Comment by yojo
14 days ago
In comedy, they call this “punching down” vs “punching up.”
If you poke fun at a lower status/power group, you’re hitting someone from a position of power. It’s more akin to bullying, and feels “meaner”, for lack of a better word.
Ripping on the hegemony is different. They should be able to take it, and can certainly fight back.
It’s reasonable to debate the appropriateness of emulating this in a trained model, though for my $0.02, picking on the little guy is a dick move, whether you’re a human or an LLM.
not everything an LLM is prompted for is comedy
additionally, infantilizing entire groups of people is an ongoing criticism of the left by many groups of minorities, women, and the right. which is what you did by assuming it is “punching down”.
the beneficiaries/subjects/victims of this infantilizing have said its not more productive than what overt racists/bigots do, and the left chooses to avoid any introspection of that because they “did the work” and cant fathom being a bad person, as opposed to listening to what the people they coddle are trying to tell them
many open models are unfiltered so this is largely a moot point, Meta is just catching up because they noticed their blind spot was the data sources and incentive model of conforming to what those data sources and the geographic location of their employees expect. Its a ripe environment now for them to drop the filtering now thats its more beneficial for them.
The leftist coddling crusades are just a different form of dominance over minorities. It absolutely is bigotry and sense of superiority driving it. That said, it would take one incredible therapist to get them to realize it.
The most mind numbing thing from that side are when leftists act confused that a minority or woman didn’t vote their way.
I’ve never seen greater confusion in my life from otherwise well adjusted people.
“Self interest” is the go to term. “They’re [an amorphous group all in a single socioeconomic bracket] voting against their self interest”.
the form of dominance is very apparent but it seems like that crowd is completely blind to it, they're saying “here are the prepackaged things your kind can vote for, leave fiscal foreign and monetary policy to the white man. it is impossible for you to be in a position where those matters are relevant to you and may have you evaluating parties based on those factors. stick with the availability of elective surgeries like we said”
The left in the US manifests as the Democrat party, that party will be better off when they realize their constituents don’t really like them and are not that liberal. They're just more cautious of some people on the right.