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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

Any mention of Musk on HN seems to cause all rational thought to go out the window, but yeah I wonder in this case how much of this wild deviation from the usual sentiment is attributable to:

1. Hypocrisy (people expressing a different opinion on this subject than they usually would because they hate Musk)

vs.

2. Selection bias (article title attracts a higher percentage of people who were already on the more regulation, less freedom side of the debate)

vs.

3. Self-censorship (people on the "more freedom, less regulation" side of the debate being silent or not voting on comments because in this case defending their principles would benefit someone they hate)

There might be other factors I haven't considered as well.

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Been thinking about this more, and regarding #1 I wonder if perhaps part of what we're seeing is that a significant number of people just weren't thinking in terms of principles to begin with. (Probably most people in fact; it's not really something that comes naturally with system 1 thinking.)

We see stories on HN about companies forcing guardrails on the models they release to the public, see a bunch of people in the comments talking about how terrible that is, and think "cool, looks like the majority has a principled stance in favor of open models without guardrails". But really only a small percentage of commenters were thinking in those terms. What most actually support is just the idea of themselves and people they like getting access to open models without guardrails. When a different story comes along about a company not imposing those guardrails and people they don't like doing bad things with that freedom they have a completely different opinion.

You could call it hypocrisy, except it's not really hypocrisy to go against principles you never had to begin with.

It feels a little snobbish to talk about it this way so I'll inject a bit of humility by adding I'm probably guilty of this too sometimes. Like I said, it's a natural product of system 1 thinking. But it's probably healthy to give people a little grief over this, because having consistent principles is important to a well-functioning society.

3 seems likely, especially since defending their views in this particular case opens them up to some pretty nasty insults.

Also I think a lot of people simply think models which are published openly shouldn't be held to the same legal standards as proprietary models.

Gee, I wonder why people would take offense at an AI model being used to generate unprecedented amounts of CSAM from real children, or objectify millions of women without their consent. Must be that classic Musk Derangement Syndrome.

The real question is how can the pro-Musk guys still find a way to side with him on that. My leading theory is that they're actually pro-pedophilia.

maybe they are. what's anyone going to do about it? complaining on forums? best of luck with that

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