Thank you for sharing your thoughts on it. I’m happy to hear it resonates. :)

This reminds me of a thought I had the other day, which went something like: some people (seems to be a US thing, can’t speak for elsewhere) are so stuck with the mindset of approaching politics as, “I am on equal footing with you in terms of knowledge and understanding” that it’s virtually impossible to get through on the information you give them alone. They have to first confront their socialized arrogance about knowledge and start to unlearn the idea that politics is some kind of easily universalized, mostly opinion-based entity.

Like if I look at my own progression of views, a significant difference in me being a “leftist” vs. being a “ML” (or thereabouts) was consciously trying to unlearn elitism and consciously trying to listen more (to marginalized people especially, but more importantly, to marginalized people who have theory/practice knowledge to impart, even if I didn’t know it in those terms right away) and talk less (resist the urge to comment “because I can” and try to be more conscious of why I’m reacting the way I am if someone’s take gets under my skin). This shift in mindset and attitude coupled with some partly guided exposure to theory was pivotal for me. I had a significant amount of “I can think smart so I can work this out just as well as you can” arrogance socializing to get through and a significant amount of viewing politics as overly simplistic in nature, and I see that same kind of attitude play out in other people, talking like their takes on politics have weight just because they are allowed to have one. When it’s like no, halt the universalizing, you need a framework to work from with a conscious motive behind it and that is found in sincerely caring about the plight of working class people, the marginalized, the colonized, and applying what liberators have observed about it who came before and who still exist now in developing socialist projects. It is humbling to get a glimpse of the depth of combined theory and practice that exists and has existed, and I would say it’s a good sign for people in the situation described if it is humbling because they are so often socialized to put their own intellect on a personal and cultural pedestal.

Slight correction and further info on this:

Although it’s theoretically possible someone could train a language model on Reddit alone, I’m not aware of any companies or researchers who have. The closest equivalent may be Stable LM, a language model that was panned for producing incoherent output and some mocked it for using Reddit as something like 50-60% of its dataset, tho it was also made clear that their training process was a mess in general.

How a language model talks and what it can talk about is an issue with some awareness already, though the actions taken so far, at least in the context of the US, are about what you would expect. OpenAI, one of the only companies with enough money to train its own models from scratch and one of the most influential, bringing language models into public view with ChatGPT, took a pretty clearly “decorum liberal” stance on it, tuning their model’s output over time to make it as difficult as possible for it to say anything that might look bad in a news article, with the end result being a model that sounds like it’s wearing formal clothing at a dinner party and is about to lecture you. And also unsurprisingly, part of this process was capitalism striking again, with OpenAI traumatizing underpaid Kenyan workers through a 3rd party company to help filter out unwanted output from the language model: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxn3kw/openai-used-kenyan-workers-making-dollar2-an-hour-to-filter-traumatic-content-from-chatgpt

Though I’m not familiar enough on the details with other companies, most other language models produced from scratch have followed in OpenAI’s footsteps, in terms of choosing “liberal decorum” style tuning efforts and calling it “safety and ethics.”

I also know limited about alignment (efforts to understand what exactly a language model is learning, why it’s learning it, and what that positions it as in relation to human goals and intentions). But from what I’ve seen in limited relation to it, on the most basic level of “trying to make sure output does not steer toward downright creepy things” has to do with careful curation of the dataset and lots of testing at checkpoints along the way. A dataset like this could include Reddit, but it would likely be a limited part of it, and as far as I can tell, what matters more than where you get the data is how the different elements in the dataset balance out; so you include stuff that is maybe repulsive and you include stuff that is idyllic and anywhere in-between, and you try to balance it in such a way that it’s not going to trend toward repulsive stuff, but it’s still capable of understanding the repulsive stuff, so it can learn from it (kind of like a human).

None of this tackles a deeper question of cultural bias in a dataset, which is its own can of worms, but I’m not sure how much can be done about that while the method of training for a specific language means including a ton of data that is rife with that language’s cultural biases. It may be a bit cyclical in this way, in practice, but to what extent is difficult to say because of how extensive a dataset may be and factoring in how the people who create it choose to balance things out.

Edit: mixed up “unpaid” and “underpaid” initially; a notable difference, tho still bad either way

If there is anyone who could become a billionaire and then, somehow, without any working class force to make it happen, through sheer incapability to do anything sensible, become an eX-billionaire, it would be Elon Musk.

There are some paranoid levels of thinking in some of that stuff. Like when a person thinks someone is a “x foreign country spy” because they disagree. It’s possible for people to break out of that mode of thinking, but when they are in that mode, it’s next to impossible to get through because everything you say that is in disagreement is “because you are trying to deceive them.”

Liberals claiming someone is doing whataboutism seems like a component of this thinking, with a belief that the one doing the “whataboutism” is attempting to deceive. But although it’s (probably? I haven’t analyzed it in enough depth to say with certainty) possible for someone to deceive in that way, it’s also possible to compare two things for a variety of rhetorical purposes that have nothing to do with dishonesty. Such as pointing out the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world if someone tries to say x foreign country is “authoritarian” in contrast to the US being “free”; that’s not whataboutism, it’s a factual point that undermines the narrative of the US having some kind of greater moral standing from which it can properly judge other countries.

If anything, I would say imperialists, liberals, tend to be more engaged in actual whataboutism, even if unconsciously. Like if you try to point out something fundamentally wrong with the US, claiming that alternatives are way worse. Which in that regard also seems to be in bed with doomerism (or more formally maybe, capitalist realism).

I don’t like to speculate as a matter of principle, but given what I’ve seen in my own evolution and what I can see traces of in some others, I suspect fear underlies a lot of it, as well as pride; fear of the implications of what it means and pride in not wanting to lose the idealized self image of western supremacy. If the US, for example, is genuinely terrible to the core on a fundamental state foundation level, that means a lot of pretty big change is necessary and change can be scary. And further, if a place like China or Vietnam is actually just a genuinely better system on a fundamental level and has better QOL for its people, that means the west is not only not superior, it’s not even on an equal level of political competency. Instead, it’s actually lower and in the capitalist caste socialization of “everything is a rung on a ladder,” that means the west is part of the “gross/bad class.”

People don’t have to see it this way though. They can see it as it’s not something to be afraid of, but a wakeup call that what’s being done is not working for most people and never has; they can consider the notion of major upheaval as an opportunity for fantastic expansion of the possibilities they’ve previously had presented to them, within which can carry drastic healing, improved quality of life, both personal and collective empowerment. They can also see the pride thing not as a designation of lesser nation, but as a designation of better or worse quality of life and empowerment and so on. It’s important that people unlearn the notions of it all being about caste, and who is and isn’t “superior.” Socialist projects doing better for their people are superior in the sense of quality of life, people power, etc., not in the sense of some colonizer-centric mindset of civil and savage.