3 ms·
I don't want my models to be "centrists" and bothside everything for the sake of it. I want them to provide the facts and tell me which side is right on the iss
by thrance 4mo ago
I don't want my models to be "centrists" and bothside everything for the sake of it. I want them to provide the facts and tell me which side is right on the issue.
- atty 4mo agoFactuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally. People can use the same set of facts and come to very different conclusions. That’s a separate issue from “are these facts correct” and what happens when an individual or entire party starts getting most of their news from highly partisan and unreliable sources.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally. Sometimes, but not always. https://www.fastcompany.com/91561329/widening-health-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives https://www.fastcompany.com/91561329/widening-health-gap-bet... > By 2016, the gap had begun to appear in biomarker measures. By 2020, it was showing up in deaths from causes such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Since then, the gap has only widened. Between 2020 and 2022, only 0.2% of “very liberal” respondents died of internal causes, compared with 1.34% of “very conservative” respondents.
- jjk7 4mo agoIt's interesting how distrust for big pharma used to be left wing, but is now right wing. How did that happen?
- ceejayoz 4mo agoIt's a whole thing. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/fringe-left-alt-right-share-beliefs-white-power-movement/672454/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/fringe-lef...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bjourne 4mo agoIt's only interesting after you've removed all signs of nuance and dumbed the argument down to two keywords: "big" and "pharma". People are rightfully skeptical of pharmaceutical companies due to the enormous amount of power they wield over our lives and how they use that power, e.g., multi-national companies suing third world states over patent infringement for distributing generic live-saving drugs.
- glenstein 4mo ago>Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally. It certainly can be orthogonal, in some notional sense, and in many cases that explanation is good enough. But in practice there are too many contrary cases to ignore, and there's often an integral relation between factual veracity and polarization, especially with respect to American polarization of politics. Global warming, the results of the 2020 election, the percent spent of federal budget spent on foreign aid have factual answers and right wing affiliation can be predictive of (1) not agreeing with the facts and (2) treating factual corrections as "liberal bias". I think left wing versions exist also but are less systematic: 2004 election results, efficacy of plastic recycling or dangers associated with nuclear power are cases where I think left wing partisan affiliation probably predicts being wrong on the facts. And meta-narratives about the relation between factual information and partisan bias are themselves as likely to be polarized as anything, complicating the ability of people to do good analysis, or of accurate analysis to be trusted by people committed to certain meta-narratives that would deny the possibility of factual knowledge predicting polarization.
- michaelmrose 4mo agoI think Nuclear power is an interesting case and can be usefully contrasted with say vaccine denial. The anti nuclear position is one that was certainly correct at someone point in time and retains many good arguments that require technical chops to untangle and requires one to come to many other technically challenging conclusions to come to the arguably correct position. Vaccine denial requires one to ignore decades of fairly simple positions about which no expert credibly disagrees nor has in our lifetime. It's like watching 2 packs of athletes some of which are failing to clear 1 meter hurdles whilst on the other side some are tripping on little nubs set in the floor.
- quickthrowman 4mo agoI would characterize myself as left of center. > 2004 election results, GWB beat John Kerry in a fair election. > efficacy of plastic recycling Collecting plastic to recycle is almost certainly not worth the fuel and labor it takes, it gets landfilled more often than not. We’d be better off collecting only separated PET and HDPE and landfilling the rest. > or dangers associated with nuclear power Nuclear power is the safest method of power generation that uses steam or gas to spin a turbine.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoI guess centrist is a placeholder for "I don't want you to pick a side, I want facts, not BS" I'll go further, I don't care which side is right, I want to know what claims are factually accurate, and what claims are omitted from the issue / news / conversation.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoCentrist in US politics (and especially in the media) often means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoYeah, I know, and I totally should have clarified what I meant by centrist. I mean what one would ASSUME a centrist take to actually mean, or rather a "no sides, only facts" type of take. This reminds me of those "what they think it means" "what it means" type memes or the "how I see myself" vs "how I actually look?" type of memes.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- stephencanon 4mo ago"Centrist" in practice means "more or less content with the status quo." That is fundamentally a conservative position orthogonal to any notion of "facts".
- platevoltage 4mo agoYou're exactly right. The Downvotes are not deserved here.
- pixl97 4mo agoFacts are the information you feed yourself about the world. If you feed yourself, or an LLM in training mostly 'facts' that disagree with reality both of these neural networks will encode them with a higher probability of being true than information that conflicts with these facts. A particular problem with facts is they don't tell the average person what do to in any particular situation. You live a huge portion of your life, especially modern life, with subjective experiences. If someone asks an LLM "Why should I go on living" should it respond "As a matter of fact, Nihilists think you shouldn't. All we are is a gradient of low entropy to high entropy."? At the end of the day an LLM is not a fact machine. One day people will accept that, hopefully before they eradicate mankind. We don't pour facts in them and get facts out. We pour everything in them and poke at them until they give us acceptable answers (kind of like raising children). I would go on to make an even stronger constraint, that you cannot put only facts in a LLM and get anything close to human accepted responses.
- jimbokun 4mo agoUntil it disagrees with you.
- tayo42 4mo agoThe kinds of questions they asked don't really have right or wrong answers. They didn't ask the culture war questions that comes up now in politics.