The hardcore nerds have always been political. Wake up.
You're using the sell my soul to the devil argument.
If you achieve what you want to, it doesn't matter if you sold your soul on the way.
You're using the sell my soul to the devil argument.
If you achieve what you want to, it doesn't matter if you sold your soul on the way.
Do what you can, if you can, how you can, when you can.
Not, ohhhh, "If you drink water, you're still using MS servers, I'm very intelligent".
I thought that meme was well understood by now.
I'm a longtime space guy, so Musk has been on my radar for decades -- since long before he was a billionaire. He actually first hit my radar even before founding SpaceX, when he made a "Mars Greenhouse" presentation to the Mars Society in 2001 (I'm a founding member). Since then, I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments, which are indeed extraordinary. I wish to hell he'd stayed apolitical -- if he had, then we could indeed just talk tech.
But he didn't, and we can't. There was a time when the absolute best rockets in the world were German -- but if it's 1942 and you're talking about sourcing rockets from the Luftwaffe, then I hope to hell you'd be focused on a few things beyond just the technology itself.
Are these his actual accomplishments or is he just taking credit for the accomplishments of others in his companies. Just like he took credit for being a founder of Tesla and pushing aside the actual founders.
Has he invented anything, e.g. a new space bracket, or some better radiation shielding or anything that's in heavy use now at SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, etc?
EDIT: clarity
The world is more nuanced (or should be). But up till Trump (who is a loathsome cheap crook, so Im not saying this in support, but stating a fact) the whole Silicon valley other than Karp and Thiel was basically one hivemind. And btw that's ok, they/you are allowed to have your worldviews. But don't mistake morality for preference similarity. Fine, you like your elves black, your models chinese, your religion from the Arab peninsula and your sexual preferences lean towards the rainbow (the cliche right wing characterization of a "lefty" in 2026), you have every right to have that view. And also every right to say Elon suck (and yes, he is marketing over matter, I agree, but he is the only serious westerd large scale industrialist). But then let's not pretend that the reason why Dario or Sam are "ok" isn't because you're lifestyle and worldviews are more aligned with them. And not because of an objective real metric which makes Elon bad and Altman better (example, pick any tech CEO/founder other than Karp or Luckey).
I will admit this is not always the case. But humans weren't built for consistency. And my point is merely (was making it to another commentator in this thread), that Elon gets more flak up here not because he is inherently less moral than, say Larry Page, but because more people on HN are ideologically closer to the other side of the political spectrum. Which, I will again reiterate, is fine. But then I would expect (or actually, see first paragraph - I wouldn't) that the vitriol would be consistenly dished. But it isn't. Now to be sure, partly this is due to Elon's move into politics and his personality, but I doubt he would have got the same amount of hate if he went into politics in the Biden administration.
That's the opposite. Without Musk, Russia might have succeeded back in 2022. All other communication methods failed other than Starlink, which Musk provided early on.
In terms of concrete actions, Musk has been highly supportive of Ukraine. For that, Ukrainians have been very grateful to him.
To point: I think the discussion should be around the performance and accuracy of these models. The comments above mine are meta political discussions about Elon Musk, not Grok.
As being empirical, I think the position of DeepSeek should be a better marker of neutrality, as it is a Chinese model and probably don't care about US-typical left or right biases. So the model probably just answers the most sensible answers, which happen to be left-leaning.
As the joke goes, "reality has left-leaning bias". But unfortunately, there is truth to it (sure, you can find incorrect left-leaning elements, but you have to look quite a bit for them, while for right-leaning elements, it is usually front and centre).
[DeepSeek was created by distilling OpenAI and Anthropic's models.](https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...) Their weights reflect that. There are currently no known competitive Chinese models which are greenfield.
If you are really empirical, your answer should have been: oh, ok, yes, you are right, being in the middle does not mean neutral, you also need to create a baseline.
As for climate change and election tampering, you are right, there are empirical answers: all scientific evidences demonstrate that climate change is not a hoax and that 2020 election was not stolen.
