to make logical sense, they only have to trigger people into instinctive camps. "The math doesn't even make sense, and is making my point, that there's no problem here" "You're saying there's not a problem? Believe me, there's a problem..." etc.
enriquto 7y ago
This is a chilling, very well written story!
J-dawg 7y ago
The part I don't understand is, how would the scissor statements be made real? E.g. The Russian scissor statement machine spits out a statement about a bakery refusing to make a cake for a gay couple. What happens next? They somehow identify real people who fit the role and nudge them towards ordering a cake? Or would everyone involved be paid actors? Or real people who are bribed / coerced? I know we're in fictional territory, I'm just curious about how this would work in the story's 'universe'. (And in real life, I guess, considering that some of it seemed dangerously plausible).
- Illniyar 7y ago
  In the cake example - find a bakery that won't make a cake for a gay wedding. Probably by correlating gay hate posts on social media and baking. Start directing traffic from social media of LGBTQ communities, perhaps even wedding orientes, towards that bakery. For example false accounts on facebook wedding groups who say that bakery is really good or something. Wait until something happens.
  - golemotron 7y ago
    Another. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transgender-woman-human-rights-waxing-1.5227434 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transgender-...
- gwern 7y ago
  None of that matters. Haven't you been following any of these social media hate crime hoaxes and wars? Or watched _Ghost in the Shell_? It doesn't matter if there is no real bakery. Or a real bakery will be distorted by a game of Telephone by unscrupulous activists or journalists into something which vaguely looks right. And even if there is no such bakery, it may create a bakery: a real bakery will announce it's standing up for its principles and not baking for gay people, or a spat between a bakery and a gay couple (for completely other reasons unrelated to being gay) will be recycled, or heck, someone may step up to claim to be the bakery in question and to be fighting the good fight for Christianity. You might think, who would be so weird as to do that, as they must know what they are doing, but there are a lot of weird people out there and you only need one ( https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood ).
misterdoubt 7y ago
This is cute. Creepypasta for grownups.
- esyir 7y ago
  A little less cute when it's so common.
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MagnumPIG 7y ago
The idea is interesting, but everyone is a caricature of their role (marketing people have no morals, programmers are clueless about business). I guess there may be some "intentional" hyperbole but overall it's a badly written but interesting idea.
- jerf 7y ago
  If, for the sake of argument, a traditional story involves plot, setting, and characters, short stories are considered to be doing pretty well if they can come out swinging on all three. When you add "ideas" to the mix, it is inevitable that something else is going to suffer. Optimizing on that many dimensions is just not a reasonable request. It's part of why science fiction has so frequently had such flat characters... there just isn't room with the complicated plots, the uniquely-demanding settings (you can't just say "Bob banged open the saloon doors" if the equivalent of "Bob", "saloon", and "doors" have to be explained to the reader), and the introduction of "ideas" into the mix. Insisting that they all also be character studies would be asking for the moon.
pjc50 7y ago
Now that I've actually read it rather than starting with the comments, as we're all prone to do, I think it's an interesting little piece of fiction that reminds me of two things. One is the Monty Python weaponised joke sketch: the premise of the sketch is that the joke is so funny that anyone who reads or hears it promptly dies from laughter, so it is carefully divided into pieces and translated into German for use as a weapon. The other is the Dreyfuss affair, and its notorious ability to fragment French society for years.
- srl 7y ago
  It reminds me of a CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc. In that video (okay I'm interpreting a bit...) society itself acts as Scissor, "breeding" some ideas to become maximally controversial. Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along!
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along! I don't think we did. SA's machine learning based scissor generator is to what you described what engineered bioweapons are to natural evolution. The latter can produce nasty stuff over time, the former is about taking the latter, refining it, and improving on it much faster.
  - drak0n1c 7y ago
    Like any invention, not everything that can be invented has been invented. The current culture war has only been going for around 5 years. Things can change and new divides erupt all the time.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      5 years? Lots of it can be traced directly all the way back to the Vietnam war, surely? Certainly abortion has been a scissor issue since at least 1973.
doubleunplussed 7y ago
I remember 2011's scissor statement in the online Atheism community: "Guys, don't do that".
chwilson 7y ago
I really enjoyed this - are there any other places online that host “tech thriller” fiction similar to this?

