[braingenious]

Elon Musk has publicly spoken at length about his ongoing struggle with the “woke” crowd

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-wading-into-p...

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2021/12/22/elo...

https://nypost.com/2022/04/29/elon-musk-says-woke-progressiv...

And has publicly voiced his support for a language model that supports his political views

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/fighting-woke-ai-mus...

Now that this comment thread has been flagged because I said LMAO, has the quality of discussion about the future of LLMs been improved by suppressing publicly-available posts by one of the most influential figures in AI?

How is strictly policing tone to the extent of suppressing actual information useful here?

Like seriously, “criticizing a billionaire that’s very public about using technology to further his ideological goals is the same thing as using technology to further your ideological goals is genuinely funny. Like ROFLMAO funny. “Everyone is equivalent to Elon Musk, even in the context of discussing the future of LLMs.” Is a cartoonish rule that serves no purpose whatsoever aside from quelling legitimate criticism.

[dang]

I'm not arguing with you about Elon Musk or any of the underlying topics. I'm saying that your account has been breaking the site guidelines by posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait.

Those things create and fuel flamewars, which is destructive of everything we're trying for HN to be. We want a place on the internet that doesn't inexorably burn itself to a crisp. Since that's the direction of internet entropy, we expend a lot of energy trying to go the other way. We need users like you to help with that, and when accounts don't help with that and instead continue to post destructively, we have to ban them, regardless of their ideological orientation or political positions.

I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, I'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[braingenious]

I am legitimately confused here.

If my comment hadn’t started with “LMAO” and had the current spelling of “Elon”, would it still have had the replies locked?

My criticism of six months being too short to achieve AI safety was in fact substantive. As was my quote on the LLM work that he is presently funding. That leaves only tone being the issue.

My comment is locked. Other posters can not have any dialogue with me in relation to the salient points I made. The links to further reading are buried below your admonishment, so they’re less likely to trigger any discussion.

I’m not really motivated to post again because it’s not clear if my post was not “substantive”, what qualifies as “flame bait” (for example, is directly quoting his words about “wokeness” flame bait even when they are directly about the topic at hand?), or if the issue here is “My account” as you put it.

So which is it? Flame bait, empty posting, or you just don’t like the way I post in general? You’ve provided all three as reasons for not allowing further discussion of my post.

[dang]

I agree that the bit about six months was substantive, or at least the kernel of a substantive comment. The problem was all the other stuff: the LMAO and Elmo, yes, but also the snarky italicized pseudoquote. That's the majority of what you posted!

A better comment would have (1) made your point about six months thoughtfully; (2) omitted the snark, name-calling, and flamebait; and (3) perhaps added some evidence for the connection you were making.

[braingenious]

Elon Musk has been very public about his battle against “woke minds virus” (direct quote) His posts have led to front page discussions here and has made headlines in global news outlets. It’s been discussed ad nauseam to the point that it’s entirely reasonable to expect that people in this thread, with interest in the future of LLMs would not struggle to see how silly (yes, silly!) of a proposition it is that we all pause for “alignment” when the definitions of “alignment” are so wildly different.

In fact the only way I would expect a poster in a thread about the future of LLMs to not have heard about any of this would be because discussion on this topic has been literally suppressed and hidden. I know that it’s the official line that “LMAO stifles curiosity”, but applying it readily to the detriment of the sharing of knowledge deprives curiosity of oxygen.

Your literal line is “Nobody should be allowed to discuss this particularly obvious issue of alignment because I said a word that you didn’t like.” No warning, no chance to rephrase.

My understanding of this interaction is that you will readily assume that anything I post is in bad faith and will stamp out any post of mine that comes through your mod queue. This is your prerogative as a mod — you don’t like my posts.

That’s the most charitable read. The other possible interpretation is that it’s policy here to limit any discussion that might upset Elon Musk fans and there is an explicit bias in their favor.

I should add that my post didn’t seem to bother people much. The only responses to my post that weren’t complaining about decorum (which I’m kind of confused by. Is that on-topic?) were in agreement with my point and an obvious call for discussion. Aside from that, all those upvotes were from regular users too. I’m not sure who is being protected here, if anyone.

[dang]

I can't fathom how you get any of that out of what I wrote. I'm making a tedious, straightforward point about following the site rules, which you broke. I don't care about your views on the underlying topics; I don't even know what they are—I don't read HN comments that way.

[braingenious]

Buddy I don’t know what to tell you other than I posted LMAO and it only took moments for discussion of an important topic was hidden and made impossible to interact with.

You talk about the spirit of the rules but you quite literally stamped out what could’ve been a helpful discussion because you read LMAO.

You at some point spoke about curiosity and discussion. How did this moderation enforcement help either of those things?

Yes, this is tedious. It is very tedious to have discussion of important topics literally banned based on an unevenly-applied arbitrary rule of decorum.

To be very clear: I believe you made the wrong call and you’re now doubling and tripling down simply because I irritate you. There isn’t really another interpretation of this exchange unless we’re both to believe that you’re incapable of countenancing words like LMAO and you rushed in to hide a discussion about alignment in order to defend The Website from Me, The Rules Breaker. I just don’t think that’s how you usually moderate here.

Edit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35358536

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35338835

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35362555

lmao