It is. And regardless, apologetics concerns absolute truths of the highest order. Marketing any LLM as being an authority on absolute truths has always been a terrible idea, which is why we do not use them instead of doctors and babysitters. Using them as faith guides is no less reckless.
If you literally believe that getting an answer wrong can send someone to hell, then I think the stakes are a little more dire than bad nutritional advice.
Like imagine if this were a baby-care bot, dispensing advice on how to safely care for your baby. That would be pretty stupid, and would likely eventually give advice so incorrect a baby would die. For someone who believes, that is a less tragic outcome than being led astray by an apologetics bot. It takes an incredible level of conceit to build one anyway.
chat GPT and Gemini both provide advice on how to care for babies. I think in the end you have to have faith in people to also use their common sense, discretion and not blindly believe or act on everything a bot tells them.
I think the same is true for an AI giving religious advice - you have to exercise a bit of faith in the readership and, perhaps in this case , also faith in the ultimate guidance of the divine. Faith that they're not going to make serious mortal or religious decision by unquestioningly following a chatbot
If we take this thinking to its logical conclusion we should put all our efforts as a civilization to getting rid of all misinformation that may harm babies whether online or spoken. And every religious person should do nothing but have flame wars and censorship campaigns about any flase religious information that has any chance of affecting a person's salvation.
The author seems to be in a purity spiral and seems to be taking an overly hardline interpretation of the religion
But this isn't just claiming to produce some benign facts, it is trying to make claims on absolute truths with consequences as dire as "going to hell".
Even if you don't believe, the creators certainly intend for their bot to have eternal consequences. Like selling an LLM with the claim it can give advice better than most doctors and should be used as such, the intent behind the apologetics bot is just as reckless and conceited.
Foxglove founder here. Foxglove is framework agnostic - we have first class ROS support but you can just as easily bring in custom data via Websocket or MCAP files.
I liked PG's attempts to define the perjorative form of "wokeness". I was disappointed that the rest of the essay didn't serve the discourse much.
What I was really hoping for was focused analysis on how to make social media more useful to the earnest helpers instead of the "loud prigs". That would have made for an interesting discussion here.
The problem is that he thinks he solves the problem by bringing 'prig' into the conversation and in reality he just paints a broad swath of people with a broad brush. A lot of folks who are in the "earnest helpers" category are also categorized by the right as "woke". That's the problem with the word right now, it can go all over the place.
"Prig" is in the eye of the beholder. What about when the "prigs" were right? I'm sure the Quakers were seen as "prigs" by the southern slaveholders/traders. The Quakers were early to the abolition party and their opposition to slavery was based on religious zeal which made them seem like "prigs" to the people in the South who's whole society and economy was built on slavery. But we now consider the Quakers were right and the slaveholders wrong. MLK was viewed as a "prig" by many southern whites for interfering in their racism. But MLK was right.
Step one is to stop the handwringing over who’s “woke”. Paul is committing every sin he claims the “woke” people are doing by obsessing over what words other people are saying instead of trying to solve actual problems.
The Internet has finally allowed the wealthy and powerful to converse at the same level and in the same space as your big brother's friend who smokes a lot of weed and knows that the government is suppressing a car that runs on water
Yeah, it's very strange to write an "origins of" essay without citing examples (just Larry Summers?), referencing experts, or showing evidence. This article is just about his feelings. He's not an historian, or a social scientist, and frankly I don't think he's familiar enough with this topic to present an historical overview. It's an unconvincing essay.
I laughed at the beginning when he stated that student movements in the '60s didn't have any real power. Paul, please just take a sociology class or something.
There is so very little citation or substantiation in the entire essay. Even the footnotes are largely just more speculation. He presents it as some kind of historical record but it's literally just his thoughts.
It’s almost like that is the entirety of the rhetorical and argument station expectations when people comment on too much wokeness.
Vibes.
“I invented a meaning for this word that bears no resemblance to its actual meaning and then am critical of others because I think my invented definition is bad”
1. Build a strawman.
2. Beat the living hell out of the strawman.
3.”I’m sure this will trigger some people”.
4. Get a standing ovation from Elon Musk.
5. Lots of money from private capital.
He didn’t even have to build his own strawman. It is a shared strawman - which is more efficient. PG out there disrupting the bad faith argument industry.
No. And man, I feel like the quality of PG's essays have declined. Even if I agreed with a few points, it was so rambling, and just made so many leaps. The sheer length of it is a pretty good signal he didn't really work that hard on this.
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