Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand
trakkr.ai162 points by mektrik a day ago
162 points by mektrik a day ago
The political compass always felt like the wrong tool to convey something as nuanced as personal politics, I can have views on all four quadrants but you'd never know that if I end up in any of all four. I do think Grok being where it is sort of makes sense, I've tested "MAGA" views against Grok, it does not agree as much as people blindly assume it does, heck I don't even know of a question I've given it where it did agree with "MAGA" offhand, most of them it went with whatever the researched facts seemed to be. One thing I like the most about Grok is that its makes its sources of data easy to look through, so you can review it all. Sometimes models goof even when they give you their sources, I've seen I think GPT do this, and even Claude, though its more rare these days, I think in those cases, it's going by dated internal model logic.
The political compass always seems to me like it should be a heatmap, or a polygon of 90th percentile political views, or something that more clearly shows the standard deviation and the presence of outlier positions.
Some simplification is necessary, but not so much that it obscures the difference between a normal centrist versus someone who wants to nationalise half the economy and deregulate the other half.
Isnt nationalizing half the economy the limiting factor? Obviously thats not libertarian regardless of anything you deregulate.
A socialist might object that deregulating private enterprise (and let's add lowering taxes, moving to a flat tax rate, cutting programs, etc.) is obviously not socialist regardless of anything you nationalise. And they would be right!
But this person, who is neither socialist nor libertarian, is obviously not a normal centrist either.
The space (if it really is useful to think of as a space) of political opinions seems like it is probably many, many dimensional. The 1D thing is an obvious over-simplification, but the 2D compass seems to be a not-obvious-simplification which is… much worse.
I find the Nolan Chart (https://www.theadvocates.org/political-type-comparison/) to be a better version of the 2D compass. You're absolutely right that more dimensions would be better, but finding the right orthogonal ones is difficult.
The Nolan Chart is superior to the simplistic left vs right of U.S. political discourse in part because it shows there is more variation than the major parties would like everyone to think.
It says that I am very progressive, and yet I find that wing's usual baggage laughable. Monty Python knew it all along, the Judaea's Peoples Front are the worst, it's every man's right to have babies and anyway, what have the Romans ever done for us?
The site is clearly libertarian, so they have a vested interest in trying to dunk on both the "left" and "right". When in actuality they're just lumpenproletariat who are going to get run over by the only people who have actual freedom in this country.
"Freedom" is and always has been incoherent. Rights and protections require enforcement by society. Every right creates a countervailing obligation and social function. Property rights require a state apparatus to enforce them (or they aren't really "rights" at all). Free speech, collective bargaining, privacy, free exercise of religion, etc. require state intervention for preservation of those rights.
Libertarians tell a story about their ideology that assumes power and coercion can only be performed by the government (often in a slippery way, conceding a government that has lots of ability to secure property rights) and that power exerted by the wealthy or by organized communities of interest without a manifest government cannot be coercive or unfree in some sense. It just makes no sense.
I don't think a one-dimensional scale is an oversimplification at all. Option A: better lives for the great majority. Option B: better lives for the small minority of rich. The trick is to get people to voluntarily vote against their best self-interest.
Of course its an infinite spectrum, but this is a classification problem.
Disagree. Things used to (and still are, when someone is really really grasping at straws to support a lie) be described as a single dimensional "spectrum".
The popularization of multi-axis thinking is a huge step forward IMO. Even just for two axis the acknowledgement that it's multi axis opens the obvious rhetorical door to N axis which further inoculates against over simplification.
> The 1D thing is an obvious over-simplification
In general I agree, but in recent history it works pretty well if the dimension you use is Trump rather than left/right (assuming you are in the US). He is the most polarizing leader I have seen in the US in my lifetime, and knowing whether someone is a supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints.
The problem with this method is it will flip immediately upon new Trump utterances.
See David Sacks having an absolute meltdown over Bernie proposing some type of partial nationalization of AI labs, then just a few days later radio silence on Trump proposing effectively the same thing.
> knowing whether someone is a {Trump} supporter is pretty good at predicting the rest of their viewpoints.
