Cipheron on 16/5/2025 at 10:47

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Grok developed a sudden obsession with the "white genocide in South Africa" conspiracy theory, right after news about Trump admitting South African white supremacists as refugees

(https://www.404media.co/why-did-grok-start-talking-about-white-genocide/)



xAI then put out a perplexing statement about how not-good it was:

(https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/15/musks-xai-grok-white-genocide-posts-violated-core-values.html)



A classic "mistakes were made" style statement that avoids mentioning who made the changes, and why.

As for LLM AI's this illustrates the difficulty in "aligning" the AI to what you want it to believe, outside of actual training data. If Musk shoe-horned that into its system prompt, then it's going to get reminded of it in every single prompt, even if the user didn't ask about it, hence why it became obsessed with the topic: an LLM often can't actually tell what's the user prompt vs the system prompt, they're all tokens.

Either that, or Musk is an idiot and ordered someone to program the statement into the system prompt and nobody was willing to tell him that was a bad idea. Basically a cleverer bit of code would have screened the user prompt, checked whether they're asking about the topic, and only then have injected key statements into the system prompt. But doing it that way would take more effort and maybe cost more money, so Musk ordered the "cheap, fast, and stupid" version instead.

Nicker on 16/5/2025 at 20:42

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To clarify, the "channeler" I referred to wasn't making deterministic predictions about events random, he was offering likely or possible life outcomes from personal decisions and tendencies.

I don't buy hard determinism, regardless of whether this is is a novel and singular reality or it is one of a branching tree of multiverses. While there are constraints around possibilities for outcomes of any choice and while there are probabilities that favour certain possibilities over others, at least for humans, we do have some limited choices. We are not acting out a hard-deterministic script.

The god-simulations are an interesting thought experiment but I am not sure what would be the difference between a perfect simulation and a manifest one. That goes both for the inhabitants and the creator.

Nicker on 20/5/2025 at 06:12

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Magic is supernatural, defying natural laws. Flipping ones and zeros in a CPU, using your mind, sounds supernatural to me. Offering an opinion on what the likely outcome of your life choices might be, is not supernatural.

Allowing some deviation within a limited set of possibilities isn't magical, it's just wiggle room. That's not determining a result, it's choosing which you prefer, which target you aim for, or what outcome is more likely. Whether you get it or not isn't a given.

We may have slightly divergent definitions of hard determinism. My understanding is that hard determinism is also predeterminism, that there is no wiggle room at all, and no free will at all. Obviously one's free will cannot extend to supernatural choices but the idea that every choice which might be made was made before our local expansion event started, sounds closer to magic, IMO.

demagogue on 20/5/2025 at 12:46

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I think a lot of this debate, like a lot of things, comes down to how we talk about emergent phenomenon like apples, and tables and chairs, and stock markets, countries, and human behavior.

While it's not wrong to say all of these things are determined by lower physical behavior, already here people have to be careful, and the reason why validates describing events at the level of their manifestation, like saying human action is caused by humans.

So why you should be careful is because, e.g., you can't even say events are determined by chemical behavior or even the behavior of atoms or subatomic particles, because these things are, or should be, also emergent phenomenon from still lower elements. I mean, whenever people figure out a theory of everything, things like electrons are probably not going to look fundamental anymore, but they'll be made out of simpler elements (fundamental strings or even underneath that is some hydrodynamics of space time foam or string bits or whatever you want to call it). But there's no consensus position on what it might be though. String theory itself is more unpopular than ever, although I think it's the most highly developed of the candidates, whatever that tells you.

So if you're wrong to say behavior is caused by me, then it's the same wrong to say it's caused by atoms, and you gotta go still lower. I actually don't think it's turtles all the way down though. In string theory, little as I know, I know there's a lowest cut off in standard versions where lower action isn't physically meaningful. (It's weird. One way to see how weird it is, is to imagine string A winding around B. If you make the radius of B smaller from A's perspective, at some point B now winds around A and they just swap roles, and the system looks like it's growing bigger again from B's perspective.) I think other proposed theories have their own lowest bounds as well. But that's the level we're talking about, if there's any, and there's no consensus what's really down there.

But we still talk as if atoms are real things. That's like the starting point for people trying to deny free will. But if atoms are real things, emergent constructions as they are, then humans are also real things, emergent constructions as they are. So, flipping the equation, if it's okay to say physical events are caused by atoms, it's the same right to say that human action is caused by humans. So "free will" has to be right if physicalism is right, unless you insist that everything can only be described by a theory of everything which nobody currently knows or agrees on. That's my current go-to approach on this topic.

Edit: If you want a search term for this kind of argument, I think it's gonna be "real patterns" as Dennett would talk about them. He thought it was fair to say free will was real because human action was caused by a complex system (a human, or the action-determining part of a human's mind anyway) that was a real system because it maintained real patterns across time. Something like that.

Briareos H on 21/5/2025 at 16:52

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I've turned around on free will to the point where my null assumption is absolute determinism i.e. I see no reason for any possibility of fundamental free will to exist. I acknowledge that this is an act of belief just the same as yours, but to me it is easier to believe that there are no undetermined branching paths, because the reality of our experience is always of one path.



You don't need one theory of everything, you just need an axiom that whatever theories are describing one level down are deterministic (and they even may result in properties that are not all measurable).

IMHO, the argument that free will exists because we can define it as an emergent pattern of a system that is so complex that a complete description is unattainable is self-evident and only serves to introduce philosophical arguments into a topic that doesn't need it (although to be fair, such a topic isn't the one that Nicker brought up since his argument started philosophical).