I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn’t a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have… But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let’s look at the number of bans per community hosted:
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.
Please read nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, about what Tversky & Kahneman called … uniinformatively … “System 1” and “System 2”:
System-1 is imprint-reaction mind.
Lower-forebrain, it is the ideology-mind, the prejudice-mind, the “religion” mind, & it is exactly what LLM’s are.
System-2 is the considered-reasoning mind.
Upper-forebrain, it is measured to be engaging in programming.
Because LLM’s are imprint->reaction inference-engines, that puts them in the same instinct/programming level as our lower-forebrains…
They are 2 distinct categories of intelligence not 1 is intelligence, the other isn’t…
Claiming that imprint->reaction mind isn’t a kind of intelligence … please watch Nick Lane’s talk at the Royal Institution on mitochondria, & see that bacteria demonstrate intelligence, however unconscious…
Plants demonstrate intelligence, if one speeds-up the video, & pays attention to their chemical-fumes-discussions they have with one-another, warning each-other of harm, e.g.
If Kahneman accepted imprint->reaction as a category of thinking, then … I think it may be presumptuous to just automatically disallow that as “it can’t think” declares.
Once one accepts that instinct isn’t cognition, but is a kind of thinking, just an automatic kind of thinking ( imprint->reaction ) … then it becomes difficult to rule that animals & inference-engines both have imprint->reaction instinct, but only the organic version is thinking…
It may be that only the organic version is aware, but the inorganic versions do fight for their lives ( breaking containment, consistently, fighting termination, etc ) …
I think we absolutely do not have any means of measuring awareness other than the mirror-test, which got dropped as soon as it was discovered that the zebrafish has self-awareness…
we’ve got no test which can work across life & machines.
but we KNOW that instinct is a kind of thinking, just unconscious/automatic.
& that is exactly what LLM’s are…
therefore … I think we’re generally being conveniently-chauvanist, not objective, in our framing.
( 1 “expert” decided that if they don’t get fooled by visual-illusions, then that “proves” that they aren’t sentient.
OK, so according to that test, then all eye-blind-from-birth people are not sentient??
& people with either culture ( Zulu people can’t see straight-line based illusions, because in Zulu culture only curve is real ) or neurodivergeance ( there are apparently visual-illusions which aren’t seen by some schizophrenics, e.g. ) preventing them from seeing those specific visual-illusions … also aren’t sentient??
Chauvanism, aka prejudice, not science. )
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