Via Tyler Cowen, a weird study that intended to investigate whether large language model AIs could "replicate the diversity of human thought." They tried to train various runs with an AI as either conservative or liberal, and got the AI to identify as such. However, when they analyzed the answers, they found little difference. In particular, they found that "both self-reported ‘GPT conservatives’ and ‘GPT liberals’ showed rightleaning moral foundations."
The authors think this shows a weakness with AI, but I agree with Cowen that this actually shows a weakness in the human investigators. Cowen:
In my view many “liberals” (not my preferred term) actually have pretty conservative moral foundations in the Jon Haidt sense, namely, in spite of what they may say the liberals prioritize “in-group, authority, and purity,” rather than worrying so much about actual “harm and fairness.” Just like so many conservatives.
I would start from a somewhat different place, and ask what it means to be on the Left. If your model is, say, hippies, or the original Romantics with their free-love circles and revolutionary fantasies, then it might seem that the Left is all about rejecting social conformity and regimented labor in favor of a wilder and freer state of being. But if your model is, say, V.I. Lenin, well, he hired American efficiency experts to bring greater discipline to Soviet factories.
It is famously true these days that in America, middle clas liberals – in this sense, people on the moderate left – are the group most likely to get married, stay married, have children in wedlock, work in big institutions, and generally model a life of middle class discipline. It is liberals who say, "trust the science" and conservatives who quote Foucault on networks of power and knowledge. Ever since the Reagan/Thatcher anti-government revolution liberals have been more focused on preserving the government as it is, while many conservatives demand radical reform. Over the past 30 years there have been at least as many "insurrectionists" on the right as on the left.
So who is conservative? It all depends, I would say, on what issues you care about. There is a very important sense in which all middle class Americans with instutional jobs are profoundly conservative, whatever party they support.
Right now one of the biggest issues on the American left is opposition to what they consider Fascism, that is, a violent, insurrectionary, burn-it-down rightism. I agree that this is an important fight, but I do not think the Proud Boys are particularly conservative, and Donal Trump is at the least a very strange sort of conservative leader.
Right now the biggest hot-button issues have to do with sexuality and identity, but if you ask me that is mainly a distraction. Personally I have been pro-gay marriage and gay acceptance since I was old enough to have political ideas, but I think that like many members of my class I actually have pretty conservative ideas about sexuality. And having raised five teenagers, I am extremely dubious about letting anyone under 18 make important decisions about their future lives.
Some of you may be thinking that it is liberals or progressives who stand up for working people, and that is often true; I have occasionally thought of imposing maximum salaries on CEOs, expressed in terms like "no more than ten times the median corporate salary," and I doubt many conservatives would sign on to that. But it is liberals who are working to throw all the coal miners and oil field roustabouts out of work; less than fifty years ago American liberals were putting huge energy into keeping coal mining jobs in depressed areas, just like German socialists still do today.
I consider myself a moderate on immigration issues, in that while I personally favor lots of immigration on the grounds that it makes this a more exciting, vibrant, and productive country, I think every nation absolutely has the right to determine how many and what type of immigrants to receive. I do not think any nation has an obligation to admit so many refugees that this profoundly changes its culture and politics. These days you can hear Trumpist Republicans saying "Democrats believe in open borders!" but I certainly don't, and the only people I know who do are actually libertarians. The flood of people trying to reach America and Europe is just a very hard problem, and I don't claim to know how to solve it.
I guess what I am saying is that I do not think our contemporary politics map very well onto any deep, long-term definitions of "conservative," "liberal," or "progressive." It does not surprise me at all that an AI trained on the contemporary internet has trouble sorting our political and social factions into conservative and liberal; I certainly do.
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I suspect these categories have been difficult to determine in most times and places, especially since the 1870s. The nineteen-sixties American New Left rebelled more against the New Deal, Cold War liberalism of FDR and LBJ than almost anything else. That liberalism was in many ways a capitalism-friendly, anti-Soviet version of late nineteenth-century German socialist revisionism, which Lenin and others of his ilk hated more viscerally probably than they hated tsarism. Yet in the 1930s many American leftists were happy, or at least willing, to work with the FDR administration, as were many businessmen and old-line patricians (and of course some patricians, in both Britain and the US, were ideology-driven Soviet spies, bringing it all full circle). *And yet* some right-wing types were viscerally hostile to FDR, regarding him as a class traitor, etc., and a few were willing to talk about a coup.
Contemporary academic leftism is likewise in many ways mostly a rebellion against the old-line, bring-Shakespeare-to-the-masses academic liberalism of the fifties and sixties. This doesn't make them friendly to the Republican Party or the contemporary right. Nazism, of course, included both hard-left and hard-right elements. And so on.
And yet, I don't think it is impossible for humans to "get" something like the New Deal coalition. This is not about identifying and verbalizing principles. It's something more like "fuzzy" logic, a sort of social intuition that comes into play when we get a sense of who goes with who and how those alliances can shift from moment to moment. I think the question is whether AI systems can be taught this sort of human social understanding.
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