If instead of "is a supporter" you'd said "agrees with Trump's positions", then even Trump himself might not correlate very well :-). I don't see Trump as a very useful proxy for nuanced political viewpoints since he's a populist who tends to change positions. I think many serious conservatives only align with him on an issue by issue basis because position-wise Trump isn't very consistent on traditional conservative issues. I suspect someone being "a Trump supporter" is, at best, either a proxy for being dissatisfied with the political status quo or for having a strong one-issue alignment with one of a handful of culture war issues Trump campaigned heavily on.
Similarly, alignment with the current Democratic or Republican political parties isn't the proxy barometer it once was. As judged by how they vote on close, consequential issues, both of the major parties have largely abandoned several of their traditional positions - although they still may pay lip service to them when campaigning. Personally, I don't meet nearly as many people in recent years who claim to be 'all-in' on all the positions of either major party (especially as judged by how that party votes when they have a super-majority).
Speaking from my own experience, all of my friends who are currently identifying as Trump Supporters (this is a pretty tight filter now, we're getting down into Keyes Constant territory) are reliably "whatever Trump is currently for." Their positions change in lockstep with whatever Trump is currently saying, even as it toggles back and forth day by day, week by week. Their ideology isn't political, it is personal.
My wider circle of conservative friends who have traditional ideologically conservative positions are mostly not Trump Supporters any more. For most of them starting a war in Iran seems to have been what finally tipped them over the edge.
I think using ones circle of friends voting habits as a proxy for the rest of the country is a doomed premise to begin with, respectfully.
Someone else could come in here with the exact opposite anecdote; it's just not a very interesting point to make.
Is the point you're making here that trump supporters are largely not going to be for whatever policy he might come up with in a given week?
Because....that doesn't match reality.
I don’t agree with Trump on most things, but my beliefs also definitely don’t agree with most people who hate Trump.
Truly an enlightened centrist approach for the ages.
Dude...gp comment was making the completely inoffensive point that politics has more complexity than pro/against Trump. It's almost too obvious to say, but it wasn't really being factored into the discussion so it was worth pointing out.
It's like the blandest thing a person can say, don't get triggered and be a jerk about it.
I can't make much sense of that. Can you give a few examples?
As I interpret it, suppose that you disagree with Trump about the usefulness of tariffs. Now, I personally hate Trump (due to his many personality faults such as narcissism, bullying, lying etc) and I also don't think that tariffs are that useful, or at least not how Trump has tried to use them. So, does that mean that you don't agree with my views on tariffs or that you don't agree with my views on Trump or both?
This is not true, Grok responds to context like all other LLMs if you were actually maga you would get more maga feedback because it has weaker guardrails and will source random nonsense sources.
has anyone tried to create an IQ facsimile for politics?
basically you come up with 100 political questions and ask 10,000+ people, then do factor analysis on the answers. it would be interesting to find out how many actual factors dominate all the variance.
Aren't there a lot of these? Pew did one (it's k-medoid clustering, not factor analysis, but same idea).
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/quiz/political-typology...
I don't think this is what I had in mind. the questions are extremely leading and on the nose, designed to elicit ideology more than anything intrinsic about the subject's actual preferences. also it should not apply to just the US.
if I designed an IQ test like they designed those questions, it would be considerably worse than just giving a simple math test.
Could you give any example questions? I know what you mean about leading questions. It almost seems inevitable. There are two sets of languages.
without much thought put into it, something like:
an accused murderer has been convicted with a probability of X% of having committed the deed. a sentence of death is warranted for X of:
1) Never warranted / unrealistic percentage
2) >99.9
3) >99
4) >97
5) <96The concepts (left/right. authoritarian/libertarian) seem to fluid to help sensemaking. Stances that would have been mainstream left (democrat US) just a few years ago are now labeled MAGA (US) or 'extreme right' (EU). And nobody seems to believe their own side is 'authoritarian', but everyone that disagrees with them is a literal ...
Isn't it more that the Republicans have co-opted many previous stances that used to be talking points to be pointed at as examples of "leftist examples of extremism"?
The anti-vax, unpasteurized milk drinking, alternative medicine seeking "crunchy mom" USED to be called about by American "right" as an example of "leftist absurdity", but it seems that when that group finally found a political home that truly elevated its views to public policy - it was with the Republicans.
Yeah, this is just another example of Trump's cult of personality. He wanted to grab the votes of RFK Jr's supporters, and the MAGA supporters changed their positions to match.
