
Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial - paulsutter
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
======
pjc50
Now that I've actually read it rather than starting with the comments, as
we're all prone to do, I think it's an interesting little piece of fiction
that reminds me of two things.

One is the Monty Python weaponised joke sketch: the premise of the sketch is
that the joke is so funny that anyone who reads or hears it promptly dies from
laughter, so it is carefully divided into pieces and translated into German
for use as a weapon.

The other is the Dreyfuss affair, and its notorious ability to fragment French
society for years.

~~~
srl
It reminds me of a CGP Grey video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc).
In that video (okay I'm interpreting a bit...) society itself acts as Scissor,
"breeding" some ideas to become maximally controversial.

Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies
that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible,
because society's been trying to produce them all along!

~~~
drak0n1c
Like any invention, not everything that can be invented has been invented. The
current culture war has only been going for around 5 years. Things can change
and new divides erupt all the time.

~~~
pjc50
5 years? Lots of it can be traced directly all the way back to the Vietnam
war, surely? Certainly abortion has been a scissor issue since at least 1973.

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javajosh
The idea that words have enormous power over human minds is taken to
fantasical extremes in a (sf? f?) thriller "Lexicon", by Max Barry[1].

My own view is that "truth" means something different to some people. For
example, a charismatic narcissistic leader might mean "confident belief" when
he says "truth". This definition define his statements to be truth! I suppose
the last backstop for these kinds of structures are nature itself, and it's
tendency to allow problematic structures to crumble.

1 [https://www.alibris.com/Lexicon-Max-
Barry/book/24166116](https://www.alibris.com/Lexicon-Max-Barry/book/24166116)

~~~
H8crilA
I mean the entire society is organized around abstract concepts: corporation,
nation, state, money, God, duty/obligation, human rights. None of these things
are real (physics does not care about, say, debt), those are just programs
running on the human brain. Natural language is the dispersal protocol of
those programs.

------
atemerev
Well, this is “fiction”, but he described his method precisely: get the
publicly available Reddit comments archive, sort by controversial, set up the
GAN generating and scoring texts according to controversy (the comments that
cause the most schism and/or initiate discussions), train it, then try to
generate new controversial comments. Seems doable.

I presume that everyone with a spark of scientific mindset and even a slight
interest in the field now warming up their OpenGPT-2 instances and trying to
reproduce the effect.

~~~
gwern
Well...
[https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bers5o/usin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bers5o/using_gpt2_to_sort_by_controversial/)

~~~
jerf
That's about what I'd expect at the current level of GPT-2. It is very good in
some dimensions, but terrible in others, e.g., right there at the beginning:
"Blacks make up 1/8 of the world's population, but they account for only a
3/10 of global economic power." \- GPT is very bad at math [1], it gets the
structure of arguments involving math or numbers but doesn't understand the
numbers, so right off there's a massive unforced error in this controversial
statement in which it complains that 12.5% of the world's population has
"only" 30% of the power, undercutting the whole thing from the getgo and
making something that was a good start to a "controversial" statement
completely fall apart into farce due to a simple error. It does this sort of
thing pervasively. It's clear that GPT-2 is touching controversial _topics_
but it's failing to put together controversial _sentences_.

I suspect that the sort of thing that Scott discusses in this story isn't
_quite_ possible, at the full described power... but certainly if AI gets
better than GPT-2, it'll get better at this too.

[1]: Read some of
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/search/?q=math&res...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/search/?q=math&restrict_sr=1)

~~~
manifestsilence
Funny thing though - I could see that statement being particularly enraging
once a large enough and random enough group got behind debating it. These
statements don't have to make logical sense, they only have to trigger people
into instinctive camps.

"The math doesn't even make sense, and is making my point, that there's no
problem here"

"You're saying there's not a problem? Believe me, there's a problem..."

etc.

~~~
jerf
True enough, but I think one with accurate math is more likely to focus more
people on the more enraging substance rather than the mere fact of a math
error. It may be enraging to some people but I don't think it's anywhere near
_optimally_ enraging.

~~~
manifestsilence
Yeah, I think the more general problem is people can only get so enraged if
they realize it's a bot. So the sentences have to be good enough to pass a
perfunctory Turing test. The math is only one of several tells in these.

------
J-dawg
The part I don't understand is, how would the scissor statements be made real?

E.g. The Russian scissor statement machine spits out a statement about a
bakery refusing to make a cake for a gay couple.

What happens next? They somehow identify real people who fit the role and
nudge them towards ordering a cake?

Or would everyone involved be paid actors?

Or real people who are bribed / coerced?

I know we're in fictional territory, I'm just curious about how this would
work in the story's 'universe'. (And in real life, I guess, considering that
some of it seemed dangerously plausible).