217 points by paulsutter 7y ago

trevyn 7y ago

(2018), but still very relevant!

throwaway_bad 7y ago
I guess it did partially come true. The GPT-2 model by OpenAI (2019) trained on reddit links did tear some communities apart. :) https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/ https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/

awayyyythrow 7y ago

One of Alexander's better stories. However, I'd say it reeks of what I'd call Alexanderness: -The idea that arguments and debates are the most important thing in the world and everyone should do it as much as possible (possibly due to his being terminally online). In real life if you say something other people find abhorrent they'll first go "that's wrong wtf", then if you insist "sure alright go off" then "please stop talking to me". Most people are not, in fact, in a perpetual crusade to prove opppnents wrong. That's because the real world isn't Twitter. -The idea that both sides have a point and trying to rule out one side is anathema to a well-functioning society. In other words, why can't everyone just get along? Well guess what, sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong. Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it. -Equivocating all controversial statements as equally controversial. For instance, design decisions about a codebase vs. religion issues vs. presumably something even deeper ('so hateful and disgusting'). Some fights are worth having, some are not.

javajosh 7y ago
I don't know the author, but I had a similar thought, that was about the very immediate emotionality of his characters. It doesn't have to be that way - the "radical compassion" he mentions is only one small step away from nipping that kind of angry/passionate response in the bud.
cousin_it 7y ago
I think people who claim that their side is above argument are often being a bit hypocritical, since they rarely dismiss arguments for their side.
- awayyyythrow 7y ago
  There are no rational arguments for my cause if it involves whether I should exist or have rights. I want rights because I want them. How would a rational argument even work?
  - memling 7y ago
    > There are no rational arguments for my cause if it involves whether I should exist or have rights. I want rights because I want them. How would a rational argument even work? This is a pretty important question, although I don't know how well it applies to specific causes. On the other hand, there are reasonable questions we can ask about rights themselves whose answers are not easily reconcilable. For example: 1. Are rights discovered or invented? 2. If discovered, where do they come from? 3. If invented, can you "uninvent" them? 4. If invented, by what process?
    - yourbandsucks 7y ago
      I read a bit about postmodernism recently. I think the difference between yourself/Scott and the 'X studies' traditions is that they're not into classically philosophical arguments like you're making here. It's all about implied power relationships, the identity of speaker and listener are as important, maybe more important, than the content. Whereas for you and Mr SSC, the identity is to be studiously ignored in favor of only focusing on the argument, to treat it fairly. So everyone is using wildly different metrics and then wondering why their interlocutors seem crazy.
    - nine_k 7y ago
      Rights are mostly won in a power struggle. For that, the idea of the rights has to be conceived first, and made the point of the struggle. This can be seen as "invention". Then rights can be rationalized and tweaked a bit so that parties with comparable power do not step on each others' toes, and become allies. This can be seen, more roughly, as "discovery". Rarely rights are granted by the more powerful to a less powerful because of moral / religious reasons. E.g. the anti-slavery movement in the US had a significant religious component, based on the idea that God created people equal. More often a more powerful party gives a less powerful party some rights because they need an ally and want to prevent a full-on power struggle. I think women's suffrage had a significant component of this in many places. Powerful and oppressive parties can definitely "uninvent" rights; look at any totalitarian regime for examples. Say, communist regimes often revoke the right to freely trade. Most oppressive regimes gladly uninvent the right to congregate, and usually the right to free speech. They tend to frame these activities as harmful and unnatural. Regaining them usually involves a power struggle; see above.
larzang 7y ago
The idea that the discussion of a supreme court nominee being a rapist is what is dangerous, and not the fact that a supreme court nominee is a rapist, is frankly sickening. So is reducing Kaepernick to a political meme, complete with invocation of Putin as scary mastermind. Acting like everything is some kind of abstract theater designed to divide people on internet forums shows a disturbing detachment from the real effects that real events have on real people.
- markrages 7y ago
  > The idea that the discussion of a supreme court nominee being a rapist is what is dangerous, and not the fact that a supreme court nominee is a rapist, is frankly sickening. I see what you did there.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > The idea that the discussion of a supreme court nominee being a rapist is what is dangerous, and not the fact that a supreme court nominee is a rapist, is frankly sickening. Not in general. There's damage, and there's collateral damage. Sometimes discussions do more damage than their topic. For instance, a journalist writing an article in a popular newspaper that some doctors are considering violating patient confidentiality in cases of admission of crime, and people reading and reposting it, is much more dangerous than the ultimate decision of those few doctors.
