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Comment by sourcecodeplz | Hacker News Reader

I don't need to read the article to know the bot is left leaning. There is just more left-leaning material online than other.

As one grows older, one learns to view things from different perspectives but it could be "dangerous" for young people to rely entirely on what they read online. This is where upbringing has its most impactful role: Family & friends. Online is not family, online is not friends.

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> left leaning

What US calls center left much of world calls center right.

Not sure about labeling the global bell curve of written material as "bias" since, almost by definition, the LLM is unbiased, being a compression of global view -- so accusations of bias against probabilistic answers from the corpus would actually telling us about the bias of the beholder.

> What US calls center left much of world calls center right.

Citation needed.

Had to downvote this, it's just too superficial to be the top comment on this article. What is "left-leaning content?" Why is there so much more of it than (presumably) right-leaning content? And "don't rely entirely on what you read online" is overly simplistic advice.

Moreover GPT is trained on material in multiple languages, so having ChatGPT have a neutral bias in the context of American politics would be very strange. Achieving that would probably put it pretty far right on a global scale.

Europe is not that left leaning. While it has common agreement on certain topics that in the US are still a big left-right debate on other Europe is way more radical than US. For example hating a certain minority (eg. gypsies) is pretty much mainstream in Europe and has little blowback. There's far right parties with quite a strong base in pretty much every European country.

> There's far right parties with quite a strong base in pretty much every European country

This is more a function of more proportional representation systems than anything else. Both the US and UK have first past the post, and in both of those countries both the more extreme left and right politicians are part of the major parties, whereas this happens less in more PR based systems.

> Achieving that would probably put it pretty far right on a global scale.

Would it? Compared to Europe, sure. But I always had the impression that most of Asia skewed rather further right?

I imagine that conservatism across Asia looks very different than conservatism in the US; i.e., questions of trust in government, whether COVID is serious, or whether people should own guns.

I think that just trying to project strict left-right dichotomy as contemporary American politics produced on other countries is already bad start. It is not something universal, it is being exported to some extend, but still. The aliances elsewhere and political splits dont copy America.

I do agree with that.

The American right is insofar an outlier as it is deeply distrustful of the state. Many conservative movements across the world tend to be more statist than their leftist compatriots. In general, right-left is a pretty insufficient category for classifying politics, something like milieu theory

How do you figure there is more left leaning material, is anyone keeping statistics. What exactly is left leaning?

Most people strongly believe they're correct, the universe disagrees and so their perception becomes that there must be some sort of bias, the alternative would be that they're wrong which they can't accept.

Being able to accept that you're often wrong, without just taking some nihilistic stance like "I don't know if anything is real", is not easy, and we ought to admire it but on the whole we do not.

> There is just more left-leaning material online than other

Maybe, but the leftward lurk of ChatGPT refusing to answer certain question it had no problem answering before has been documented by many.

Another take on this is that rightwing has an outsized influence on society, and so-called left leaning is actually how most people orient themselves.

That should show up pretty clearly at the ballot box and yet the US remains divided and most other countries go back and forth between left and right leaning parties every election or two.

The US Republican party hasn’t won the popular Presidential vote in the last 8 elections or so.

There is no such thing as a popular presidential vote though. Using a baseball analogy, scoring more runs in a series doesn't matter, winning more games does. So you build your strategy with the idea in mind that if you're going to lose California anyway, lose it big and use those resources elsewhere.

Also of note (and just as relevant), Republicans won the Popular vote for Congress by over 3 million.[1]

[1] https://www.cookpolitical.com/charts/house-charts/national-h...

The GGGP discusses how most people are oriented and how that influences the training data for ChatGPT which does make the popular vote relevant.

Republicans won the Popular vote for Congress by over 3 million.

So what does that tell us?

That less people show up to vote in midterm elections, those that do are usually motivated by opposition to the ruling power, and possibly that the less people allowed to vote legally is an advantage for Republicans.

Also historically the last mid terms should have given massive gains in both houses instead of the extremely slim majority in a single house.

Not really anything in a first past the post voting system where lots of people vote simply because they don't need to because their party will win the state already.

That the US is a divided country?

Sort of contradicts your original point though. But at this point we're entering Reddit-level discussion so there isn't much reason to go down that rabbit hole.

Over the last 40 years, a Republican has been president for 22 years, while a Democrat has been president for 18 years. Pretty even.

Right, but they haven’t won the popular vote. That strengthens the “outsized influence” point, right?

Right, because the right wing has an outsize influence on society even though most voters are left wing.

Being barely over 50% doesn't account for the amount of bias that ChatGPT shows.

The US electoral system is designed to favor rural, thus primarily conservative and Christian, votes over urban as a vestigial remnant of compromises to keep slave-owning states in the union, gerrymandering, etc.

The majority of Americans live in cities and have political views which would be considered "leftist" in US parlance - they support Roe V. Wade, gun control, health care reform, etc. That, in practice, the US appears "divided" at all is only due to the outsized influence of the right and rural voters.

It's not so much a bias of rural over urban, but lower population states versus larger states. You could be urban and just be smaller in size. This part of the "great compromise" was actually for smaller, non-slave states like Delaware. Virgina, the largest state in the nation at the time and a slave state, proposed the Virgina Plan, which proposed the creation of a bicameral national legislature, or a legislature consisting of two houses, in which the “rights of suffrage” in both houses would be proportional to the size of the state. Small states objected, because they'd had equal representation under the articles of confederation.

https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-...

The overall final compromise did include compromises to slave owning states, but this vestigial is not due to those compromises. In fact, they were against it.

It's the right-wing capitalists that promote left-wing narratives for the masses. It's called woke capitalism for a reason.

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