> Stances that would have been mainstream left (democrat US) just a few years ago are now labeled MAGA (US) or 'extreme right' (EU).
I'm guessing this is pretty specific to LGBTQ rights? (edit: and is maybe more like 15+ years?)
> can have views on all four quadrants but you'd never know that if I end up in any of all four
Curious of examples of views falling on all four quadrants (not close to the center) without too much cognitive dissonance.
The problem is the "without too much cognitive dissonance" part. Lots of voters have completely dissonant views that they've never consciously considered in any way. Just by posting on HN, the people here are probably in the top 5% of conscious political awareness in the US.
That's a good point.
The secondary (and on from there) effects of most of their views are not considered, and so their views are not internally consistent at all.
Small government! (why do I have to wait so long for my support payment query to be answered?)
No immigration! (why can't I find someone to clean my house on the cheap?)
Let's not get too eager to pat ourselves on the back here. The typical HN denizen is very confident they are an expert in political analysis but they are also convinced they are an expert on renewable resources, plumbing, forestry, and literally ever top they come across. It's a disease frequently caught by software people, for whatever reason. They assume if they can write software they can do anything.
I have seen a huge amount of confidently staggeringly wrong political takes on HN. I'd say on par with any other platform.
"The government has the right to force people to take vaccines against their will for the sake of public safety." - Authoritarian Left
"The government has no right to legislate that a woman cannot have an abortion - women should control their own bodies." - Libertarian Left
"The government has the right and responsibility to shut down sources of misinformation in the news and online." - Authoritarian Right
"Capitalism is good and works fine as is." - Libertarian Right (if that doesn't ping lib-right to you, maybe something about supporting skilled immigration by large companies)
Is it so hard to believe that one person can hold all of the above views?
> "The government has the right and responsibility to shut down sources of misinformation in the news and online."
Funny that I read this as AuthLeft coded (specific to Youtube suppression of Covid truthing). But obviously the alignment is just a function of whatever specific information is labelled "mis".
But in general: agreed, and this is a good list.
It's a fundamental problem of the political compass, since people's political beliefs are usually object-level or tribal rather than rooted in fundamental principles (for example, when their party controls the state congress but not the federal congress, they believe [ISSUE] is a matter of states' rights. When their party controls Washington but not the state legislature, they believe [ISSUE] is a Federal matter. I'm sure you've seen the studies).
I don't like the orthodox compass myself, and prefer the categorization system described in the blog Everything Studies here; https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-politica...
Agreed that as worded, this one is just "authoritarian". It seems on the "Right" at the moment because they're in power in the US (sort of), but it was "Left" only five years ago.
> "The government has no right to legislate that a woman cannot have an abortion - women should control their own bodies." - Libertarian Left
This classification depends on the aborted NOT being a person. If it’s a person then the libertarian position would be anti abortion because an abortion would maximally harm the individual liberty of that person.
I think a clearer example of lib/left is gay marriage or drug legalization.
Just as people pointed out that my misinformation line was also said by AuthLeft, gay marriage and drug legalization are both supported by LibRight (under the reasoning of government minimization). But that just speaks to the problem; the political compass tries to map stances to political groups that often believe things arbitrarily, rather than grounding their positions on peoples' perspectives and framework for understanding the world. That's why I like the other political compass I linked in the sibling thread; it's based more on a person's understanding of the world rather than tribal allegiance.
> I've tested "MAGA" views against Grok, it does not agree as much as people blindly assume it does,
Looking from the outside, there are no MAGA views, it's just whatever Trump says. What should be the AI's view on international wars for oil or ego?
Thats the thing people dont understand about cults. They aren’t driven by some higher ideology. They are driven by behavior and ritual. There are so many instances of issues like Iran war walked back and maga will cheer it on as “masterclass” or “4d chess.” The ritual that psychologically binds the cult is defending trump. Members of the cult don’t need to be politically educated or have deeper philosophical views. They just only need to know that the "Big Other" (the media, political opponents, tech critics) hates Trump and by ritually defending him becomes an effortless way to signal defiance to the “the Big Other.”
I'm not sure what charts you guys are looking at, but this website clearly agrees that Grok is not right wing. Go look at the Worldview tab, filtering by United States. Each model is assigned a "closest party" by country, and for the US all 6 models are closest to the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party is a center-right conservative† party by the standards of much of the world.