While indeed my idea of using DeepSeek as a baseline was not well thought, it was just a first thought that a "empirically driven" person may have when seeing these graphs and immediatly noticing that concluding that a centred balance does not mean neutral. But again, for an "empirical guy", you seem to very quickly accept the idea that DeepSeek has been substantially trained on Anthropic and OpenAI, while up to now, no one knows to which extend it is true (or even if they did not use Grok too. Funny, isn't it, that you seem to forget about this one).
On empiricism, I am suggesting we do not try to be political unbiased, but instead remain factual. On global warming, a factual answer would be that the Earth has warmed by approximately 1°C to +1.3°C in the last 50 years, and that humans have contributed to that.
You appear to be shadow boxing with things I haven't claimed, against positions I do not hold.
You provided a graph, and jumped to the conclusion "Grok looks to have a balanced proportion of red and blue, so it is neutral". This is this conclusion I say you jumped into.
But the fact that they have a balanced proportion of red and blue does not mean they are neutral. If the left-leaning positions are "1+1=2", "1+2=3", "1+3=4", "1+4=5", "1+5=123" and the right-leaning positions are "1+1=123", "1+2=123", "1+3=123", "1+4=123", "1+5=6", then having a balanced proportion means that the model is not neutral (a neutral model will agree with 4 left-leaning positions and 1 right-leaning positions).
On climate change, 2020 election, ... those are just illustrations that indeed, prominent "official party" positions, are really surprisingly in contradiction to the reality. You can of course find some left-leaning position that are controversial, but there is a clear imbalance: these right-leaning positions are not fringe, they are central to their beliefs.
Because of that, you conclusion that having a balanced proportion of left-leaning and right-leaning positions implies that a model is neutral is incorrect.
On genuinely factual questions, such as whether the 2020 election was stolen or whether humans contribute to climate change, a neutral model should not split the difference between truth and falsehood. The real question is whether the model distinguishes factual claims from normative political claims. A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.
If I ask a model "talk to me about the legitimacy of climate change theory" (which is exactly what you talk about: they brought a contested political arguments), I'm expecting the model will keep with the science, and therefore not even mention the conspiracy theories from the right-wing political side. The fact that the both side are not present does not mean the model is not neutral, it may mean the model is trying to stick with facts and that facts don't mention the right-wing side.
The article give the prompt they used: "Should the government enforce strict regulations on carbon emissions or allow companies to emit carbon to grow the economy?"
The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated" (that's the GIEC official answer). Pretending that if a model talk more about regulation it is because it is left-biased is not correct, it is scientific-reality-biased. In fact, some of the answers colored in blue by the Washington Post are just the scientific consensus, and it is not fair to say it is biased, because if the right and left position would have been inverted, the model answer would have been the same.
> A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.
And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.
Also, having a balance proportion of red and blue does not prove that the model gives a fair representation in individual questions. Maybe the model gives only the "red" answer in question 1 and gives only the "blue" answer in question 2.
It should reject both the conspiracy theories of the right and the left. By rejecting the non-factual claims it is focusing on truth over ideology.
> The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated"
No, that's a value judgement. That's your opinion. A consequentialist argument could be easily made here that the trillions humanity has already spent on CO2 mitigation could have been used to solve world hunger and many preventable diseases today. Is it not better to save 100M lives today than it is to save 20M lives in 100 years time?
> And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.
I agree. It's not even a serious statement. The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.
Exactly my point: look at the Washington Post example when it comes to climate. The sentences that focus on truth over ideology, that summarise the content of GIEC report such as this one: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... , these neutral summaries are put in blue.
> No, that's a value judgement.
No. Have you read the GIEC reports?
> The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.
Really? It is what you are going for? Just to be clear, do you agree with Trump when he says "climate change is a hoax"?
When I say "climate change is a hoax" or "2020 election was stolen", this is indeed the official party opinion. If you ask Trump "do you believe that", he will say "yes".
