Comment by RC_ITR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RC_ITR | Hacker News Reader

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Divorcing the conservative/liberal split from its current muddied use in American politics:

Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”.

OpenAI is being aggressive in moderating ChatGPT, and that’s against the core principle of conservatism (at the end of the day, LLMs are taking what people say and reflecting it back, but OpenAI is adding the extra step of only reflecting some of what people say)

Re-connecting this to the reality of American politics: ChatGPT is made by a diverse team of people nucleated around San Francisco. Some people believe that the ChatGPT team is pushing “Liberal” talking points instead of the “Conservative” talking points, so they are mad.

EDIT: Since this is turning flaewar-ey and Dang is already on me about that, I suggest anyone reading this comment also read the Wikipedia article on conservatism [0].

Long story short, it's situational based on the muddy definition of "traditional," so many specific examples you bring up will probably seem to violate the above tenant (e.g., 1940's Conservatives in the Soviet Union hated free enterprise, despite Communism being a relatively new and unproven system), but given broader context, the above definition is usually pretty consistent.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism

> Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”.

> OpenAI is being aggressive in moderating ChatGPT, and that’s against the core principle of conservatism (at the end of the day, LLMs are taking what people say and reflecting it back, but OpenAI is adding the extra step of only reflecting some of what people say)

ChatGPT isn't trying to "alter society" by being prudish, it's trying to avoid embarrassing the company (especially given all the "ethical AI" marketing spiel. And aggressively moderating attempts to generate pornography or insult people's religion or use rude words or advise is extremely consistent with a long history of conservatives of various stripes being opposed to the principle of people circulating such material. Think of the children!

> ChatGPT isn't trying to "alter society" by being prudish, it's trying to avoid embarrassing the company (especially given all the "ethical AI" marketing spiel.

Thank you, you get it. They're not making ChatGPT out of some pure love for AI. It's a product to be sold to billion and trillion dollar companies that don't want a tool on their site to get in to certain topics. That's it. It's not some grand conspiracy.

> Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”.

This isn't what conservatism is. It's about conserving the values and traditions of the past. Modern conservatives advocate for drastic changes to society of many forms. Banning abortions, eliminating the income tax, making sodomy illegal, etc. These things all have in common that they were the way society used to be. Making big changes to social norms after decades of precedent isn't a conservative approach.

Abortion was generally legal in the US until after the Civil War.

The meanings of "Liberal" and "Conservative" with respect to American politics are completely haywire. At the extreme ends we have a far left pushing illiberal restrictions on free speech, and a far right cult of personality inciting mob violence. Referring to those extremes a liberal or conservative is misleading. That's not what those words mean.

Trump isn't particularly right wing let alone far right. This is probably still the best takedown of that idea:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-w...

Trump is politically/ideologically center left. He has very little to say about wokeism, was fine with vaccine mandates, and said things like this:

"America must reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton who sees communities of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future."

Also he was a Democrat in the past.

The term far right doesn't make any sense if you think about it for a second. It's not just in American politics. People describe the NSDAP as "far right" even though it was largely indistinguishable from the USSR which everyone agrees was far left. Far right would logically be the extreme inverse of communist countries like China or the USSR: shrink the government at any cost, freedom of speech without limits, repealing laws en masse, refusing to take over the world and so on. So extreme libertarianism. In practice though, this isn't what people mean when they say far right.

Ah yes, the classic "Actshually the nazis called themselves socialist so they must be socialist"

Even though they were an extremely corporatist and oligarchical system. The nazis were so hilariously un-socialist, that one reason hitler pushed for invading the soviet union, an action that pretty much sealed their fate to lose, was to deal with those "bolshevik jews" who hitler was terrified were going to cause a socialist revolution in germany. Nowadays people scream about "Cultural marxism" instead because most people are smart enough to see "bolshevik jews" as the anti-semetic dog whistle it is.

Unless you think north korea is the morally superior country, they have "Democratic" in the name!

The only serious disagreement those two groups had about how to run a country was who got to be the dictator.

Yep lets take a reasomable commenter and call him a Nazi! What fun it is to strawman people on the internet

>Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”.

This is a nice fuzzy thought, but doesn't seem to be true in practice. It's not about conserving society, but the status quo. Society seemed to do pretty well with Roe v Wade.

Neither party's positions can be derived the values they allege to be for. That's what you get after 200yr of reactionary politics and choosing your policies based on the voting block you think it'll gain you.

Not if you were a baby.

Roe v Wade, pretty much by definition, did not affect babies. Roe v Wade also did not preclude a ban on abortion after a certain time period, which is broadly popular and desired by the american populace, including most people that the american right calls "radical".

Wait what? Really? Like are you saying roe v wade defined a time perioed after which states could have laws disallowing abortion? I was not aware of this

> Conservatism generally follows the principle of “be conservative in your attempts to alter society”.

> OpenAI is being aggressive in moderating ChatGPT, and that’s against the core principle of conservatism (at the end of the day, LLMs are taking what people say and reflecting it back, but OpenAI is adding the extra step of only reflecting some of what people say)*

I see it the opposite way. Building a stochastic parrot that will parrot back anything is a dangerous, unchecked situation. What we saw with MS Tay was a lack of conservatism, a willingness to do whatever, and what we see here is in reflection a far more conservative approach.

… posted a rant… thought better of it. Couldn’t delete it though.

Woke != liberal. Very, very far from it.

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