Comment by MangoToupe
2 months ago
Do you think LLMs don't further the propaganda emanating from the US? I don't even know how you would start to excise that, especially if you don't agree with foreigners on what's propaganda vs just "news" or whatever.
I have quite a few Chinese friends, both on mainland and throughout south-east asia, and I can speak a little mandarin, and I can read quite a bit of Chinese. My friends complain about the PRC quite a bit. But I find it telling that this complaint specifically—authoritarian political oppression—seems to mostly come from the west, and especially from the US. And it's true that we can say obscene things to the president's face and not get locked up. I don't think that's necessarily the "gotcha" you think it is, though—we're really good at complaining, but not so good at actually fixing. Which feels increasingly more embarrassing than restrictions on speech.
Edit: I suppose I'm a bit unfair. A lot of folks in our sphere of influence in east asia say stuff like this, too. But the contrast between the folks I know who literally live in china and americans feels striking to me.
> But revolutionary socialism has always devoted a lot of words to justifying violence against dissidents.
It is very difficult to take the political opinions of people who talk like this seriously.
> LLMs should be well-positioned to make advances in political science, game theory, and related topics.
I'm struggling to understand what this might look like, and I find the argument that nuclear warfare being related to game theory to be extremely dubious. Cuz if it really held that strongly, we should be handing out nukes like candy.
> It is very difficult to take the political opinions of people who talk like this seriously.
This tells me you haven't read the literature.
I've probably seen 150 versions of the comment you made, but almost everyone tries to explain why the violence is justified.
People rarely try to deny that revolutionary socialism is a violent ideology since every major writer from Marat to Marx to Lenin to Mao has explicitly advocated violence against civilian non-combatants. Some, like Marx, even explicitly call it terror (as in terrorism).
Can you tell me what you're referring to? Of course I've read the literature.
> People rarely try to deny that revolutionary socialism is a violent ideology since every major writer from Marat to Marx to Lenin to Mao has explicitly advocated violence against civilian non-combatants.
Yea, that's a very different thing than murdering "dissidents." Capitalists use (state) violence to maintain power; violence is necessary to seize power and create your own state. That was Mao. We are now many decades later and any "revolutionary socialist" in the area would be trying to overthrow the government by definition.
China isn't very indicative of revolutionary socialism, and revolutionary socialism comes in dozens or hundreds of different conflicting flavors. Even Lenin and Stalin argued over many things including how they should treat what we would now call "small business owners", and Stalin won in the end (mostly because Lenin died, but still).
Why don't you paint other ideologues (i.e. capitalists) with the same broad brush? It's not like they're any less violent in their suppression of threats to their power. Ever hear of vietnam? or the korean war?