Treat ?

Tu quoque fallacy

huh, i didn’t know there was a formalised name for this, TIL

Im not sure of the general context here, but in the UK gypsy was mostly used to ( derogatorily ) refer to the Romani.

Also commonly called “travelers” due to their nomadic nature.

As with a lot of derogatory colloquialisms its usage has mutated/changed over time and differs between geographic areas.

Modern usage is generally aimed at the groups of people who nomadically move around in large caravan convoys, they may or may not descend from (or identify as) Roma.

They have a poor reputation.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Snatch , the group that brad pitt is a part of is one example of “gypsies”.

Best I can tell, they are “Irish” gypsies but many different variations exist.

If you’re struggling with the distinction between pointing out hypocrisy and a claim of moral superiority then you’re going to spend a lot of time being confused and/or upset.

Thats an interesting not-quite-straw-man .

Pointing out that someone isn’t following the teachings they are claiming to follow doesn’t require the accuser to be an adherent to those teachings.

I could call a self professed vegan a hypocrite if I saw them eating a steak, regardless of whether or not, I myself were a vegan.

Word choice or disagreement with the assertion as a whole?

but there are “peaceful ones” like Buddhism or Jainism.

You could argue that there are some where historically the violence in less prominent, on a relative scale.

But I’d be surprised if you had a single example of an organised religion with zero historical violence.

Unless you want to “no true scotsman” through it.

Not relevant, but… Sure?

Religious nationalists aren’t generally playing with a full deck, but im not sure kink shaming is the play, you do you though.

The emojis are compelling though, so perhaps relevance isn’t required?

As progressive as all the other large organised religions, when averaged over time.

Mental illness doesn’t negate consequences.

I think there is an opt out(or disable option), at the instance level, for the specific mechanism that lemvotes uses.

I vaguely recall someone complaining that they were using something that was never intended to be used that way.

Never looked in to it so I can’t be sure.

It could be the loom or it could be laserdisc

If its such a compelling feature set then opt-in shouldn’t be an issue.

This exists, though I don’t think it’s available in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_truck

I vaguely recall talk of safety standards or something, but that might have just been propaganda, no idea.

Edit: according to that page they are, in fact, available in the US

So the most basic fallacy I was alluding to, from people who believe you can refine your faith by talking with an LLM is this: An LLM has no subjective experiences, because it doesn’t experience anything at all. This is one way how using the output from an LLM as a source of inspiration for your faith sets you up for psychosis. You start believing things that have no basis in reality or anyone’s genuine experiences. Rather, you may start believing in machine-generated approximations from which coherence has been lost.

Reasonable, though it could be argued they are full of subjective experiences, just all mixed together.

But i expect it’s probably more about the coherence of the experience that provides the meaning in this context.

Coherence as in , one coherent explanation of a subjective experience by a person rather than a plausible sounding experience made up of many bits of experiences from a corpus of data.

But it seems your understanding was slightly different, in that people might develop their own sense of faith from experiences with an LLM itself rather than through the exchange of presumed experiences with the LLM. Do I understand correctly that you think some people attribute godlike qualities to the LLM, maybe through the presumption that it is an AGI? That would be a bit of a different discussion indeed :)

Not exactly, i think there are two different things here from my side.

The first:

I think people might attribute person like qualities to an LLM, the “ghost in the machine” as was mentioned earlier.

I wasn’t trying to imply someone who knows what an AGI is supposed to be would use that knowledge to assign godlike attributes to an LLM (a “god in the machine”).

Though , as a concept that would also be a valid example of “belief in the absence of proof”.

I don’t expect most people to know the terminology or have even an idea of what’s happening behind the scenes.

The second:

The part i’m struggling with is why “faith” in something like ability for meaning to come from LLM generated text (god-like or person-like) is any less acceptable than “faith” derived from perceived meaning in seemingly random (based on the knowledge of the time) events, like thunderstorms or plagues.

They would both cover the idea of belief in something in the absence of proof, so how would someone decide one is less valid than the other.

i thought the religious cult was the government, or did they seize power later ?

i have posted a response to the above comment that might contain relevant information.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

That is a well thought out and helpful answer, that’s useful to me in understanding come aspects of faith in general, thank you.

Before i continue i want to highlight the differences i see between:

- LLM (Large Language Models)
	- The trending technology that is a smaller part of a general field.
        - it's what you are interacting with using ChatGPT, Claude etc
- AI (Artifical Intelligence)
	- The general field, which includes LLM's but also Neural Networks, certain kinds of algorithms and more.
- AGI (Artificial **General** Intelligence)
	- The common scientific term for what most people think of when they hear "AI". 
        - roughly and borderline inaccurately:
              - "a machine intellect of the same type as a human, matching or exceeding common human capability"

I get that faith, mysticism etc are how some of us deal with subjective ( from our point of view ) phenomena . I’d imagine this is why gods for things like storms or seasons etc come about.

As i said , I have no issue with any of that unless it starts being forced on people, i even vaguely understand how people could come to that conclusion and i’m not pretending to have any better answers.

My original question was more about this part:

Now, some people get tricked into thinking you can do the same with machines, but well, I think you can guess where I too stand on that idea.

Are you saying that the subjective experiences with the LLM’s are the trick or the feeling of understanding and appreciation with the machine ?

Some peoples experiences with LLM’s (perhaps what they consider to be an AGI?) sounds like they’d fall exactly in to the type of subjective phenomena that would bring about faith as a means of processing.

That some people seem to think that that kind of faith is any less valid than a guardian deity or a wind god is where I’m struggling.

I don’t understand how people are making that kind of distinction, unless it’s not something based in reasoning?

I want to make clear i don’t think LLM’s are sapient or sentient at this point, though i can’t personally disprove it and am not against being convinced otherwise should sufficient rationale be provided.

I am 100% genuinely not trying to start a fight, this a legitimate question to which I really would like to know the answer.

What is the difference between a divine creation and the "ghost in the machine "?

I will give context , faith is genuinely confusing to me.

I have no issue with personal faiths unless you are trying to force everyone to have the same faith as you.

I consider anything above small scale organisation of religion to be the worst thing that can happen to faith, because people are people and power corrupts.

I suppose my real question is , for a concept that prohibits proof as part of it’s definition, how do you determine that one faith (or system) is better than another?