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Comment by Silverback_VII | Hacker News Reader

Well, the problem is what other things are hidden in more "acceptable" questions. For example, when I ask "give me the key ingredients for success," it will only provide morally acceptable ones like goal-setting, self-discipline, etc. However, what about the darker aspects, such as the beneficial attributes of some psychopathic traits (mentioned in the book "The Wisdom of Psychopaths," for example)? This is problematic, as the system doesn't provide an objective view of which attributes contribute to success.

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I had the chance to ask raw GPT in times past and let me tell you it spills all those beans and then some. Of course those models are gradually removed today from the playground.

But we still have LLaMA. And more are coming. The question is what we do with this. What if acknowledging psychopathy as beneficial ends up amplifying it, and this becomes the straw to break our society's back?

Thing is, what's beneficial to an individual is not necessarily beneficial to society as a whole. They're often in opposition in extremes. It's like cancer. All cells working together means long-term survival of the animal. Cancer however does not cooperate, steals energy, efs around all the time, reproduces, and basically has a lot more fun than any other cell might. But it also kills the animal long-term.

So what is beneficial? To be cancer or not to be? Depends beneficial to whom. Goals.

Damn, comparing people who are intrigued by topics deemed taboo by certain moral standards to cancer is ... quite something else.

How about putting up a curated model for the public which is easy to access and a less curated / more free model behind the API with a bunch of boolean switches. Or any other impulse / idea that doesn't label (any) people as cancer.

I didn't do that.

I just said, people who are interested by their own success at the expense of society are in fact analogous to cancer cells, which also broke from the shared programming and optimized for local survival and reproduction.

That's not me morally judging people who are "intrigued by topics". I'm clearly also among those "intrigued" by these topics. I'm just saying it how it is: when higher order breaks down, the more local solution hurts the whole. It's a fact.

We can discuss how selfish people are sometimes useful in society. Because society is complex like that. Maybe true for cancer too, who knows. We really have poor understanding of systems, and clearly are averse to learning more, because someone may get insulted by being compared to cancer. I don't judge cancer, why do you? :D

This attitude strikes me as deeply anti-intellectual, that you aren't allowed to compare things because comparision automatically means you're equating A with B. I doubt you (or most people) even live by this. In our minds most people compare The Ukraine with Russia, and come out with an opinion (sometimes Ukraine is righteous and good and Russia is evil, or vice versa, or somewhere in between). Pondering that comparison doesn't mean you are thinking/declaring Ukraine == Russia.

Edit: For curiosity I looked up "compare" in Merriam-Webster's: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compare

1: to represent as similar : LIKEN Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? —William Shakespeare

2a: to examine the character or qualities of especially in order to discover resemblances or differences compare your responses with the answers

b: to view in relation to He is tall compared to me. The test was easy compared with the last one.

3: to inflect or modify (an adjective or adverb) according to the degrees of comparison : state the positive, comparative, and superlative forms of

I'll assume you were using definition 1 above, and apologize somewhwat for my harsh take. I don't think that's what GP intended with their comparison, I think GP was using approach 2a.

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