[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

[dang]

I promise you I'm not moderating even a hair differently from how I always do (seriously). I've been at this a long time and it's extremely repetitive.

The difference is just that it sucks when it gets directed at you—I know that and I'm sorry. If I knew how to express this better, I would.