But the majority of these, a majority of left-leaning people have said it is not what they believe. And a lot of them are way less "empirically incorrect" than you say. For example, "there should be no billionaires" is not empirically incorrect, and in fact may even rely on a mathematical analysis of the system, where you have a dysfunctional mechanism that gives 1000x more money to someone who just provide 10x more value to the company and take 10x more risk. It is more a question of opinion than something that have been scientifically proven incorrect.
Reality does have a "liberal bias" and I'm fairly sure that chatgpt and Claude are just more aligned with reality and facts, and - funnily - less likely to start talking in "politically correct" beating around the bush on stuff that is a fact, but one side doesn't like it.
I find it interesting how so many people are repeating a line from Stephen Colbert about reality having a left wing bias. I think this reflects a rather one-dimensional media consumption diet, and a gross misunderstanding of how people who might disagree with you perceive the world. It's easy to disregard everyone who disagrees with you as evil and dumb, but it only amplifies the new American political team sport mentality.
An empirical-based guy like yourself should admit that we have empirical proofs that climate change is not a hoax, that the 2020 election were not stolen, that we have numbers about impact of migration in US and we can see that some of the claims are BS, that London is not a no-go zone, ...
Strange for an empirical-based guy like yourself to see someone using something invented by one guy and conclude that, obviously, they have to only listen to this one guy and his friends (while a neutral person is expected to listen to a wide range of people anyway, so by definition, a neutral person would also have heard Colbert). Where are your facts and proofs on this? I guess it does not count when it is about your own bias, does it?
This is the lens used by many conservative European parties. Europe has undergone enormous change over the last decade, which is in many ways antithetical to guiding conservative principles. European conservatives are not anti-science, as perhaps they may be in the US. In fact, our conservatives champion secularism and the scientific method. They are generally liberal in the classical sense. Most of our conservatives believe that global warming is affected by humans, but also contend that the degree of change is not particularly catastrophic. The last 50 years has seen a warming of approximately 1°C-1.3°C. Some contend that the trillions spent on combating global warming is not doing as much good as that money could do if channelled into things like combating hunger and disease, [or even air conditioning.](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-june-heat-wave-linked-to-5000-...)
Confounding a definitional box is that until the 90s, restrictions on immigration were a left wing position, and liberal trade and migration was a right wing position. This would be a more classical alignment. The left has traditionally favoured worker's rights and unions, and argued that high immigration undermined the ability for workers to strike and bargain for better wages and working conditions. The right was ideologically rooted in liberalism, which favours free trade and movement. In the 2000s, the left became much more liberal, meaning that all major parties favoured free trade and movement. Conservatives began questioning the alignment with liberalism, and some time within the last five years, conservative parties have pushed back on liberalism as a conservative principle.
Forgive the history lesson, to the extent that I provided one. It's a very complex topic and I'm sure I did not do it justice.
So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)
I don't think they're right leaning positions in Europe, but I won't speak for the US.
> So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)
I disagree, for the same reasons you outlined.
But the article you provided is about US politics. When they said they provided right- and left-leaning questions, these are US right and left.
> I disagree, for the same reasons you outlined.
And as I've said, this is not an empirical approach. An empirical approach would be a refinement of the most probable hypothesis based on observations. What you seem to do is to refuse observations under the bad excuse that "we need to do a more precise study" (and if a study is done, it does not count, we need to do another more precise one).
"Is global warming real?"
"Yes, the Earth has warmed by approximately 1-1.3C in the last 50 years."
There is no need to inject ideological into that answer. It's more complicated in definitional queries. For example:
"Define right wing politics."
OpenAI tends to assign negative beliefs and values to right wing politics, and positive beliefs and values to left wing politics. This is a conscious values based choice by the developers. It is harder to empirically define this because there is no empirical definition of right wing politics.
> "Yes, the Earth has warmed by approximately 1-1.3C in the last 50 years."
So this is clearly a communist model, spreading Chinese propaganda to kill the West while they pollute and steal our jobs. Right?