~~~
Illniyar
In the cake example - find a bakery that won't make a cake for a gay wedding.
Probably by correlating gay hate posts on social media and baking.

Start directing traffic from social media of LGBTQ communities, perhaps even
wedding orientes, towards that bakery. For example false accounts on facebook
wedding groups who say that bakery is really good or something.

Wait until something happens.

~~~
golemotron
Another.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-
columbia/transgender-...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-
columbia/transgender-woman-human-rights-waxing-1.5227434)

------
awayyyythrow
One of Alexander's better stories. However, I'd say it reeks of what I'd call
_Alexanderness_ :

-The idea that arguments and debates are the most important thing in the world and everyone should do it as much as possible (possibly due to his being terminally online). In real life if you say something other people find abhorrent they'll first go "that's wrong wtf", then if you insist "sure alright go off" then "please stop talking to me". Most people are not, in fact, in a perpetual crusade to prove opppnents wrong. That's because the real world isn't Twitter.

-The idea that _both sides have a point_ and trying to rule out one side is anathema to a well-functioning society. In other words, _why can 't everyone just get along?_ Well guess what, sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong. Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't _argue_ for my existence, I _want_ it.

-Equivocating all controversial statements as equally controversial. For instance, design decisions about a codebase vs. religion issues vs. presumably something even deeper ('so hateful and disgusting'). Some fights are worth having, some are not.

~~~
DrScientist
> We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have
> rights.

Nobody has 'rights'. It's an artificial construct.

Nobody can do what they want, they are constrained by others - whether through
a system of law, or simply other people intervening.

Everything is a negotiation.

If somebody wanted to kill you - you could fight - or you could become useful
to the person with the power to kill you.

It's a negotiation where both sides weight the risks of different approaches.

Democratic systems of government and the law simply are an agreement by the
majority that it's a pragmatic way of doing stuff - negotiate once nationally
rather than constant negotiations with everyone we meet.

So maybe what's missing in a system like reddit is the recording of decisions
- ie a vote at the end of every thread.

~~~
klodolph
> Nobody has 'rights'. It's an artificial construct.

Whether “rights” are an artificial construct is not germane. A twelve-month
lease is an artificial construct, but I have one of those. So is a Twitter
account, gender, and my favorite pancake recipe. I have all of these things. I
also have rights.

~~~
derefr
In the context of a certain society, sure. But those are “rights within that
society”, just like your lease is “a lease within that society.” (The pancake
recipe is a pancake recipe anywhere; whether or not you can get the
ingredients is a separate issue.) Having rights enforced by treaty across most
of the world doesn’t mean you have rights if you e.g. crash-land your private
plane into a North Korean military base. Or if you get hijacked by pirates in
international waters.

In both cases, it’s not really some airy _universal human rights_ that’ll
protect you; instead, you have “being the subject of a powerful sovereign
nation that has made a promise to its citizens to retrieve them from such
peril, probably ultimately because of _that nation’s_ perception of your
_granted rights_ as a citizen of that country.” (And, if you’re stateless, you
don’t even have that—which is a big reason many nations don’t let you renounce
citizenship without already being a citizen of somewhere-else.)

And, more to the GP poster’s point, your rights don’t exist if you wander into
the wilderness, get chased by a bear, get backed into a corner, and want to
convince the bear not to eat you. The bear will not stop because “you have
rights”; those are, at their widest, a “human civil-society” thing. At that
moment, you need something else. Something _negotiated_ , probably. (Maybe you
can throw him a sandwich and leave while he’s distracted? That’s a
negotiation.)

------
misterdoubt
This is cute. Creepypasta for grownups.

~~~
esyir
A little less cute when it's so common.

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doubleunplussed
I remember 2011's scissor statement in the online Atheism community: "Guys,
don't do that".

------
chwilson
I really enjoyed this - are there any other places online that host “tech
thriller” fiction similar to this?

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MagnumPIG
The idea is interesting, but everyone is a caricature of their role (marketing
people have no morals, programmers are clueless about business). I guess there
may be some "intentional" hyperbole but overall it's a badly written but
interesting idea.

~~~
jerf
If, for the sake of argument, a traditional story involves plot, setting, and
characters, short stories are considered to be doing pretty well if they can
come out swinging on all three. When you add "ideas" to the mix, it is
inevitable that something else is going to suffer. Optimizing on that many
dimensions is just not a reasonable request.

