Every society is founded on a set of truths. These truths are believed to be true by the people who created them or, in some cases, inherited them from their predecessors. Broadly speaking: these truths concern what is good and bad, how things work (such as 'this is an apple' or 'an apple will fall if unsupported') and which actions promote reward/punishment.
Humans came to believe that arguing about the truth was a bad thing. Arguments cause stress and conflict, which lead to damaged relationships and hurt feelings. Further, argumentation often results in one person changing their mind or believing less strongly in something they held previously. The further the belief is from 'true' – i.e., supported by evidence – the more likely it is for someone to stop believing it.
As a result, humans developed social cues that indicated when it was acceptable to argue about things and when it wasn't. They also developed a set of rules for argumentation itself – such as 'be civil' or 'admit the other person's point'. These became known as etiquette.
Etiquette is, in essence, a set of rules that people use to avoid arguments. The problem with etiquette is that it can be used to silence uncomfortable truths.
What happens is that people who are in positions of power and authority have a good deal to lose if they admit the uncomfortable truth. It would be inconvenient for them, or require them to change something about themselves. Or it might upset someone important.
So, they use the power of etiquette to enforce their own truth on others. 'You must agree with me' is a common example of this. The fact that two people disagree – and are willing to argue about it – shows that both parties believe one may be right and the other wrong.
Log in:
You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.
This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize Llama 3.1 405b, a neural network trained by Meta.
Llama is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.
Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.
Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.