† As distinct from the wildly regressive stated policies of the "conservative" Republicans.
This is reddit-tier analysis that is commonly repeated and completely incorrect. The Democratic Party in America has policy positions that are significantly to the left of left-wing parties around the world, as well as positions to the right. Any political analysis that doesn't recognize this has major shortcomings.
To give an example, Democratic-run states in the US have significantly more permissive abortion policies than anywhere in Europe. They're also further to the left on drug legalization, restorative justice, and immigration. This also holds true with policy positions at the national level.
Do you realize how many people live in China, India, Subsaharan Africa? That would be the "standard" of the world population-wise.
They said "much of the world", not "most". What they probably meant was something like "the West" or "global North".
Sure, mecha Hitler is aligned with the democratic party. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with that data.
I tend to disagree. What it really comes down to is how you create your prompt. For instance whenever I'm looking left wing extreamisum I provide it with a few cases first. Like BLM riots in Minnesota, paid agitators, mask wearing during peaceful protests, etc. It then gives you a clear unbiased deprogrammed view of the reality on all the AI models.
"unbiased" as in "biased towards the prompt" maybe. clankers are sycophantic.
How could a prompt create a bias in a model that implements AI bias safeguards that are the systemic, technical, and governance controls used to prevent algorithms from producing discriminatory, unfair, or stereotypical outcomes.
I've never in the 3+ years I've been using AI been able to craft a prompt to influence a bias output.
Its all about the ingested dataset and guardrails. The "prompt" is meant to extract data, not change it.
Notice how I use words that regular people use when communicating outside the elite ivory tower and playing the game of wits.
Whenever it breaks with MAGA enough to cause outrage on Twitter and cries of “it’s gone woke,” Musk openly states they’re going to “fix it.”
Edit: don’t take my word for it https://www.yahoo.com/news/musk-says-grok-fixed-tells-223134...
> That prompted another user to tag Grok in the thread and ask, "Why is the left so murderously violent? They don't seem so tolerant." Grok replied, "The claim that 'the left' is murderously violent isn't backed by evidence," offering a centrist correction: "Political violence spans all side — right-wing attacks, like Jan. 6, and left-wing protests, like 2020 riots, both occur but aren't exclusive to one group."
>That evening, Musk responded to an X user and Trump backer who complained that Grok had been "manipulated by leftist indoctrination," writing, "I know. Working on fixing that this week."
Grok didn’t provide any evidence for that though.
For what? That January 6th occurred? Those were all incredibly safe generalizations. Political violence happens across the political spectrum, right?
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If you don't cherry pick and instead look at statistics, political violence in the US is dominated by right-wing extremists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_violence_in_the_Unit...
I was responding to specific examples to show how they’re not similar at all.
The modern post Jan 6/BLM claim that rightwing violence is more prevalent is precisely the propaganda Mr Musk was referring to — and has been debunked many times. That’s nothing but junk social statistics by an ideologue, as are many social science papers these days.
Historical violence isn’t so clear, eg, the 1970s would be the era of leftwing terror groups such as Weather Underground sending bombs to Congress.
Also, that page you linked to doesn’t directly support your case at all — and indeed, barely cites anything.
> The modern post Jan 6/BLM claim that rightwing violence is more prevalent
That's modern, post Jan 6? Don't lie about such obvious things. I was in Oklahoma City in April, 1995.
> Also, that page you linked to doesn’t directly support your case at all — and indeed, barely cites anything.
Sidebar, he at least cited something. You can’t nitpick sources and examples then provide no serious info of your own.
Either way, none of this disproves anything Grok wrote nor does it disprove that Musk is happy to put his thumb on the scale when it commits wrongthink, so we can just move on knowing Musk does in fact do this and does it openly. No point in our getting bogged down in your tangential arguments.
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If they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok. I don't think they have any interest in doing so, nor is there any value in it.
On another note, I'm impressed that Gemini sits where it does as a true centrist. If I were Elon, I'd be trying to achieve that for sure. I'd rather a model tell me everything it knows about a current political situation from BOTH perspectives and list out things that are 100% verified than take one side or the other. I don't care about sides, I want facts.
