Be honest, you knew that someone was bound to do this sooner or later.
Inspired by Scott Alexander's famous post (is it true that it might be turned into a film?), I decided to train the publicly-available, weaker version of OpenAI's GPT-2 text generation model on a dataset of extremely controversial Reddit comments. I used PRAW (a Python library used for Reddit scraping) to grab every Culture War Roundup thread on here or /r/TheMotte, find the five most controversial comments from each thread (as determined by Reddit's algorithm), and spit them out into a text file. I then finetuned GPT-2's weights on this dataset (aided by this guide by the illustrious gwern) for a while, and then sat back and looked at what text was generated. Here are a couple of excerpts that the model generated (feel free to skip them if you just want a TLDR of my thoughts):
Blacks-Can-Be-White-Without-Blacks-Literalizing-Blacks, We-Are-Blacks explains the broad implications of the term Are We While Black and Can We Be We Like Red Without Blacks? and sums it up perfectly:
Blacks make up 1/8 of the world's population, but they account for only a 3/10 of global economic power. They are grossly disproportionate to the number of human beings on earth. While whites made up 17% of human populations between 3000 BCE and 3000 AD, whites made up only 8% of the world's economic power starting in AD 200. This disparity may explain why we currently have the world's highest homicide rates, worst health problems, lowest per capita income, lowest per capita education, highest per capita income, highest per capita income and highest per capita income being the United States’s two highest incarceration rates.
Our US overlords made us the descendants of European races much more advanced than jaywalking whites even if that bodes well for the racial survival of humanity. Also clearly explains why people in Latin America, Asia and Africa derive more from chattel slavery and darwinism than from the per capita average of whites living there.
The Nazi Daily Caller wrote a story on how Nazi Propaganda Factory and The Tranny State broke the rules and distributed propaganda across the world.
My response to the usual complaints about Rightist provocation, namely, that people start calling people fascists , I basically agree with that statement.
Brief history of SNL: The Onion's Culture war accuses, rallies behind Richard Mellon Scaife
As you might know by now, SNL [has] been running a series of interviews this week about the culture war for a while now, and it's been fun to watch them try and dig up some material from last week about themselves. Usually, I'm pretty blunt when I come across the same material over and over again, and the snarky assholes would like it that way.
I agree. Because that's exactly what you want to hear in this case.
It has to be said that the alt-right are all about conspiracy theory and "the art of the relationship". This is likely correct: while the art of the relationship may contain the Secret Service, the Secret Service may act to prevent a mofascist invasion of the USA by virtue of having little personal entanglement with the art of the relationship.
In fact, in my experience, the art of the relationship is just as valuable for the alt-right as it is for conventional liberals. It is a logical consequence of having little personal entanglement with the art of the relationship, in that the very concept of power supersedes any sense of personal self-power. Making false claims/claims that are purely rhetoric are indistinguishable from making true claims (as I did in that instance).
It is preferable that you have both power and authority when conflating power and authority. If the only distinction is between power to make claims about your opponents and power to make genuine claims about the enemy, then you may as well have both. You may think of consent as power to make claims propaganda by the leftists if you like, but it is very different if it is the strategy of fascism. The same applies to making claims about the enemies you are fighting against - you should dislike the fascists of the west and hate the alt-right, but at least you think that agreeing that the left is weak isn't somehow a sin.
Alt-right have magic powers, see for yourself:
http://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/
[Editor's note: that ending was hilarious to me.]
Affirmative Action Background
According to the relevant data, we have 1455 students who have taken AFAP (American Indian and Alaska Native Studies). Of these, 7 (58%) are boys, 6 (179%) are male, and 1 (97%) are non-binary (including the boys) and 1 (761) are genderfluid (all other numbers are in red). These are the students who have taken AFAP in the last year.
These are the AIs I did not count in last year's report:
For most of human history, the West was white. It was white collar, white people were rich, white collar. The West was white--investive, white people took care of their debts, white people worked hard, ate well, got married early, had kids early, died early, lived to 99,000, got a raise and got a good education. With the rise of the Internet and the physical reality of our times, the idea of 'the West' losing its male-dominated content has gained currency. I think it is important to put this in perspective, with regards to the second half of the 20th century. Even among white men who identify as belonging 'West' got laid off (despite obstacles). The first task is to account for the losses. The second major task is to present a plausible narrative for where the losses were. For example, the migration of white men to the East in the 1800s is not the founder of the West. The West lost its male-dominated content, but this did not stop white men from trying to claim a slice of the pre-industrial West. The first can be written as a retreat from Western culture. The second is far richer and more modern and therefore easier to justify as a Western narrative. But there is a huge difference. The first is something like the loss of 1) testosterone and 2) having a mate who is not white not related to being West is not worth it in the long run, whereas the loss of 2) is worth in the long run because it exposes the pop culture comparison to much more serious objection (i.e. whether it proves that the Culture War is really about men or only about MEN being West will be discussed at a much larger level) than making the same argument about how to justify it (i.e. male and female are going to have same wants and whatnot). The second thing is that MEN being West has a very specific meaning. Hence it is a taboo, what is not taboo is that we are discussing it for the norms, not for the men.
My thoughts
Reading through the samples generated by this model, I find that most of them don't make any arguments that have much relevance to our own Culture War. Sure, the model knows all the best buzzwords to throw in there, but it doesn't use those buzzwords to craft any statements that are meaningful on a global level. This was behavior of GPT-2 identified by either Scott or commenters (I can't recall which) in this post, or maybe this? As such, none of the statements seem all too controversial to me, because there is no meaning for me to agree or disagree with. But I'll make one last point: in the original story, nobody realized (initially) that the statements produced by the model were controversial. How frightening!
If you're interested in playing around with this finetuned model, I've uploaded the necessary files here. Now, I've never used GoFile before, so there's a good chance that it's slipping viruses into your downloads. But, if you're brave enough to press on, to use this model, simply create a new folder in the "models" subdirectory of the place where your GPT-2 is located, download all the files, drag all of them into that folder, and next time you run GPT-2, pass it the following option:
--model_name='FolderName'
where "FolderName" is the name you chose for your folder. I'll let you know that I did a pretty bad job training this model. A good number of the comments in the dataset simply consisted of the word "[deleted]", and many others were decidedly non-controversial "Quality Contribution Roundups". (This was due to the fact that as stickied comments, they always showed up first in the threads, even when the threads were sorted by controversial.) Finally, I chose the 5 top controversial comments from each thread, but for some threads, there may have only been one or two really controversial comments. This means that many of the comments that the model was trained on were likely just bland, run-of-the-mill culture war comments, rather than the juicy truly controversial stuff that we love. I might try playing around with the dataset in order to train a better model; if I do, I'll make sure to update you all.
Have fun!
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