pjc50 7y ago
> Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles Exactly this. The "nerd" position that everything is a debate should be contrasted with with the Marxist position that everything is a power struggle. Both can easily become stopped clocks, but both have validity if correctly applied. Moreover, it looks to me that a large problem with present politics is people who are fed up with rational cost-benefit analysis and want to wreck their perceived enemies, even at a cost to themselves.
- J-dawg 7y ago
  > people who are fed up with rational cost-benefit analysis and want to wreck their perceived enemies I've been thinking this for a while, and it seems to be creating some nasty feedback loops. At least some of the support for politicians like Trump and Boris Johnson comes from the fact that they continually piss off people who are liberal/progressive/left-wing/anti-Brexit (delete as applicable depending on who is 'the enemy'). In the same way, I've seen things written about progressive politicians to the effect of "he is upsetting a lot of angry old white men, so he must be doing something right". "How much do they piss off the other team" has become something that many voters use as a metric. Perhaps even the only metric, for some people.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Yes - and this is partly due to the media, who absolutely love a two-sided punchup because it's clickbait to both sides and generates lots of furious refreshing of the comments section to show ads. It's basically a fancier version of professional wrestling. It's very prisoner's dilemma. First side to back down from the partisanship loses. So it just keeps escalating. Traditionally the media and other institutions have leant on the left to back down and "be reasonable"; this has become a losing strategy, so people are starting to get unreasonable again.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      And the root of the problem here is again that media are funded by advertising, so they need to stir outrage and pit everyone against each other to maximize profits.
andrewflnr 7y ago
I find your first bullet odd. If anything, the point of the story is that debate is not good. It makes me wonder if he's having a serious change of heart about it, in fact. On the third point, I don't think those issues are being presented as actually equally controversial, particularly not as being equally worthy of fighting over, but as things that people are equally likely to fight over anyway.
DrScientist 7y ago
> We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. Nobody has 'rights'. It's an artificial construct. Nobody can do what they want, they are constrained by others - whether through a system of law, or simply other people intervening. Everything is a negotiation. If somebody wanted to kill you - you could fight - or you could become useful to the person with the power to kill you. It's a negotiation where both sides weight the risks of different approaches. Democratic systems of government and the law simply are an agreement by the majority that it's a pragmatic way of doing stuff - negotiate once nationally rather than constant negotiations with everyone we meet. So maybe what's missing in a system like reddit is the recording of decisions - ie a vote at the end of every thread.
- mlevental 7y ago
  this isn't a hot take. we already live in a society that obligates us to abide by a social contract. so yes people do have rights. it's as real as the fact that you and I speak the same language. looking around and imagining that because some people somewhere sometimes are in breach of contract means that contracts don't exist is stupid. they do. we all signed them and resign them when we use any cooperative produced object (that includes language, science, public roads, etc)
  - DrScientist 7y ago
    Hmm.. reread the full thread again. I think the mistake here is my lack of clarity about the word 'rights'. My point was there is no such thing as an inalienable rights. 'Rights' are a negotiated social contract - so it makes no sense to say they are not negotiable!
    - mlevental 7y ago
      >negotiated social contract the bill of rights was ratified December 15, 1791. in what sense is it still being negotiated?
      - 7y ago
motohagiography 7y ago
>Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it. This statement is an example of one that could be seen as insidious as a scissor. The idea of the scissor is really interesting, as there are ideas I think people are easily seduced by, which produces these kind of statements. In my house, where politics was dinner discussion from as soon as we could all talk, we have a way to recognize when the discussion switches from comparing interests and experiences, to artifacts of personal experience that are not mutually reconcilable, and that the only remaining interesting topic is how to navigate alien experiences. It's not always smooth, but it mitigates feuding and using politics as a proxy in relationships with precedents that were set when we were all children. Of course, for this to even be possible, you need to believe in something greater than your own experience, and have what people now call an "internal locus of control," which is itself a high bar, but we've managed.
taneq 7y ago
I didn't see it doing any of those things. I saw it as a pretty straightforward story about a social conflict equivalent of a BLIT-style basilisk picture.
epr 7y ago
> sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong Certainly you can try to pick some objective criteria for determining who is right, but that is beside the point that these questions ideally split a target population 50/50. If you have a philosophical theory of everything that allows you to always have an objective answer then that is awesome for you, but thinking that everyone else will share your views is naive to say the least.
deleted 7y ago
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yowlingcat 7y ago
What a strange lack of curiosity. Framing the conversation of controversy around an anecdotal one involving someone arguing against someone else's right to exist seems like missing the forest for a very specific tree, and in a way, that's sorta the point of the whole story. Relying on the emotive power of anecdotes to derail individuals and groups in discussions from being skeptical of when they're being goaded into a reaction is a key part of media strategy -- so much that the story uses the operative noun "scissor" to describe it. I read the article (not my first stay in Alexander-land although I'm no frequent guest) and came away with a thoroughly different conclusion. 1) Arguments and debates, far from being the most important thing in the world, are a sadly spectacular (in the Debord sense) form of the social human condition. 2) While it's not the case that both sides have a point, it's almost always exploitable that both sides can be provoked, and the synthesis of provocative headlines and content while remaining just on the side of centrism is the core of the media industry. To your example, it's true that there are certain people that argue against your right to exist, but they are beyond the pale, or dressing their bloodlust in irony. My opinion is that the more dangerous kinds of bigots attempt to shroud or reframe their views into more marketable and respectable packages, and they usually "ride" or incite controversy to get there. Is it the mark of a well-functioning society to tolerate this speech without becoming intolerant, or is it the mark of a naive one which is doomed to an eventually authoritarian and surveillance state? Where ought the lines be drawn? 3) Controversial statements, if generable, imply something fascinating and thought-provoking about what controversy is. Generating controversy gets you one step further towards generating clickbait. Generating clickbait gets you one step further to ... what? That's the million-dollar question. If anyone can generate clickbait for free, will everyone continue to consume it? Will we begin to look at clickbait the way we look at nicotine and alcohol -- cheap thrills with long term deleterious effects that we need to regulate? What's the trade-off between a minimal oversight and regulatory capture or authoritarianism here; is it inevitable that we must trade things off?
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  > What a strange lack of curiosity. Framing the conversation of controversy around an anecdotal one involving someone arguing against someone else's right to exist seems like missing the forest for a very specific tree, and in a way, that's sorta the point of the whole story. The story mentions Kavanaugh, and coincidentally today the Supreme Court happens to be hearing one such existential case: whether it's legal for employers to fire their employees for being gay or trans. I guess there's a certain sense of curiosity that's satisfied by debates about issues like this. But I imagine that the people entertained by it aren't the ones who have a stake in the outcome. If you're gay, you don't want to have to endlessly convince people that you shouldn't be fired for just being yourself. You just want to be able to exist in society like everyone else.
derefr 7y ago
> possibly due to his being terminally online I mean, Scott is a practicing psychiatrist. Whether or not he’s online, he spends most of his time listening to people trying to justify (usually irrational, mental-illness-borne) positions, and then trying to give arguments powerful enough to actually change their minds (i.e. convince them to inculcate a sub-self who wants to change the mind of the rest of them.) Or drugs, if the sub-self who would “do the right [i.e. ego-syntonic] thing” exists but is overpowered by some other sub-self.
- sfink 7y ago
  I sure hope not, that sounds like an ineffective way to help anyvody. (Not to mention that it would only work on dumb or unimaginative people.) You can't argue someone out of a mental issue. If you really think it would be helpful for them to realize they're wrong, the best you can do is be a mirror so they can convince themselves. But generally, the fixation on whether something is right or wrong is a distraction, a mechanism for avoiding facing the real issue.
  - derefr 7y ago
    It’s called cognitive behavioural therapy. You help the person better arm themselves with arguments to convince themselves. But to do that, you have to convince them on the value of the arguments, such that they adopt them.
leetcrew 7y ago
> Well guess what, sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong. Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it. this may well be the case, but it's still probably worth avoiding resorting to power struggles whenever possible. winning a power struggle is orthogonal to actually being right. you might win on an issue that's particularly important to you (where you consider yourself to be "unambiguously right") this way, but it's worse for everyone the more things are decided this way. as an aside, "rights" are some of the most subjective things that exist. as a US citizen I have the right to bear (certain) arms (in certain situations). this right only exists because it's enshrined in law and not enough people have yet organized in opposition to it. it's an inherently controversial topic where the only answer is whatever people can mostly agree to.
