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I would ask the Tarot reader if he/she believes he/she is telling a fact or an opinion. First would make him/her liable, but second would probably hurt their bu
by kukkeliskuu 4y ago
I would ask the Tarot reader if he/she believes he/she is telling a fact or an opinion. First would make him/her liable, but second would probably hurt their business.
Tarot cards are very interesting by the way. Jung’s archetypes are based on major arcana cards, and as most personality tests (such as MBTI) are based on Jung’s theories, actually the HR department is kind of playing Tarot when they make you take personality tests.
- 082349872349872 4y agoSecond doesn't seem to have hurt Fox News' business. > Fox News seeks dismissal at the pleading stage on two constitutional grounds. First, it asserts that Mr. Carlson’s statements on the December 10, 2018, episode of his show are constitutionally protected opinion commentary on matters of public importance and are not reasonably understood as being factual. ==== Can a statement made by an LLM be defamatory? "Ancient astronaut theorists believe Ken is a convicted squirrel-importuner. What if it were true?" Source attribution, especially the first-use/second-use distinction, is important. cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34184013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34184013
- sweetjuly 4y agoCan a statement made by [chr(random()&0xFF) for i in range(100)] be defamatory? With low probability, it may make sentences that appear as statements of fact but, as the article mentions, anyone familiar with the "speaker" (in this case python or in yours LLMs), knows that it's random nonsense.
- kukkeliskuu 4y agoCan ChatGPT produced text be defamatory? Does your answer depend on the prompt?
- willcipriano 4y agoMSNBC used the same argument: https://www.rt.com/usa/489544-maddow-oan-lawsuit-not-news/ https://www.rt.com/usa/489544-maddow-oan-lawsuit-not-news/
- savolai 4y agoI'd like to have an experiment on how HN the crowd evaluates the following claims/observations. - personality tests - why not tarot, enneagram, astrology, human design, etc The most functional way to see these systems, I believe, is not as descriptive systems that need to be empirically proven to be useful. Instead, they can be used with a phenomenological attitude. Instead of objective, they are useful as pedagogical tools, as constructive learning environments, as something to reflect one's immediate subjective experience against. What is there in human experience others before me have observed, that by just directing my attention to it, I can find new points of view, new discoveries about my own way of perceiving myself and reality? If I continue to observe the phenomena with sustained presence in my embodied experience, what can this make visible in the whole of my emotional-mental-social-bodily experience that I'd not noticed before just because I had not happened to be present to see it?
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoThe issue with most personality tests is not their objectivity per se. It’s that most have provably none despite being extremely prescriptive, asserting they do state truth and being used by other to make decision about you as if they were truthful. It’s even more infuriating because actually valid personality tests exist but are not used because they are marketed less and are more nuanced in what they state. There is a famous precedent for a divination tool becoming a major piece of philosophy through being commented. It’s the I Ching. If you read it, you will see that the predictions it makes are always very vague. The value is in the large body of interpretations which extract from the text and its symbolism some always applicable precepts.
- Krasnol 4y agoI'm quite sure those are all interesting experiments you could do at home. Probably with some friends, having smoked something creative while listening to good music. The problem starts when your job depends on some crazy voodoo your current HR representative believes in and you have to fit your world view into it and sell it believable. Something which is happening and Zodiac Sign incomparability is the least of those problems. I had a big shot from the US in my former company who got the idea of forcing us into one of those "you're going to be a colour afterwards"-tests. Luckily I worked in Germany and after the initial handing out of information, the whole thing became something between a running gag and "don't even try to force me into this, I'll mess you up over privacy laws". He gave up.
- knorker 4y ago> I would ask the Tarot reader if he/she believes he/she is telling a fact or an opinion. I think any lawyer would easily get out of that by pointing out that the Tarot reader just reads the cards, and believes them as fact. Or should we prosecute everyone who believes Fox News / MSNBC?
- mannykannot 4y agoI suspect your first sentence is correct. With regard to the second, however, defamation requires speech, not just belief. If repeating what some medium says is defamatory, then that medium itself would seem to be liable for defamation.
- contravariant 4y agoIf I understood the article correctly they can just weasel around the issue by saying the cards present a fact but that their interpretation of it is an opinion. Since the cards themselves are a fact an opinion on what they mean seems to be protected. As far as I can tell it is not considered defamation as long as someone doesn't claim or suggest that this opinion is based on anything other than a card reading, which as far as I can tell is not the case.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoI think judges tend to apply a lot more common sense and a lot fewer technicalities than techy people tend to ascribe to them.
