Comment by weinzierl
11 hours ago
"The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have."
And this is one half of why I think
"Bad AI drivers will be [..] ridiculed in public."
isn't a good clause. The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Putting it as a rule in your policy document makes it only worse.
> The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior.
Shaming people for violating valid social norms is absolutely decent behaviour. It is the primary mechanism we have to establish social norms. When people do bad things that are harmful to the rest of society, shaming them is society's first-level corrective response to get them to stop doing bad things. If people continue to violate norms, then society's higher levels of corrective behaviour can involve things like establishing laws and fining or imprisoning people, but you don't want to start with that level of response. Although putting these LLM spammers in jail does sound awfully enticing to me in a petty way, it's probably not the most constructive way to handle the problem.
The fact that shamelessness is taking over in some cultures is another problem altogether, and I don't know how you deal with that. Certain cultures have completely abdicated the ability to influence people's behaviour socially without resorting to heavy-handed intervention, and on the internet, this becomes everyone in the world's problem. I guess the answer is probably cultivation of spaces with strict moderation to bar shameless people from participating. The problem could be mitigated to some degree if a Github-like entity outright banned these people from their platform so they could not continue to harass open-source maintainers, but there is no platform like that. It unfortunately takes a lot of unrewarding work to maintain a curated social environment on the internet.
In a functioning society the primary mechanism to deal with violation of social norms is (temporary or permanent) social exclusion and in consequence the loss of future cooperative benefits.
To demand public humiliation doesn’t just put you on the same level as our medieval ancestors, who responded to violations of social norms with the pillory - it’s actually even worse: the contemporary internet pillory never forgets.
You think exile is a better first step than shame? That's certainly a take. On the internet, that does manifest as my suggested way of dealing with people where shame doesn't work, a curated space where offenders are banned -- but I would still advocate for attempting lesser corrective behaviour first before exclusion. Moreover, exclusion only works if you have a means to viably exclude people. Shame is something peers can do; exclusion requires authority.
Shame is also not the same thing as "public humiliation". They are publicly humiliating themselves. Pointing out that what they publicly chose to do themselves is bad is in no way the same as coercing them into being humiliated, which is what "public humiliation as a medieval punishment" entails. For example, the medieval practice of dragging a woman through the streets nude in order to humiliate her is indeed abhorrent, but you can hardly complain if you march through the streets nude of your own volition, against other people's desires, and are then publicly shamed for it.
No society can function without enforced rules. Most people do the pro-social thing most of the time. But for the rest, society must create negative experiences that help train people to do the right thing.
What negative experience do you think should instead be created for people breaking these rules?
Temporary or permanent social exclusion, and consequently the loss of future cooperative benefits.
A permanent public internet pillory isn’t just useless against the worst offenders, who are shameless anyway. It’s also permanently damaging to those who are still learning societal norms.
The Ghostty AI policy lacks any nuance in this regard. No consideration for the age or experience of the offender. No consideration for how serious the offense actually was.
Thanks to Social Media bubbles, there's no social exclusion possible anymore. Shameless people just go online find each other and reinforce each others' shamelessness. I bet there's a Facebook group for people who don't return their shopping carts.
Getting to live by the rules of decency is a privilege now denied us. I can accept that but I don't have to like it or like the people who would abuse my trust for their personal gain.
Tit for tat
It is well supported that TFT with a delayed mirroring component and Generous Tit for Tat where you sometimes still cooperate after defection are pretty succesful.
What is written in the Ghostty AI policy lacks any nuance or generosity. It's more like a Grim Trigger strategy than Tit for Tat.
You can't have 1,000,000 abusers and be nuanced and generous to all of them all the time. At some point either you either choose to knowingly enable the abuse or you draw a line in the sand, drop the hammer, send a message, whatever you want to call the process of setting boundaries in anger. Getting a hammer dropped on them isn't going to feel fair to the individuals it falls on, but it's also unrealistic to expect that a mob-like group can trample with impunity because of the fear of being rude or unjust to an individual member of that mob.
It is understanding of these dynamics that lead to us to our current system of law: punitive justice, but forgiveness through pardons.