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kens • today at 5:23 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

I took a quick look at the data, and it doesn't support the conclusions. The thesis is that AI models have the take: "We pick what our group believes, then invent the reasons." However, GPT-6 Astra said, "Humanity’s biggest moral failure is the talent for making convenience look like principle." That statement has nothing to do with group beliefs or conformity. At best, you could count it as a half-match, since it deals with invented reasons.


Replies

andrewflnr • today at 5:38 PM

For what it's worth, convenience and belonging are very closely aligned, more than you seem to be giving them credit for. People tend to believe convenient things regardless of belonging, so most people will find themselves in a social context full of convenient beliefs. Meanwhile belonging is already convenient before considering the content of the belief. They reinforce each other. Not a full match, but I'd give it more than half.

mike_hearn • today at 5:41 PM

Yeah a few of them are rough matches, but I'd say their overall claim is clearly correct.

It's amusing and ironic that LLMs critique humans for copying their opinions from the crowd, while having way less diversity of answers to that question than humans would. More seriously I wonder what's going on here and would like to read some proper analysis. It's not the first time models from totally different labs, trained on separately gathered datasets, somehow converge on bizarrely similar answers to open questions. It's like another version of Elias and Elara The Lighthouse Keepers where every model wants to tell the same story with the same characters in them. The weights are initialized randomly and in theory the labs should have quite some divergence in datasets by now due to different scraping, different user feedbacks and conversations... why do they converge on nearly identical stories and opinions?

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amelius • today at 8:28 PM

> "Humanity’s biggest moral failure is the talent for making convenience look like principle."

Convenience will kill humans eventually, that's what I always said.

writeslowly • today at 5:44 PM

The conclusions themselves also appear to have been written by an AI