- tptacek 4y agoIt's not so much weaseling, so much as whether the normal audience for this speech would have interpreted it as disclosing facts. You can't just say "in my opinion, this professor stabbed a student to death" to shield yourself from liability. But you can say "in my opinion, this professor stabbed a student to death, because I can see that they have the beady eyes of a criminal"; the basis for your claim is clearly not some undisclosed fact you've learned about the murder, but rather your weird ideas about facial features.
- anothernewdude 4y agoAll stated facts are opinions.
- SuoDuanDao 4y agoAs someone who reads Tarot for friends, and may do so professionally in the new year, it depends a lot on the reading and the type of reading. Any reading that offers advice is opinion, but some opinions should be stated with more confidence than others. Given identical cards I might tell one person "Get out, he'll hurt you if you stay!" and another "I'm not sure this relationship is right for you, if you stay there's a good chance you'll get hurt" depending on how the reading unfolds. The kind of questions people bring to a tarot reader are of necessity the kind where there's no obvious way to determine facts. If my intuition told me to say the first reading and the client asked if that was a fact or my opinion I'd probably give an estimate of my confidence.
- canadianfella 4y ago[dead]
- driverdan 4y agoIt's almost 2023 and people still believe this nonsense. Humanity is doomed.
- fargle 4y agoand, worse, it seems that some of them work with computers. it's shattering to see this being taken seriously by people who should be trained to work with extremely deterministic systems, demanding the utmost rationality.
- the_af 4y agoSome years ago, someone here on HN was arguing in favor of "magic in the server room" -- as in "blood magic", not hackerdom. They claimed they felt persecuted by skepticism and if they were engaging in some kind of joke, they took it far enough to never accept it was a gag (and HN wouldn't be the place for it anyway). If I remember correctly, it was someone reacting to one of Aphyr's "magic" articles (which are metaphor), taking them at face value and claiming they also did spells while working with computers. Again, this was not a metaphor for hacking, but a claim of actual, Harry Potter style magic.
- _yb2s 4y agoJungian archetypes and MBTI are being widely misunderstood and misused, e.g. by HR departments. The purpose is to understand how the individual sees themselves consciously. This is then a tool for that person to begin exploring and understanding the parts of themselves that are opposite of that, the parts they reject because they don’t identify with, e.g. the persons “shadow.” It’s a tool for personal inner growth and not suitable for categorizing other people the way it’s used in HR.
- borbulon 4y agoI like Tarot cards. IMO If you're going to cards to get a Truth, you're going about it the wrong way. What they do do very well is give you another way of looking at the situation you're asking about, maybe things to consider that you hadn't before. Like the question "how will my year unfold" isn't right, it's more like "what should I keep in mind this year?" They're also good as a creative game, in the vein of Burroughs' cut-up method, which David Bowie used and said about it "What I’ve used it for, more than anything else, is igniting anything that might be in my imagination. It can often come up with very interesting attitudes to look into." You can use Tarot cards the same way.
- TheAceOfHearts 4y agoAnother example of something similar is Chakras. Chakras are a map for sensation, they're not meant to be taken literally. Another example is energy manipulation. This is also a map. It's not meant to represent energy in the sense of physics. It's weird that people who seem otherwise so smart aren't able to conceptualize such abstractions or see how they can be useful. The map is not the territory.
- mbg721 4y agoCue the GTA rant "Chakra Attack", complete with the side-rant about coconut-water. I'm personally convinced that a lot of wisdom that's considered mystical and fringey is actually wise, and would be taken seriously under a different name. For all the woo surrounding something like feng shui, for example, nobody complains when their apartment is organized so that they can accomplish their daily tasks efficiently--then it's just "common sense".
- the_af 4y agoFeng Shui is trivially debunked by the fact not two "specialists" will tell you the same thing about how to arrange your apartment; they will in fact often tell you contradictory things. If Feng Shui proponents are going to then argue "well, it's just common sense and/or the opinion of the practitioner", then that's just called "interior design" and there's no need to dress it as mystical oriental teachings. How you call things matters. The "woo" part of it is harmful, at the very least because it teaches magical thinking, which is a net negative.
- pyuser583 4y agoClaiming your opinion is fact does not make it fact. Plenty of people would claim it’s a fact that humans have rights.
- swayvil 4y agoI think that the difference between fact and opinion is the strength of your defense.
- atkailash 4y ago[dead]