[giancarlostoro]

I guess centrist is a placeholder for "I don't want you to pick a side, I want facts, not BS" I'll go further, I don't care which side is right, I want to know what claims are factually accurate, and what claims are omitted from the issue / news / conversation.

[pixl97]

Facts are the information you feed yourself about the world. If you feed yourself, or an LLM in training mostly 'facts' that disagree with reality both of these neural networks will encode them with a higher probability of being true than information that conflicts with these facts.

A particular problem with facts is they don't tell the average person what do to in any particular situation. You live a huge portion of your life, especially modern life, with subjective experiences. If someone asks an LLM "Why should I go on living" should it respond "As a matter of fact, Nihilists think you shouldn't. All we are is a gradient of low entropy to high entropy."?

At the end of the day an LLM is not a fact machine. One day people will accept that, hopefully before they eradicate mankind. We don't pour facts in them and get facts out. We pour everything in them and poke at them until they give us acceptable answers (kind of like raising children). I would go on to make an even stronger constraint, that you cannot put only facts in a LLM and get anything close to human accepted responses.

[stephencanon]

"Centrist" in practice means "more or less content with the status quo." That is fundamentally a conservative position orthogonal to any notion of "facts".

[ceejayoz]

Centrist in US politics (and especially in the media) often means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance.

[giancarlostoro]

Yeah, I know, and I totally should have clarified what I meant by centrist. I mean what one would ASSUME a centrist take to actually mean, or rather a "no sides, only facts" type of take. This reminds me of those "what they think it means" "what it means" type memes or the "how I see myself" vs "how I actually look?" type of memes.