Edited headline stating accusation as if it were fact, linking to a tabloid instead of actual journalism, and copying over ambiguous language (“shells”) instead of using more accurate terms (“seashells” <- a rather important distinction!!) to boot.

Think what you will of what Comey posted, this post & article are incredibly sensationalized.

Don’t feed the troll, folks.

And that’s making them larger and “think."

Isn’t that the two big strings to the bow of LLM development these days? If those don’t work, how isn’t it the case that hallucinations “are here to stay”?

Sure, it might theoretically happen that some new trick is devised that fixes the issue, and I’m sure that will happen eventually, but there’s no promise of it being anytime even remotely soon.

Ah, drat! Usually I’m the one reminding people of Hanlon. Hoist by my own petard!

Yes, and? The money Gates makes from capital he owns comes from somewhere, and I firmly believe that it comes disproportionately from the poor, as that is how America tends to work. So for all he may or may not donate, that money is circulating right back to him. It’s like if a slumlord “donated” $200 to you right before rent was due. You might find it preferential to not getting a de facto $200 discount on rent that month, but he’s still a slumlord and nothing about the “donation” makes him ethical.

As for being better than Musk, I really don’t care. “Better than a Nazi” is not a defense.

“You’re all cowards! How dare you not immediately jump up and recklessly risk the lives of yourself and everyone around you while I sit back and watch?”

Trump isn’t really leading this autocratic coup. He’s a tool of the people who backed and made up the Heritage Foundation and the like.

I never liked this kind of thinking. I heard the same crap from my parents when Biden was in office, and it sounds just as conspiratorial now as it did then.

Occam’s Razor: Trump and his cronies are just stupid fascist douchebags and this is a useful way to get power that is straight out of a typical fascist playbook. The idea that there’s some secret group “handling” him is a movie plot, not reality.

Yeah, I’ve seen this trick before. And I have a feeling he’ll be “earning” many billions in the same time period; how much I don’t know, but I’m cynical enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was “more than he donates.”

You’re just as dishonest as the last one.

Jesus Christ. I said what I said in the worry that you were suggesting fallacies were clear verdicts, and responded in order to defuse that possibility for both yourself (if it was indeed there) and, crucially, for anyone else reading. I wasn’t trying to annihilate your character.

But I don’t think anything I can do here anymore is worth doing, now. If this is what I get for trying to encourage sympathetic behavior, I’m just not going to participate at all.

This is incredibly hurtful. Goodbye.

In that case, I contend that is is not easy to spot a cuckoo, and believing that is leaves one dangerously prone to overconfidence. So while I appreciate that you don’t see these fallacies as de facto proof of disingenuous behavior, I still feel that you’re running the risk of false positives.

Fallacies are useful for evaluating the validity of arguments and positions, not for evaluating people themselves. Solitary comments can never let you evaluate a whole person, because no whole person fits in a text box.

I don’t believe doomer trolls are right-wing plants (though I acknowledge it’s a potential avenue of attack in the future). I don’t think they usually have ulterior accelerationist motives (though I have spoken with a few). I think for the most part, they’re just people who’ve given up, or otherwise mistaken cynicism for maturity, and seeing anyone else expressing optimism or trying to organize real-world resistance just pisses them off.

This is the attitude I want to see. Believing people are psy-ops, or bots, or being evil on purpose — none of that is necessary and almost all of it is conspiratorial thinking. It’s the kind of thing the right thrives on, and it’s gross.

But this? Saying there are people who have real issues and real grief, and that it’s driving them to bad but genuinely held beliefs? That’s sympathetic, it’s understanding, and above all else it does not divide us. This is what we need more of.

I understand why you’re frustrated, but you’ve got to realize that the presence of resources that can break you out of bad thinking doesn’t mean it’s easy to break out of bad thinking, nor does it absolve those who duped you into the bad thinking in the first place. Cults work for a reason.

Just as an example, consider how hard it is to:

• Find time to learn when you’re struggling to work enough to afford rent
• Find a way to learn that works for you if you’re disabled
• Consider your thinking to be in need of challenge when everyone you listen to tells you otherwise, and you trust them
• Listen to opposing viewpoints when you have thorough hatred for the people telling you them

This is just a smattering of ways a path out of broken thinking can be more fraught than it looks. There are plenty more, so even in cases where these specific ones don’t apply, that doesn’t mean the person in question is intentionally ignorant or malicious.

If you’re angry, be angry. I don’t judge that whatsoever. I only ask that you be angry at the people deliberately trying to make everything worse, rather than the those who they’re tricking. Get mad at the influencers, not the audience.

