this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Yeah. It's infuriating to me.
It's a hard thing, because there's no way to tell for any particular individual user, and it's not real productive to introduce random accusations that someone is secretly a troll farm or something into the conversation. That just makes it even more divisive, which I think is a big part of their original goal. But yes. It's a whole bunch of crap that this stuff is tolerated and it's just "Oh yeah frequently someone comes in and ruins the conversation we're trying to have, for their own fucked-up reasons, and we just have to smile and tell them politely that we disagree while they're pissing all over the table and everyone at it." That can't possibly be the solution.
I mean, honestly, they make it incredibly obvious. The idea that we somehow can't tell is just a tactic they use. We can both smell it on them. Why pretend we can't?
Usually I don’t think the users are literal LLMs. I used to have suspicion of it but I’ve never seen really any indication that they are other than real humans. In this case I’m actually a lot less sure.
Not only were they persistently confused by the context of the conversation including flipping back and forth between “the American people are too cowed to do anything” to “sure the American people are doing things and God bless their courage for it but it won’t succeed” while seeming unaware even when the discrepancy was pointed out… but one of them managed to pick up that I was really emphasizing that American policing is certainly not “fixed” and flipped it around to get all forceful about how silly I was for saying it was “fixed”.
And then when I pointed out the weirdness specifically as to how humans don’t really often make those mistakes… both of them suddenly just fell silent.
Idk man. It’s usually not productive to make that accusation. But both of these people are acting super weird. They’re also taking turns responding in a sort of weird and disjointed way.
When I say bot farms I don't mean literal LLMs. I mean people hired or forced to work in a call-center type environment where their day is spent disseminating propaganda and sewing meaningless conflict. Often using multiple sockpuppets. Some are working for hostile governments, some are working for companies. They try to sway elections and influence public opinion to strengthen their allies and weaken their enemies. They're all over the place.
Okay, I wanted to drop this because bucket seemed to be spinning out pretty hard after getting his world view repeatedly fact checked and proven repeatedly wrong, but I'm a big fan of treating others the way they want to treat others and this sort of conspiracy theory nonsense is 100% some "bullshit that needs to be thrown back in their faces"
So are you going to engage at all with the material of the conversation or are you just going to spread conspiracy theories because the worldview being expressed isn't your own?
I actually really like engaging with the material of the conversation. Here's what makes that hard:
You strawmanned what I was saying into comical evil and into the literal exact opposite of what I said. You also keep switching back and forth between "everyone is too scared to resist" and "yes they're resisting but it's not accomplishing anything" and then pretending to fail to comprehend the difference between those two things even when it's directly called out. That's why I suspected you of being an LLM, is that that surface believability of language but lack of any underlying model that the language is encoding is a hallmark of them.
At that point, whatever you are, it's time to put the brakes on and call you out for it, instead of just pretending we're both still playing the "good faith debate" game. That's not "spinning out", that's calling out your horseshit for what it is. If you want to go back to the reasoned-engagement game, just back off from doing that and we can talk. I actually like talking and you made some points I do want to respond to. But, in the current format, it would be a waste of time.
We're actually talking about this exact issue right at this moment, and how once your opponent starts breaking the rules it is a mug's game to keep playing by the same conversational principles that they're pooping all over.
My thesis is "the general population is too scared for effective resistance" nothing I have said is contradictory to that.
You keep moving the goalpost and going on tangents. Would you like to directly answer any the claims I've posted?
Find any stats on police killings that support your views?
Sounds good. You ignored the other two examples I brought up (because, what could you say)?
Also I would give you benefit of the doubt that when you said:
Was BLM meaningful? Was it intentional? Was it "even in the slightest of ways"? What about the LA riots? Baltimore?
What about the other two examples of bad faith I brought up, though? Address them, please. Again it is impossible to have a factual conversation with someone who is going to twist my words into the exact opposite of what I said. That's why I am pausing the rest of the conversation to call our your bad faith, and you're still just pretending I didn't say anything or somehow I am the asshole for quoting your earlier words and my earlier words and lining them up next to each other. I actually talked a little bit about the underlying subject matter in this comment and then deleted it.
Again, your conduct in this conversation makes it impossible to have a factual conversation until you change doing the word-twisting thing. If you just retract it and agree not to do that in the future, then sure, we can rock and roll and I can send some citations and we can go back to talking about the subject matter.
Stats. Facts. Stop gish galloping and ad homenen-ing.
You can pick another of the arguments I made if you'd preferable.
Oh. Yeah, it's definitely that, or partly that. These two accounts in particular are so bizarre with their conversation patterns that I'm pretty convinced that it's something like that.
I actually did think they were potentially literal bots, just because of how much trouble they had in comprehending context and meaning when you look beyond the surface level. One of them was able to count "S"s, though, so maybe they are not.
I sort of motivate people to disagree irrationally with me sometimes I think, because I am so abrasive and condescending when I think someone is wrong that I think they're just inclined to start debating with me and go against everything I have to say just as a result of that. But yes, I am fairly convinced that these people are doing it professionally in some sense.
I think one of the most important tells is the laziness of it. People who are on the internet debating, whether they are rational or not, usually invest some effort into making their points and trying to prove the other person wrong. The weird accounts, in my observations, don't really seem to care all that much if anyone believes them. They just want to kind of keep the conversation going and be disagreeable and throw in various talking points that they want to throw in. This thing where they can't even really comprehend or address discrepancies in what they're saying or the context of the conversation, and just kind of repeat various things they have programmed in, could just be that, that they just want to type their message and move on to whatever the next thing is.