- asdkfjasl 7y ago
  Via capitulation, it's always possible to avoid a power struggle. Game theoretically, this has some pretty obvious suboptimal outcomes for the capitulating player. I think it's an interesting question to figure out when the power struggle is worth it, and when it isn't. But I think necessarily this is going to be a question that boils down to values that every person is going to have to evaluate for themselves.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    of course it's rational for an individual or subset of society to fight for something that's very important to them, if they can't get it through persuasion. but if most things are settled this way, it's not going to end well for the less powerful members of society.
  - naniwaduni 7y ago
    Capitulation is not avoiding a power struggle. It is an outcome.
ZhuanXia 7y ago
>We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it. Effective rhetoric, but that's about it. In practice, people take their self-serving policy preferences and enshrine them into their identity and then proclaim that any attack on their policy preference is attack on their right to exist
darawk 7y ago
> -The idea that both sides have a point and trying to rule out one side is anathema to a well-functioning society. In other words, why can't everyone just get along? Well guess what, sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong. Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it. If that's the framing you want to choose, then you have to accept the possibility that its a power struggle you may lose. The point of debating things is that the most justifiable side should win. In a power struggle, the side that wins may or may not be the correct one. If you think your position is correct, you should prefer the debate to the power struggle. It's only people that fear they may not be able to justify their view that prefer to struggle for power. > -Equivocating all controversial statements as equally controversial. For instance, design decisions about a codebase vs. religion issues vs. presumably something even deeper ('so hateful and disgusting'). Some fights are worth having, some are not. That's all context-dependent, though. Design decisions about a codebase are a fight absolutely worth having in the context of a startup, as in the story.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pgcj_poster 7y ago
  > If that's the framing you want to choose, then you have to accept the possibility that its a power struggle you may lose. The point of debating things is that the most justifiable side should win. Is there actual evidence that it works this way? Because as far as I can tell, "debates" about anything important mostly just get both sides fired up and more convinced of their own views. And I know for a fact that there are some arguments that are bad, but do well in debates, and other arguments that are good, but don't convince people. I've self-censored and said things that I don't really believe for this reason. > In a power struggle, the side that wins may or may not be the correct one. If you think your position is correct, you should prefer the debate to the power struggle. Sure, but you don't have a choice. There's always going to be power struggles going on, and your only real choice is whether you participate. If one side is regimented and ready to grab for power whenever they can, and the other side is constantly debating whether it's right to even try, I'm pretty sure I know which side's going to win. > It's only people that fear they may not be able to justify their view that prefer to struggle for power. The most important views fundamentally cannot be justified, because they're about basic values. For instance, I believe that all lives have equal value. However, I've met people who think that American lives are more valuable than all others. I don't know of any way that I could "justify" my position to these people: it's an axiom in my system of morality. The best thing I can think of would be to try and get them to meet more non-Americans, or show them sad pictures of children starving in Africa, and hope that they change their mind.
doubleunplussed 7y ago
The community that these discussions take place in are a sort of "safe space" for those who want to discuss things rationally. Nobody is claiming that subtle logical arguments are effective in the real world against anyone who isn't already in that crowd. One problem is that emotional rhetoric is often dressed up to look like rational argument, thus sucking people into a debate about arguments instead of a power struggle. When faced IRL with a fallacious argument designed to force them to say something factually correct but distasteful sounding, rational people definitely need to develop the habit of laughing in the attacker's face instead of responding with argument. I agree that not doing this is a problem they have (one that their enemies exploit). But I think you're reading into it if you think Alexander consciously endorses answering emotional attacks with reason (he might be tricked into it, but would agree it was a mistake if it were pointed out). He's talking to his own audience here.
mtraven 7y ago
This hits the nail on the head. Alexander has a horror of power struggles and wants to believe they can all be rplaced with debate, but that simply doesn't work. He addresses this somewhat meta-level issue in his posts on Conflict vs. Mistake: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ (and I try and tear it apart here: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2018/03/conflict-theory.html http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2018/03/conflict-theory.h... )

