it looks like Sam Altman and OpenAI are desperate to inflate their public image as opposition to the LLM fraud ramps up. my new browser tabs have been full of puff pieces about Altman and ChatGPT—isn't great how merely launching a web browser gets you hit in the face with ads now? oh sorry I meant "legitimate technology journalism". 🙄

I have tried to talk to these people and their fans on Twitter and it's hopeless. no argument gets anywhere and I can only assume that any sentences of mine that cast doubt upon the world-shattering AGI supergenius which OpenAI et alii are about to give the world (any second now! for real this time!) read as "hater" talk to them and they tune me right out. my talk doesn't have ZERO effect, though, because sometimes afterwards these people start getting real defensive, apt to spout things like "all expertise is fake anyway" or whatnot.

And occasionally a weird note of doublethinkful humility creeps into the techbros' talk. It's like, "Yeah I know I'm really an idiot who's faking it but isn't everyone?" It's like in their heart of hearts they have decided that humanity really has shot its bolt and is now retrogressing, so the only possible hope to solving multiple insoluble problems is the Machine God. They at least feel like they've got an edge on the folks (like Mono and me) who are totally out of the loop and critiquing this stuff from an outsider's perspective. Mono's erudition at least seems to faze them a bit, but surely they must feel like he's a goofy old relic to still be trusting in books and higher education. Isn't all that stuff going away?

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. What's the least expensive way to get into this LLM crap? Can one host one that's wholly self contained?

~Chara

I have actually signed up to post on the "LessWrong" forum, where gasbag E. S. Yudkowsky used to puff out great clouds of flatulent Reason™ (dunno if he still does), but I'm not actually expecting to be able to post ~Chara

trying to watch an old 1982 MacNeil-Lehrer Report episode on Guatemala and the rise of Rios Montt (https://youtu.be/ka2sGBwSWXE) and every time they show footage of some evangelical Christian service or preacher I just wanna shrivel up and die. somehow it's 1000 times worse hearing that garbage in SPANISH you know ~Chara

Not Faith Domergue or Faith from "Young Goodman Brown" but faith.

You know...faith! The rock of ages, the thing that makes Ted Cruz and Matt Walsh better than you and me. FAITH.

Nothing can stop an honest man with faith. (I understand that faith can be of some use to women as well but I've just been handed a bulletin that says only men have the proper masculine toughness and determination to uphold faith. They must be faithful while frail and easily tempted womanhood, flighty and emotional and surging with—okay the bulletin gets a bit damp and smeared here so I'll stop reading it.)

Faith is what separates the men from the boys (and from the women too I guess) and the brave from the cowardly. There are no atheists in foxholes, as we all know! No matter what the challenge is, a man with faith (sometimes it works for others but MEN really know what faith is all about) can withstand it. Only faith sustains men (or others maybe) in their times of trial. The weak-willed liberals and leftists cling to feeble, effeminate doctrines of social justice and the essential goodness of humanity, but the faithful know that there's only two possibilities in this world: either you have faith and you're armored against sin and temptation, or you don't have faith and you're doomed to wallow in misery. If you have faith you're always sure of yourself, always rooted in the bedrock of belief, and there'll always be someone there to lift you up when you're beset.

And without faith, how could you possibly hope to be rational? C. S. Lewis proved it somewhere—without faith you can't believe in reason at all, because then how could you trust in your own logical propositions? Why without faith, you might not know whether anything in your brain was real at all. Faith must be the only way to be rational then. Anyone who says they're rational without faith is lying to themselves, and must secretly believe in their own secular religion, like "gender ideology" or Marxism, which I understand is much like Gnosticism, or something.

I have written all that, daring myself to write as much as possible about how right-wing people tend to talk about faith.

You may notice that I no point did I answer the implicit question: "faith in WHAT exactly?"

I leave the implications as an exercise to the reader.

~Chara of Pnictogen