Very good post. I appreciate the time, effort and insight that went into this as well as and especially the fact that it is advocating for understanding others and seeing why they do what they do without accusations. Thank you for the write-up!

I had more I wanted to say on this topic when I first read it, but at the time I also had more energy. Had I not had other obligations, I would’ve written out my more detailed thoughts then. As it is, however, I’ll have to settle for the (relative) shortform, as I find this thread exhausting from the outset and the sheer quantity of incredibly angry back-and-forth here has only made it worse.

To suffice the ideas of mine that I still remember, then:

• I have a feeling that while you may not consider me specifically to be a “cuckoo,” that this post was still partially aimed at people like myself, since I’ve spent a fair chunk of time arguing to the immense faults of the Democrat Party, some of which was in discussion with you.
• If the above is true, I feel dehumanized and find this topic incredibly depressing.
• Regardless of the above, I find jumping to assumptions of bad faith on the part of those with whom you disagree on this topic understandable, but needlessly conspiratorial.

But to end my comment, I’d like to point out an area on which you and I can find common ground: Your point of “Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism” suggests you feel that the people arguing against voting / the Democrat Party are doing a poor job of offering alternative solutions. On this, I agree. Solutions for that scenario are hard to come by and often complicated, and where people do have things to suggest a portion of them are very flawed; voting Green, not voting, and the occasional implicit suggestion for violence, etc. All of those have huge problems that I know I don’t need to explain to you.

For that, all I can say is that I agree that leftists can do better and should. I’ve seen the good suggestions before. Things like mutual aid, education, organizing, joining events — all of these are very useful things that are significantly more important than one vote in a broken electoral system. Unfortunately, as you’ve noticed, frustrated and angry people tend to be bad at mentioning these things.

I only ask that you consider that these people are frustrated, angry, and restless, rather than actively fake.

the only real “leftist infighting” I’ve ever really come across.

gestures wildly at the thread we’re in

I don’t think it’s just tankies doing it!

I think it’s a very common belief amongst forums like these to look to logical fallacies to root out dishonest behavior, in the hopes that it’ll provide a nice and easy way to deduce when someone’s a grifter. That you can tell if someone’s a liar – or for that matter, real – by applying them sufficiently.

The problem is, humans are fallible. They fuck up. Innocently. Constantly. It’s normal to make fallacious arguments, and doing so should not cause you to be automatically marked off as a robot, troll or spy. Some examples for your given fallacies:

• Oversimplification can also occur if someone is tired and does not want to go into rigorous academic detail for their argument. Alternatively, they may simply not know the detail to begin with.
• Genetic fallacy can occur due to simple human anger; if someone feels that their interlocutor has made bad-faith arguments frequently before, they’re inclined to ignore what that individual has to say outright, likely without even reading it. (This one has happened in this thread, several times)
• Strawmen happen all the time and extremely easily, because people will inevitably end up making assumptions about the position of others based on previous discussions they’ve had. If you spend enough time arguing a point and getting response X, you’re going to start assuming that the person you’re talking to about that is implying X, even if they haven’t said it and never intended to.
• Ignoring refutation happens plenty simply when people get defensive. Admitting you’re wrong is hard, and it’s much preferable to instead change the topic or find some other way of pretending you were never disproven of anything. This is inherently a logical leap, and that’s why it leads to often dumber positions.
• With regard to ad nauseam: If someone finds a particular point very convincing and easy to understand for themselves, they may find it confusing as to why you don’t agree on it. This can lead to them repeatedly trying to explain it more thoroughly and in different words under the assumption that the way they said it was why you didn’t get it. I’ve done this a lot in my past.

With those examples out of the way, I just want to emphasize the fact that you should never pretend the presence of logical fallacies is a guarantee of bad faith, much less use it to dehumanize others. If we let ourselves do that, we’ll all tear each other apart under the mistaken assumption that we’re rooting out an evil that has no promise of even being present at all. To err is human.

I agree. My problem now is that people like Tlaib were who I looked to for how things could change, and yet here they are enabling worse instead of fighting for better. I can’t square that circle, and it means I’m losing one of the last bastions of hope I had for a better world.

I agree with your second paragraph, and find your third to be understandable (though I would contend that propaganda has been a problem for a long time now and wasn’t made meaningfully worse by tech, just different). Where I lose you completely though is this comment’s first statement.

Neither of your other points stated here back up a lack of empathy. In fact, they counter it, as you’ve provided two far better things to get mad at. I hope you haven’t abandoned empathy because it didn’t change minds, because empathy isn’t supposed to be contingent on getting people to agree with you.

I’m aware. My point was that this wasn’t a majority even besides that. Not sure why you seem to be phrasing this as a counterpoint, though, given that it reinforces my comment?