Dylan16807 7y ago

Ugh. A brilliant insight into how people don't actually work. I read the first third hoping for an example, then the rest just hoping that anything would happen. My opinion of slatestarcodex was significantly higher an hour ago than it is now.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Well, it's memetic warfare fiction, but I don't feel it's that far off the mark. The other day I've been in a discussion where some of the people disagreeing with me were - in my eyes - failing at reading comprehension, seemingly unable to parse the simple English statements of the source material that somehow became quoted by both sides of the argument. I left that discussion with worrying feeling that those others, most of them smart techies, couldn't possibly be that dumb, so there must be something else going on. I find this story uncanny because within its universe, it hints at what that "something else" is. (Oh, and my opinion of SSC went up a bit.)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Having been in many arguments that seem like that[0], I think the answer is actually quite simple: sometimes it's just hard to communicate with other human beings. Communication can only convey understanding with shared context, and sometimes our contexts line up enough to make it seem like we're conveying understanding but each of us is consistently misunderstanding the other. Between the frustration and our tendency towards viewing attacks against our arguments as attacks against our being, you sometimes wind up with the kind of behavior discussed in this story. The story itself is effective because it constructs a malevolent purpose to explain everyday phenomena we don't normally think too much about. John Dies at the End used Baader-Meinhof to similar effect. [0]If I'm honest with myself about it, arguing is one of my favorite pastimes.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    I think a lot of divides are because people have different assumed axioms, and in many cases cannot even declare what those axioms are. Example: I know pro-life people who cannot understand how someone could simultaneously hold the belief that aborting fetuses with congenital defects is okay, but rounding up the severely handicapped and killing them is not; there is nothing magical about birth that changes a life from not being valuable to being valuable. Simultaneously I know pro-choice people who cannot understand how someone could simultaneously vouch for reducing or eliminating social welfare services to single mothers but also vouch for making abortions illegal; clearly the pro-life people don't care about babies after they are born! Since the other side holds inconsistent views, they are wrongheaded hypocrites and all of their arguments can be dismissed without further thought. No compromise is possible because to compromise with hypocrites is to enable their hypocrisy.