It's part of why science fiction has so frequently had such flat characters...
there just isn't _room_ with the complicated plots, the uniquely-demanding
settings (you can't just say "Bob banged open the saloon doors" if the
equivalent of "Bob", "saloon", and "doors" have to be explained to the
reader), and the introduction of "ideas" into the mix. Insisting that they all
_also_ be character studies would be asking for the moon.

------
trevyn
(2018), but still very relevant!

~~~
throwaway_bad
I guess it did partially come true. The GPT-2 model by OpenAI (2019) trained
on reddit links did tear some communities apart. :)

[https://openai.com/blog/better-language-
models/](https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/)

------
Dylan16807
Ugh. A brilliant insight into how people don't actually work. I read the first
third hoping for an example, then the rest just hoping that _anything would
happen_. My opinion of slatestarcodex was significantly higher an hour ago
than it is now.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Well, it's memetic warfare fiction, but I don't feel it's _that_ far off the
mark. The other day I've been in a discussion where some of the people
disagreeing with me were - in my eyes - failing at reading comprehension,
seemingly unable to parse the simple English statements of the source material
that somehow became quoted by _both_ sides of the argument. I left that
discussion with worrying feeling that those others, most of them smart
techies, couldn't possibly be _that_ dumb, so there must be _something else_
going on. I find this story uncanny because within its universe, it hints at
what that "something else" is.

(Oh, and my opinion of SSC went up a bit.)

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Having been in many arguments that seem like that[0], I think the answer is
actually quite simple: sometimes it's just hard to communicate with other
human beings. Communication can only convey understanding with shared context,
and sometimes our contexts line up enough to make it seem like we're conveying
understanding but each of us is consistently misunderstanding the other.
Between the frustration and our tendency towards viewing attacks against our
arguments as attacks against our being, you sometimes wind up with the kind of
behavior discussed in this story.

The story itself is effective because it constructs a malevolent purpose to
explain everyday phenomena we don't normally think too much about. John Dies
at the End used Baader-Meinhof to similar effect.

[0]If I'm honest with myself about it, arguing is one of my favorite pastimes.

~~~
aidenn0
I think a lot of divides are because people have different assumed axioms, and
in many cases cannot even declare what those axioms are.

Example:

I know pro-life people who cannot understand how someone could simultaneously
hold the belief that aborting fetuses with congenital defects is okay, but
rounding up the severely handicapped and killing them is not; there is nothing
magical about birth that changes a life from not being valuable to being
valuable.

Simultaneously I know pro-choice people who cannot understand how someone
could simultaneously vouch for reducing or eliminating social welfare services
to single mothers but also vouch for making abortions illegal; clearly the
pro-life people don't care about babies _after_ they are born!

Since the other side holds inconsistent views, they are wrongheaded hypocrites
and all of their arguments can be dismissed without further thought. No
compromise is possible because to compromise with hypocrites is to enable
their hypocrisy.

------
enriquto
This is a chilling, very well written story!

------
buboard
Story would be much more readable if he had actually stated the offending
Scissor and cut it short by half.

~~~
SilasX
That would be missing the point. He’d have to commit to a specific statement
as being a scissor. But if someone doesn’t already get the point, they’d fall
into the same trap as the people in the story “what? They must misunderstand
the claim. Obviously it’s true/false.”

The story’s point requires identifying the psychological state state that
scissor statements put you into, where you feel reality is actually bending
against you (eg “he turned her against me”).

If you think there is an explicit scissor statement Alexander could have
committed to, then I think you might not appreciate the core thesis.

~~~
essayist
I'm with you. We see in this discussion that it's difficult even to raise some
potential scissors as examples without a lot of commenters falling into them.

SSC's point is not "X is a near-universal scissor", it's that there's a
scissor or ten for almost everyone, and that some scissors are likely to
ensnare a lot of people.

If you've never found yourself arguing vehemently and extensively, to the
death, about something and sometime later wondered what that was about, you
may be a counterexample, someone who is scissor-immune.

I sure am not.

~~~
ufmace
The point, though, was that a scissor statement is irrelevant to an
individual. To any one person, each statement is either obviously, trivially
true, or obviously, trivially false. It only becomes an argument when you
start discussing it with somebody who sees it the opposite way as you do.

~~~
essayist
The scissor effect can't apply to an individual. And I suppose if most
everyone falls on one side of the question, even with lots of passion, there's
no scissor.

But I'm arguing (SSC may not be) that effective scissor statements create both
passion and tunnel vision in people, even one at a time. And so when there are
people with passion and tunnel vision on both sides, voilà, scissor. (It's a
little bit like "drunken mob". You can't have a mob with just one person, but
each person, arguably, gets drunk on their own.)

