These don’t seem to be scissor statements to me, since most of what could make them provocative is the particular wordings used[1] and not very much the position itself.
Some of the examples are at least about topics that are currently very controversial in normal society, but I still feel this fails to meet the tier of the psychological effect in my memory of the original “Sort By Controversial” fiction:
If you just read a Scissor statement off a list, it’s harmless. It just seems like a trivially true or trivially false thing.[2] It doesn’t activate until you start discussing it with somebody.
You asked:
Did you find yourself drawn to any of the controversial statements?
I didn’t, though I only skimmed through the list. If others did, and didn’t know this was possible or anticipate it, then the conclusion (“we should epistemically lower our trust in published media from here onwards”) has some truth for them.
If I was really trying to create virality or controversy. I could spend an hour or two on a single topic, encoding the unique polarity as I see it
But would current LLMs be of much help to you in this, such that you do it better than other humans do it?
Disagreement about the nature of qualia comes to mind as meeting the first half of the description—seeming trivially true or trivially false to different people—but fails to meet the second half of evoking extreme opposition upon disagreement.
Following this post I spent an hour on one single statement. Trying to hone and adapt it. Felt metaphorically like trying to sharpen a knife. It didn’t get much sharper and I could still see ways that I could manually make it sharper (since it was a 5 sentence paragraph).
I think it’s still possible, but I would need more work and novel sharpening stones. (contextually—we use blunt stones to sharpen a knife) I believe it’s possible but I’ll keep playing and publish if I think I’ve found a more scissory scissor.
The whole concept depends on your opinions on psychological risk and also if such weapons are possible.
These don’t seem to be scissor statements to me, since most of what could make them provocative is the particular wordings used[1] and not very much the position itself.
Some of the examples are at least about topics that are currently very controversial in normal society, but I still feel this fails to meet the tier of the psychological effect in my memory of the original “Sort By Controversial” fiction:
You asked:
I didn’t, though I only skimmed through the list. If others did, and didn’t know this was possible or anticipate it, then the conclusion (“we should epistemically lower our trust in published media from here onwards”) has some truth for them.
But would current LLMs be of much help to you in this, such that you do it better than other humans do it?
E.g., ‘recklessly endangering’, ‘intellectually lazy’.
Disagreement about the nature of qualia comes to mind as meeting the first half of the description—seeming trivially true or trivially false to different people—but fails to meet the second half of evoking extreme opposition upon disagreement.
Following this post I spent an hour on one single statement. Trying to hone and adapt it. Felt metaphorically like trying to sharpen a knife. It didn’t get much sharper and I could still see ways that I could manually make it sharper (since it was a 5 sentence paragraph).
I think it’s still possible, but I would need more work and novel sharpening stones. (contextually—we use blunt stones to sharpen a knife) I believe it’s possible but I’ll keep playing and publish if I think I’ve found a more scissory scissor.
The whole concept depends on your opinions on psychological risk and also if such weapons are possible.