• 23 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • This was a really interesting video which I had a lot of thoughts about.

    I think that discussing narcissistic personality traits that appear commonly among many in our culture is valuable, just as I believe discussions concerning safe spaces, triggers, and what it means to be woke are valuable. The thing that all these have in common is that conservatives took these terms over and made them meaningless to suit themselves. This video features dozens of instances of American con artists and cult leaders leveraging a valuable discussion to their own benefit.

    The experts in the video believed that they and people like them were inherently superior, or deserved to be considered among the elite group. They expressed no empathy or compassion toward the people they dehumanized. Since they make their money from the people they lie to through lying to them, they are skilled exploiters. I would call all these narcissistic tendencies even if none of them had diagnosed NPD.

    The reality is that many Americans, especially those in business, don’t care how they get what they want as long as they get it, and have no qualms about doing whatever they can get away with. I think this is a consequence of our culture and economic system rather than individual moral failings.

    I don’t accept that no one should be called out for their greedy and selfish behavior. I don’t accept the most greedy and selfish in our society are once again trying to blame their own vices on their victims. I don’t think it’s monstrous to behave the way that countless nobles, gangsters, and capitalists have throughout history have because it’s clearly very human behavior in the circumstances that allowed these people to thrive at the cost of others. It’s the circumstances that allow and/or encourage this behavior which are a problem.














  • I have two main thoughts on this

    1. LLMs are not at this time reliable sources of factual information. The user may be getting something that was skimmed from factual information, but the output can often be incorrect since the machine can’t “understand” the information it’s outputting.

    2. This could potentially be an excellent way to do real research for people who were not provided research skills by their education. Conspiracy theorists often start off as curious but undisciplined before they fall into the identity aspects of the theories. If a machine using human-like language is able to report factual information quickly, reliably, and without judgement to those who wouldn’t be able to find that info on their own, this could actually be a very useful tool.