> Meh. Writing like this was formative for me (before Gwern; I'm old), but I've come to realize that the biases of the rationalist community are really no different from the biases of anyone else. It just manifests in a different way?
Could you point out to some examples? Is there any "rational inquiry" that shows a worldview bias from the rationalists, in your opinion?
I agree that the broader smarty-pants community may have this issue, just curious to read your examples.
I think this nicely pointed out in "The Big Bang Theory", where Sheldon Cooper says something like "If I would be wrong, don't you think I would know about it?" That sounds like something Elmo M would say with a serious face.
The copy on the main page gives a first clue. "A daily reading club for language learners" available on 7 languages, on a .club domain...
Now, look at the number of books on each language. Does it sound reasonable that a no-name startup with no contact details (except an email to an aktivlang.com domain that redirects to storica.club) will invest in a serious effort to human-translate and adapt that many books to language learners, without anyone noticing?
I'm not going to argue about the writing style because we know it is an arms race. But look at the underlying business, that business would not exist without AI generated content.
I was an avid reader, then I had to stop due to eye problems and because I did not want "staring at a thing" to be my hobby when it was also my day job as a data scientist.
While I still spend a lot of my working life staring at a screen, taking acting and filmmaking as a hobby has enabled me to enjoy many other aspects. Even if the plot/character is lousy (e.g. "Heated rivalry") I enjoy looking at the director's choices and analyzing them. My wife jumped ship and every time we watch something we have a discussion about it, which is something I had never done with books.
It truly is the level of engagement, not the medium.
> Same goes for HN, yet it does not take kindly to certain expressions either.
> I suppose the trouble is that machines do not operate without human involvement
Sure, but HN has at least one human that has been taking care of it since inception and reads many (if not most) of the comments, whereas ChatGPT mostly absorbed a shiton of others' IP.
I'm sure the occassional swearing does not bother the human moderators that fine-tune the thing, certainly not more than the violent, explicit images they are forced to watch in order for you to have nicer, smarter answers.
He did the best he could with the information he had at the time. Yes, it is sad, and it may even feel more a "selfish" life in many ways in a "modern" society. (I would say "Western" but that would include the retrograde, homophobic dictatorship the US is currently).
Could you point out to some examples? Is there any "rational inquiry" that shows a worldview bias from the rationalists, in your opinion?
I agree that the broader smarty-pants community may have this issue, just curious to read your examples.
I think this nicely pointed out in "The Big Bang Theory", where Sheldon Cooper says something like "If I would be wrong, don't you think I would know about it?" That sounds like something Elmo M would say with a serious face.