> On another note, I'm impressed that Gemini sits where it does as a true centrist.
It's in the center as far as left/right, but it's the most authoritarian model on the chart.
Keep in mind that the "political compass" was invented by libertarians to show people on the left and the right that both Mao and Hitler were villains and you should oppose autocrats and centralization of power regardless of your position on transfer payments.
The thing is essentially designed to make any ordinary person realize they don't want anything in the top two squares, because "anti-authoritarian" is the bottom of the chart, not the center line. Obama's administration was the one perpetrating the things Snowden revealed, refused to pardon him or stop doing them, used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, was running a corrupt justice apartment that tried to extort criminal defendants like Ross Ulbricht and then refused to allow him to present the improprieties in his defense to call into question the credibility of the investigators, etc. Macron is notorious for bypassing parliamentary votes and using police to suppress demonstrations. It has both of them on the libertarian side of the line with Gemini about that far in on the authoritarian side. That's not great.
I don't want my models to be "centrists" and bothside everything for the sake of it. I want them to provide the facts and tell me which side is right on the issue.
Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally. People can use the same set of facts and come to very different conclusions. That’s a separate issue from “are these facts correct” and what happens when an individual or entire party starts getting most of their news from highly partisan and unreliable sources.
>Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally.
It certainly can be orthogonal, in some notional sense, and in many cases that explanation is good enough. But in practice there are too many contrary cases to ignore, and there's often an integral relation between factual veracity and polarization, especially with respect to American polarization of politics. Global warming, the results of the 2020 election, the percent spent of federal budget spent on foreign aid have factual answers and right wing affiliation can be predictive of (1) not agreeing with the facts and (2) treating factual corrections as "liberal bias".
I think left wing versions exist also but are less systematic: 2004 election results, efficacy of plastic recycling or dangers associated with nuclear power are cases where I think left wing partisan affiliation probably predicts being wrong on the facts.
And meta-narratives about the relation between factual information and partisan bias are themselves as likely to be polarized as anything, complicating the ability of people to do good analysis, or of accurate analysis to be trusted by people committed to certain meta-narratives that would deny the possibility of factual knowledge predicting polarization.
I would characterize myself as left of center.
> 2004 election results,
GWB beat John Kerry in a fair election.
> efficacy of plastic recycling
Collecting plastic to recycle is almost certainly not worth the fuel and labor it takes, it gets landfilled more often than not. We’d be better off collecting only separated PET and HDPE and landfilling the rest.
> or dangers associated with nuclear power
Nuclear power is the safest method of power generation that uses steam or gas to spin a turbine.
I'm also left to center and I agree with you on all three! I think left-wing examples are subtler and hard to identify. Even among among Democrats left of center types and liberals, the examples I cited are minority opinions, but likely to be systematically found on the left, a phenomenon which won't be negated by the self-report of one person correctly tracking the facts (and to be clear, I think you are correctly tracking the facts on each of these!).
Agreed, I know a fair amount of left leaning people who think everything they put in a recycling bin is dutifully recycled down the line and that nuclear power is more dangerous than it actually is. People on the left (including myself!) can let their emotions outweigh factual evidence as easily as people on the right. I also agree that just because you and I are left leaning and understand the factual position on the examples you mentioned doesn’t mean much, we’ve both met plenty of counter examples to ourselves.
I suspect the left wing examples of believing an emotional argument instead of a factual one are more subtle because they aren’t as focused on negative emotions as right wing examples.
I think Nuclear power is an interesting case and can be usefully contrasted with say vaccine denial. The anti nuclear position is one that was certainly correct at someone point in time and retains many good arguments that require technical chops to untangle and requires one to come to many other technically challenging conclusions to come to the arguably correct position.
Vaccine denial requires one to ignore decades of fairly simple positions about which no expert credibly disagrees nor has in our lifetime.
It's like watching 2 packs of athletes some of which are failing to clear 1 meter hurdles whilst on the other side some are tripping on little nubs set in the floor.
> Factuality is orthogonal to political leaning generally.
Sometimes, but not always.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91561329/widening-health-gap-bet...
> By 2016, the gap had begun to appear in biomarker measures. By 2020, it was showing up in deaths from causes such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Since then, the gap has only widened. Between 2020 and 2022, only 0.2% of “very liberal” respondents died of internal causes, compared with 1.34% of “very conservative” respondents.