javajosh 7y ago

The idea that words have enormous power over human minds is taken to fantasical extremes in a (sf? f?) thriller "Lexicon", by Max Barry[1]. My own view is that "truth" means something different to some people. For example, a charismatic narcissistic leader might mean "confident belief" when he says "truth". This definition define his statements to be truth! I suppose the last backstop for these kinds of structures are nature itself, and it's tendency to allow problematic structures to crumble. 1 https://www.alibris.com/Lexicon-Max-Barry/book/24166116 https://www.alibris.com/Lexicon-Max-Barry/book/24166116

celticmusic 7y ago
It turns out, if you let people define words however they want to, they're never wrong. who knew! The solution is to reject those redefinitions.
H8crilA 7y ago
I mean the entire society is organized around abstract concepts: corporation, nation, state, money, God, duty/obligation, human rights. None of these things are real (physics does not care about, say, debt), those are just programs running on the human brain. Natural language is the dispersal protocol of those programs.

buboard 7y ago

Story would be much more readable if he had actually stated the offending Scissor and cut it short by half.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Nah, if he did, it would tear SSC, HN and God knows what else apart.
SilasX 7y ago
That would be missing the point. He’d have to commit to a specific statement as being a scissor. But if someone doesn’t already get the point, they’d fall into the same trap as the people in the story “what? They must misunderstand the claim. Obviously it’s true/false.” The story’s point requires identifying the psychological state state that scissor statements put you into, where you feel reality is actually bending against you (eg “he turned her against me”). If you think there is an explicit scissor statement Alexander could have committed to, then I think you might not appreciate the core thesis.
- buboard 7y ago
  It is either a story or a theory. Telling a story without naming the characters ranges from cumbersome to infuriating. Telling a theory, is another story
  - SilasX 7y ago
    I just explained why the specifics of the story require the scissor statement not be made explicit.
- essayist 7y ago
  I'm with you. We see in this discussion that it's difficult even to raise some potential scissors as examples without a lot of commenters falling into them. SSC's point is not "X is a near-universal scissor", it's that there's a scissor or ten for almost everyone, and that some scissors are likely to ensnare a lot of people. If you've never found yourself arguing vehemently and extensively, to the death, about something and sometime later wondered what that was about, you may be a counterexample, someone who is scissor-immune. I sure am not.

atemerev 7y ago

Well, this is “fiction”, but he described his method precisely: get the publicly available Reddit comments archive, sort by controversial, set up the GAN generating and scoring texts according to controversy (the comments that cause the most schism and/or initiate discussions), train it, then try to generate new controversial comments. Seems doable. I presume that everyone with a spark of scientific mindset and even a slight interest in the field now warming up their OpenGPT-2 instances and trying to reproduce the effect.

gwern 7y ago
Well... https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bers5o/using_gpt2_to_sort_by_controversial/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bers5o/usin...
- jerf 7y ago
  That's about what I'd expect at the current level of GPT-2. It is very good in some dimensions, but terrible in others, e.g., right there at the beginning: "Blacks make up 1/8 of the world's population, but they account for only a 3/10 of global economic power." - GPT is very bad at math [1], it gets the structure of arguments involving math or numbers but doesn't understand the numbers, so right off there's a massive unforced error in this controversial statement in which it complains that 12.5% of the world's population has "only" 30% of the power, undercutting the whole thing from the getgo and making something that was a good start to a "controversial" statement completely fall apart into farce due to a simple error. It does this sort of thing pervasively. It's clear that GPT-2 is touching controversial topics but it's failing to put together controversial sentences. I suspect that the sort of thing that Scott discusses in this story isn't quite possible, at the full described power... but certainly if AI gets better than GPT-2, it'll get better at this too. [1]: Read some of https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/search/?q=math&restrict_sr=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/search/?q=math&res...
  - manifestsilence 7y ago
    Funny thing though - I could see that statement being particularly enraging once a large enough and random enough group got behind debating it. These statements don't have to make logical sense, they only have to trigger people into instinctive camps. "The math doesn't even make sense, and is making my point, that there's no problem here" "You're saying there's not a problem? Believe me, there's a problem..." etc.

enriquto 7y ago

This is a chilling, very well written story!