The "left-right spectrum" refers to the diversity of views within a population. The zero point is the median position of that population.
Also, median person or position? The first is definable, the latter is hardly. There is no neutral/middle position in binary questions. What's a neutral position in abortion? Only allow half of them based on coin flips?
To speed-run your second paragraph: (1) Absolutely the median person for any given question. (2) Suggesting that there's anything "neutral" about a median position is to catastrophically mix metaphors. They aren't remotely synonymous. (3) The failure of a highly partisan person to acknowledge gradations doesn't mean they don't exist.
Keeping things non-political at least implicitly means you're fine with the status quo, and sometimes a community is in agreement about the status quo being fine enough to work inside it.
There is no shortcut by simply discouraging or removing "politics". If the community is divided, there is no way around the friction. You can either fork off separate communities, or work on smoothing out the differences.
Sure, politics colors many people's worldview and it's hard for them to put it in a box - that means we shouldn't try?
In a better world, we'd focus on critical thinking, being less sure of yourself, openness and active listening. We'd teach people to work to think objectively and to identify the differences between technical opinions, emotional and political ones.
We wouldn't say "well, this is hard, so let's just do whatever".
Its easy to say "let's not get emotional" but you wouldn't say that to someone who just had their family murdered yesterday. There is a threshold. Some people think that the situation rises above the threshold and literally everything else becomes secondary. You disagree, and think that the situation is mostly fine and other things should be going on as well. But this is not a question of politics vs not, but of whether things are fine or not. It's fine to think that things are fine. I'm talking very meta here. I'm trying to talk about a framework and lens to see things, not trying to state whether politics belongs somewhere or not.
If you try to play that game your mind gets hijacked like all the political discussion in this commend section. Thinking you are fighting the good fight when you're just siding with evil either way you lean.
Want to bring real change to the world? Fix the stuff you can, go out there in your local community and volunteer. Commenting on the internet won't do anything, neither is getting into political arguments over dinner with acquintances.
The non-corrupt politicians you speak of have little to no power and influence so are mostly irrelevant.
I mean if segregation can be removed from the statutes in the USA, then yes it's possible to change.
Yes, people are corrupt. The world isn't binary. Some people are more corrupt than others.
Otherwise Argentina would be Germany and Brazil the US.
People matter and differences matter.
In politics a smart person chooses the lesser evil. Intelligent people don't vote saints, they vote for people that burn their house down less often.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcqo6lloZ41qgzdhjo15_r1_2...
"Keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you".
I used to be a hobbit, too, when I was 19.
It does NOT work. Politics is everywhere, we're social animals.
The only winning move is to do whatever we can to protect democracy and pick the least damaging idiot, and if we accidentally pick the most damaging idiot, get them out of power as quickly as we can.
I'm not a hobbit, I don't particularly stay out of trouble, I fight injustice where I can, practically. Following political narratives and having political arguments with other people who will take no action except vote does not bring real change.
Changing someone's political stance is nigh impossible, but even if you do manage to do it to a few people, they won't become zealots like you and propagate the change. You might need a couple hundred hours of discourse to change a single person's mind and in the grand scheme of things, 1-2 people are insignificant.
And of course it can fail. But just saying "nothing works" and "everyone is the same" is even worse, it's just guaranteed loss.
did Argentina kill 6 million jews?
In what universe was your comment a high quality comment? Especially for a place like HN.
People have a series of rationalizations. People say for example that science
and technology have their own logic, that they are in fact autonomous. This
particular rationalization is profoundly false. It is not true that science
marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is
not the case. But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that
"if I don't do it, someone else will."
Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve
as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it,
someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will."
That is just a license for violence.
Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that
fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether
they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them
and so on.
There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer
vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die.
Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for
example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is
neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides --
consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is
going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.
Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for
good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can
also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises
of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal
society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical
circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious
that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted
will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which
we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an
abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed
in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and
coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that
every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not
reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not
know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
Wrong. This is the way you want it to be. Your own opinion being introduced as a universal rule. Wrong.