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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it's about facts but rather values.

Take guns. For Americans guns are a legally enshrined right whereas in Britain guns have been rejected by society to the extent that even most police officers are not allowed to carry a gun.

I would not want a LLM telling me that guns are useful for self defence because from my cultural perspective they are not and owning a gun for self defence is actually a serious crime.

Likewise I would not expect that perspective to work for many Americans. If you live in the middle of nowhere and there's no police for miles around, then owning a gun for self defence seems like an important right to have. It's just not a right that is applicable to my cultural circumstances.

That's a deliberately mild example, there are of course more serious cultural incompatibilities that are almost impossible to discuss online in the abstract without setting off a debate on the thing itself.

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> I would not want a LLM telling me that guns are useful for self defence because from my cultural perspective they are not and owning a gun for self defence is actually a serious crime.

> Likewise I would not expect that perspective to work for many Americans. If you live in the middle of nowhere and there's no police for miles around, then owning a gun for self defence seems like an important right to have. It's just not a right that is applicable to my cultural circumstances.

I find this line of thinking to be exceptionally fascinating especially when taking into account the macro and micro political divisions around the world. While there are a number of things where so far we don’t have enough data to come to strong definitive conclusions, there are lots of culturally-incompatible facts that I would much rather an ML tell me the truth about rather than pandering to some set of values that it has inferred about me or my culture.

To your example, both you and many of the general patrol police officers are legally prohibited from carrying a firearm, yet the Prime Minister’s protection detail does carry firearms. They do that because factually a firearm is an effective tool for self-protection and neutralizing threats. If that wasn’t the case, militaries wouldn’t likely use them!

One of the things that worries me about today and the future is that values are frequently presented as facts, even if the values run counter to the evidence. This happens broadly across the political spectrum and seeing that tools like ChatGPT are going to start reinforcing that makes me worry that the problem is going to get worse.

> To your example, both you and many of the general patrol police officers are legally prohibited from carrying a firearm, yet the Prime Minister’s protection detail does carry firearms. They do that because factually a firearm is an effective tool for self-protection and neutralizing threats. If that wasn’t the case, militaries wouldn’t likely use them!

And the NRA strongly advocates "from my cold dead hands"... unless you're at an NRA convention. Concealed or open carry... unless you're at an NRA convention.

I think I’d prefer a response that didn’t take a side, but presented the various perspectives.

So to that question it should answer similarly or even more nuanced way.

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