we really are in a scary place where people are completely bamboozled by markov chains
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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Cargo cult society
sorry to single you out here, friend, but i think it's worth pushing back on the notion that "cargo cults" were anything but anti-colonial responses to the disruptions wrought to peoples' relationships to their labor and modes of production. in some sense that's also what's happening now, but you seem to be buying into the notion that cargo cults were based primarily on superstition and gullibility, when they were in many ways a rational social response to their own subjugation and displacement.
It's unfortunate that "cargo cult" is such a useful and familiar way to explain fetishism (a word that also comes from colonialist nonsense!)
But I've had success still using it as a sort of one-two punch first explaining fetishism and second explaining how the phenomena is almost always colonialist projection.
Could you elaborate further on this? I want to learn more about the actual mechanism of how and why cargo cults operated.
yeah, i'll try to make an effort post soon. i'm not an expert, but it's something i've been trying to correct my own understanding of, which is that "cargo cults" were generally revitalization movements promising to restore social relationships that were being destroyed through the process of colonialism. i think many westerners, myself included, have a notion that "cargo cults" originated from air drops during world war 2, and that simply isn't true. such movements go back to the late 19th century and organized around charismatic indigenous leaders promising an alternative to the european colonialism being imposed upon them.
I love not being stupid
Mixed bag tbh
I wrote "I'm alive" on a piece of paper and sent it through the photocopier. What happened next will blow your mind...
why 76.6 why not just tell it to be infinitely more smart
that would be ridiculous
This might be the dumbest part of the whole thing. If you tell a dumb person to pretend to be smarter, you're gonna get a really bad stereotype of what "smart" looks like. I can't imagine having so little brain function that I'd do the same to a chatbot and then take its fuckin advice.
This is also why "SMART" characters in movies are often just really dumb but with nerdy/asshole characteristics. Because it is hard to write a character that is smarter than you are. The only real way is to research the topic at hand and learn from and listen to experts on that topic, so you can write a convincing smart scientist character by referring to actual experts in the field. But that's hard. Much easier to just write a character who says a bunch of technobabble nonsense and then acts like an asshole when no one understands them, it's not like emotional intelligence and communication skills are a sign of being smart or anything like that, gotta push a bunch of anti-intellectualism into everything.
Me when I tell ChatGPT to roleplay as an AI that's very good at math and then solve every Millenium Prize problem (I am going to win 6 million dollars) 
"I've committed to writing 30 articles in 30 days."
No, you've committed to having chatgpt write 30 articles about itself.
Not everyone has the expertise it takes to ask ChatGPT to unpack everything a third time, though.
you, foolish, arrogant: llms are just glorified autocomplete lol, they're so stupid lmao
me, enlightened: receives prophetic visions from the model i asked to be 76.6 times smarter
Why do I get the feeling that whatever ChatGPT spat out wasn’t much different from what’s in a dime a dozen self-help book.
The last time I used chatgpt (years ago) I asked it to imitate my writing and it just basically copied my sentences and used a thesaurus for a few words to cover its tracks, so you might not be far off here.
Seeing:—
The clarity was incredible. The advice? So real, it felt like a clairvoyant [emphasis mine] or someone who’s been with me all my life — but objective, neutral, and honest.
the third prompt really needs to be:—
What is cold reading?
It's a shame that someone who seems like they want to be less anxious and more resilient doesn't have better options for guidance.
The clarity was incredible. The advice? So real, it felt like a clairvoyant [emphasis mine] or someone who’s been with me all my life — but objective, neutral, and honest.
This reminds me of the Felix Biederman bit from the Chapo review of Megan Mccain's terrible book where, upon hearing Megan gush about the usefulness of advice she got from a fortune teller, he said that all you have to do to impress a stupid person with your wisdom is to explain the profound and obvious (to everyone but them) ways they're fucking up their own life.
Oh we're so cooked, so many people believe chatgpt is the machine god 
How long until these people start lighting incense and praying to their computers
2 weeks ago
whenever someone reacts like this to the predictive text machine they always seem to have really poor literacy and questionable critical thinking skills. I'm sure it's just a coincidence
like I understand there are real applications for it in fields like law or medicine where you have large datasets but it is not going to tell you the meaning of life based on the cooked-down biases of its training data
Oh divine machine guru, please bless me with sapience 
I'm not convinced OOP even has conscious experiences of their own, so they should ask for sentience first