This thing seems to be more about enforcing a political PoV than about avoiding logical fallacies.
All my attempts to comment on the UBI article (and not supporting UBI) said my comment was a dogwhistle, and/or had an overly negative tone. This topic, of all things, is absolutely worthy to challenge and debate.
Using this would have the effect of creating an echo chamber, where people who stay never benefit from having their ideas challenged.
Hah, the idea is to have an example on the site that is not offensive -- we're not going to write something offensive down -- but where you can understand what it would be or could be. It lets you infer / understand the point without us actually writing something awful. (Maybe we can do it better, though.)
Bears seemed a pretty inoffensive target, plus our backend uses Python with beartype and that library is all about bear jokes.
Thankyou — I’d love to hear what you wrote, if you wouldn’t mind sharing?
We’ve tried to aim it not to enforce any specific view — that’s a design goal — but focus on how it will feel to the other person.
Also things like logical fallacies or other non-emotional flaws in comments (there’s a toxicity metric for example, or dogwhistles).
An echo chamber is the exact opposite of what we want. There are too many already. What we hope for is guided communication so different views _can_ be expressed.
It flagged me saying UBI by giving money to the rich was a form of negative transfers as "negativity" and said it was polarizing. I don't think it's ready for prime time.
Ignoring what is hopefully sarcasm on the empirical part, it's a double standard because it assumes that saying Obama sucks must be a dogwhistle and tied to undertones of racism.
"Dogwhistle
The phrase "Obama sucks" can be interpreted as more than just a simple critique of a political figure; it has been used to express racist sentiments by implying that a Black president is less capable or worthy of respect. This reinforces harmful stereotypes and can contribute to a broader culture of disrespect and division."
Yes I agree, but the problem I'm pointing out is that in a phrase as simple as "X person sucks" your system flagged one as implicitly racist because the person being criticized was black.
Nothing in "Obama sucks" implied any kind of racism. If it's so baked in that with a simple phrase like that it reaches for dogwhistles, how can anyone trust the objectivity of this?
I totally agree -- just saying "Obama sucks" shouldn't have racism become part of the equation. Excellent point that we'll stew on and try to make better.
In other opinion polls they back up that he doesn't suck. Either way who cares? That's not what the app is supposed to be about if it's teaching/correcting you how to argue/debate better.
You completely ignored the whole point of what I said, which is that even in a simple statement like "This person sucks" it added its own implicit connotations, namely that disliking someone who happens to be black is implicit racism. Imagine trying to learn how to really argue with that kind of teacher.
I'm really expanding on your point - that two humans can't even agree here. The AI probably has even less chance of resolving the multi-factorial scenario we're in.
I mean yeah but it's not up to a comment-tone-fixer-upper to decide that, the ideal is some kind of neutrality for the sake of decorum, and one of the major issues that's causing political divide and (worse) movements towards extremism is that the two sides can't have a reasonable debate.
A tool like this COULD work, but I think the issue with this one is that it's built on top of an existing LLM with heaps of internet debate and their underlying ideals and what is and isn't acceptable baked in.
What a tool like this needs is heaps of honestly / fairly judged comments and feedback, and an extensive test suite that ensures neutrality by, for example, taking the same comment and like in this case changing names around - if it treats both sides the same then it passes.
The difference is probably philosophical. A (non-phev) hybrid is primarily an ICE car in every way. Building hybrids is building ICE cars with a little extra. Building EVs is different.
Honda and Toyota invested a lot in hybrid tech, they probably want to milk that investment more and the hydrogen distraction kept them from also investing in BEV tech. China was basically starting a car industry from scratch so didn’t have those sunk costs to worry about.
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