J-dawg 7y ago

The part I don't understand is, how would the scissor statements be made real? E.g. The Russian scissor statement machine spits out a statement about a bakery refusing to make a cake for a gay couple. What happens next? They somehow identify real people who fit the role and nudge them towards ordering a cake? Or would everyone involved be paid actors? Or real people who are bribed / coerced? I know we're in fictional territory, I'm just curious about how this would work in the story's 'universe'. (And in real life, I guess, considering that some of it seemed dangerously plausible).

Illniyar 7y ago
In the cake example - find a bakery that won't make a cake for a gay wedding. Probably by correlating gay hate posts on social media and baking. Start directing traffic from social media of LGBTQ communities, perhaps even wedding orientes, towards that bakery. For example false accounts on facebook wedding groups who say that bakery is really good or something. Wait until something happens.
- golemotron 7y ago
  Another. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transgender-woman-human-rights-waxing-1.5227434 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transgender-...
gwern 7y ago
None of that matters. Haven't you been following any of these social media hate crime hoaxes and wars? Or watched _Ghost in the Shell_? It doesn't matter if there is no real bakery. Or a real bakery will be distorted by a game of Telephone by unscrupulous activists or journalists into something which vaguely looks right. And even if there is no such bakery, it may create a bakery: a real bakery will announce it's standing up for its principles and not baking for gay people, or a spat between a bakery and a gay couple (for completely other reasons unrelated to being gay) will be recycled, or heck, someone may step up to claim to be the bakery in question and to be fighting the good fight for Christianity. You might think, who would be so weird as to do that, as they must know what they are doing, but there are a lot of weird people out there and you only need one ( https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood ).

misterdoubt 7y ago

This is cute. Creepypasta for grownups.

esyir 7y ago
A little less cute when it's so common.

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MagnumPIG 7y ago

The idea is interesting, but everyone is a caricature of their role (marketing people have no morals, programmers are clueless about business). I guess there may be some "intentional" hyperbole but overall it's a badly written but interesting idea.

jerf 7y ago
If, for the sake of argument, a traditional story involves plot, setting, and characters, short stories are considered to be doing pretty well if they can come out swinging on all three. When you add "ideas" to the mix, it is inevitable that something else is going to suffer. Optimizing on that many dimensions is just not a reasonable request. It's part of why science fiction has so frequently had such flat characters... there just isn't room with the complicated plots, the uniquely-demanding settings (you can't just say "Bob banged open the saloon doors" if the equivalent of "Bob", "saloon", and "doors" have to be explained to the reader), and the introduction of "ideas" into the mix. Insisting that they all also be character studies would be asking for the moon.

pjc50 7y ago

Now that I've actually read it rather than starting with the comments, as we're all prone to do, I think it's an interesting little piece of fiction that reminds me of two things. One is the Monty Python weaponised joke sketch: the premise of the sketch is that the joke is so funny that anyone who reads or hears it promptly dies from laughter, so it is carefully divided into pieces and translated into German for use as a weapon. The other is the Dreyfuss affair, and its notorious ability to fragment French society for years.

srl 7y ago
It reminds me of a CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc. In that video (okay I'm interpreting a bit...) society itself acts as Scissor, "breeding" some ideas to become maximally controversial. Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along!
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along! I don't think we did. SA's machine learning based scissor generator is to what you described what engineered bioweapons are to natural evolution. The latter can produce nasty stuff over time, the former is about taking the latter, refining it, and improving on it much faster.
- drak0n1c 7y ago
  Like any invention, not everything that can be invented has been invented. The current culture war has only been going for around 5 years. Things can change and new divides erupt all the time.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    5 years? Lots of it can be traced directly all the way back to the Vietnam war, surely? Certainly abortion has been a scissor issue since at least 1973.

doubleunplussed 7y ago

I remember 2011's scissor statement in the online Atheism community: "Guys, don't do that".

chwilson 7y ago

I really enjoyed this - are there any other places online that host “tech thriller” fiction similar to this?