But wouldn’t roughly half the population always have an above average amount of emotional insecurity?

Sure the difference between the extremes can shrink… but after a few generations, the new normal will be taken as the new baseline and the new condition to be written about by a Kaj Sotala 2 on the LW 2 of that generation… So after many cycles of this it seems the entirety of mankind will be homogeneous.

Well as the first few pararagphs of the text suggests, the median ‘AI Safety’ advocate over time has been barely sentient, relative to other motivated groups, when it comes to preventing certain labels from being co-opted by those groups…. so it seems unlikely they will become so many standard deviations above average in some other aspect at any point in the future.

Because the baseline will also change in the future.

Once you take into account real world factors, such as an expanding userbase leading to less average credibility per user, multiplying political positions, etc… which are all pretty much unavoidable due to regression to the mean…

It really becomes ever closer to an effective blanket ban, to at least try to maintain the same average quality. (Asssuming that is a goal.)

To extrapolate it to an extreme scenario, if the userbase suddenly 100X in size, then even many things considered prosaic might have to be prohibited because the userbase, on average, literally wouldn’t be capable of evaluating discussion beyond a mediocore subreddit otherwise.

Sometimes politics IS the core issue, or at least an important underlying cause of the core issue, so a blanket ban on discussing it is a very crude tool.

Because it’s effectively banning any substantial discussion on a wide range of topics, and instead replacing it, at best, with a huge pile of euphemisms and seemingly bizarre back and forths. And at worst, nothing at all.

So user competence as a factor is unlikely to be completely seperate.

Or to look at it from the other angle, in an ideal world with ideal forum participants, there would very likely be a different prevailing norm.

It seems contradictory. If LW users believe that the userbase is not competent enough on average to avoid tangential but divisive politics, then why do they believe the ’karma’ average decided by the same, matters?

It’s like a superposition of two extremes:

At one extreme there’s Reddit where a high karma is more of an anti-signal, and having extra karma beyond a pretty low threshold actually increase reader’s suspicions that it’s fluff or unusually deceiving…

At the other extreme, there are traditional old BBS forums with no karma or scoring system whatsoever. And any formal distinction is a huge positive signal.

I would perhaps go even farther, most, maybe all, people don’t have any ‘sincere ethics’ whatsoever with a sharp boundary line, it’s nearly always quite muddled.

At least judging by actions.

Which upon reflection makes it sorta amazing any complex polity functions at all.

And in any case it’s probably safer to assume in business dealings that the counterparty is closer to the 50th percentile than to the 99.99th percentile.

For a test that can give certainty to claims there’s something more than that going on somewhere in the LLM. Since the OP only indicated ~90% confidence.

Otherwise it’s hard to see how it can be definitely considered ‘consciousness’ in the typical sense we ascribe to e.g. other LW readers.