found LW as a child, found it 10 years later through a fortunate series of coincidences :)
say hi from LW: https://x.com/halina_eth
halinaeth
Karma: 10
Hi! New to the forums and excited to keep reading.
Bit of a meta-question: given proliferation of LLM-powered bots in social media like twitter etc, do the LW mods/team have any concerns about AI-generated content becoming an issue here in a more targeted way?For a more benign example, say one wanted to create multiple “personas” here to test how others react. They could create three accounts, and respond to posts always with all three accounts- one with a “disagreeable” persona, one neutral, and one “agreeable”.
A malicious example would be if someone hated an idea or person, X, on the forums. They could use GPT-4o to brainstorm any avenues of attack on X, then create any amount of accounts which will always flag posts about X to criticize and challenge. Thus they could bias readers through both creating a false “majority opinion”, as well as through sheer exposure & chance (someone skimming the comments might only see criticizing & skeptical ones).Thanks for entertaining my random hypotheticals!
Thank you for this detailed process outline! I’ve been wanting to “learn by writing” for quite a while now (inspired by PG essays actually), yet never took the time out thus far. Your outline is extremely helpful to cut down time wondering “is my process any good/how will I learn through writing”, and go straight to the learning (and writing)!
Regarding step 8 “get[ing] to the point where I can no longer easily tear apart my own hypothesis”, I’m curious what your level of “Openness” is in your Big 5 personality traits. As someone with nearly off the charts openness, I could see myself getting stuck and flip flopping a stance near infinitely, especially as I do more research and become persuaded by more nuanced on either side.
Then again, that in itself is a skill to learn! Excited to put this to use.
Thanks for linking these! Found my next reading list :)
Good point about how LLMs making “brain dumping” on a computer very different than before.
I can see how your proposal might be helpful for heads of nation states/billionaires/CEOs who worry about espionage, but for the average person writing in a journal & storing it in a safe place seems sufficient, no?
Even for myself, I’d probably write all my non-journaling notes (those I’d like to be able to search & organize & refer to later) in one of the usual solutions (notes app, maybe Google drive for more organization). Even if all my notes were leaked publicly online, I’m not sure I’d have taken the trade-offs in efficiency from going all analog and going with paper everything.
Lots to think about, and I definitely don’t know the first thing about computer security so open to learning there. Thanks for the comment & the timely point about LLMs!
Thank you! So much to explore :))
Found this site when I was a kid (hi HPMOR) & realized it wasn’t all a fever dream when I got onto X a decade later! Really excited to read through posts, learn new things, and hopefully build a thinking-deeply-through-writing habit myself.
Makes sense, thanks for the new vocab term!