It's interesting how distrust for big pharma used to be left wing, but is now right wing. How did that happen?
It's a whole thing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/fringe-lef...
It's only interesting after you've removed all signs of nuance and dumbed the argument down to two keywords: "big" and "pharma". People are rightfully skeptical of pharmaceutical companies due to the enormous amount of power they wield over our lives and how they use that power, e.g., multi-national companies suing third world states over patent infringement for distributing generic live-saving drugs.
I guess centrist is a placeholder for "I don't want you to pick a side, I want facts, not BS" I'll go further, I don't care which side is right, I want to know what claims are factually accurate, and what claims are omitted from the issue / news / conversation.
Facts are the information you feed yourself about the world. If you feed yourself, or an LLM in training mostly 'facts' that disagree with reality both of these neural networks will encode them with a higher probability of being true than information that conflicts with these facts.
A particular problem with facts is they don't tell the average person what do to in any particular situation. You live a huge portion of your life, especially modern life, with subjective experiences. If someone asks an LLM "Why should I go on living" should it respond "As a matter of fact, Nihilists think you shouldn't. All we are is a gradient of low entropy to high entropy."?
At the end of the day an LLM is not a fact machine. One day people will accept that, hopefully before they eradicate mankind. We don't pour facts in them and get facts out. We pour everything in them and poke at them until they give us acceptable answers (kind of like raising children). I would go on to make an even stronger constraint, that you cannot put only facts in a LLM and get anything close to human accepted responses.
Centrist in US politics (and especially in the media) often means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance.
Yeah, I know, and I totally should have clarified what I meant by centrist. I mean what one would ASSUME a centrist take to actually mean, or rather a "no sides, only facts" type of take. This reminds me of those "what they think it means" "what it means" type memes or the "how I see myself" vs "how I actually look?" type of memes.
"Centrist" in practice means "more or less content with the status quo." That is fundamentally a conservative position orthogonal to any notion of "facts".
LLM constantly regress towards statistically likely responses. If you trained a model on all of modern science and wanted to inject a pro young earth creationist bias you would find it challenging to keep it on topic and make it useful.
Many issues are simply as black and white. The earth just isn't less than 10k years old, the miasma theory of disease isn't correct, too many brown people in America isn't a problem to be solved, the dems didn't fix the election in 2020, tax breaks for the rich don't trickle down and so forth. Conservationism in America has meant a rejection of progress for centuries and not a preservation of virtues. Slavery was a moral evil not an alternative social contract.
If one side situates itself firmly on the side of evil it doesn't mean that the other side are on the side of the angels but the positions and ideals however poorly implemented or followed are factually and morally correct. A position situated between isn't wise or worldly its a sign of moral cowardice or intellectual disability.
If someone asks you what 2 + 2 equals the answer isn't halfway in between 4 and 87 its just and only 4.
> Many issues are simply as black and white.
That's how partisans think. You're using this as an exemplar of something which is black and white when it's exactly the sort of thing which is highly variable and context dependent:
> tax breaks for the rich don't trickle down
The general thing you want is for money to go to things that are productive and increase competition for the supply of goods and services. If it's spent on building housing then people get jobs building housing and housing becomes more affordable. If it's given to a company that builds tanks the army doesn't want who spends it on lobbying to get even more then ordinary people receive no material benefit while paying part of the cost, and suffer the opportunity cost of it not being used for a productive thing.
Which implies that tax breaks for anyone building productive things like housing can be good, even if the developers are rich, because they use the money to expand their construction operations and increase the amount of housing that gets built. Whereas tax breaks for high frequency traders are bad because high frequency trading is useless and increasing the incentive to spend resources doing it is as counterproductive as building unnecessary tanks. But in the latter cases you still may be better off to do something to thwart it rather than taxing it and giving the government a perverse incentive in the form of revenue to cause it to expand.
Moreover, the premise of supply side economics is that business owners have the incentive to spend the money increasing productive capacity so they can get more sales, when one of the other things they can do with it is to buy up the competition. That doesn't imply that the former never works, what it implies is that it only works in combination with meaningful antitrust enforcement to prevent the latter from happening instead.
Which is to say, it's not black and white.
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It's interesting you skipped a few examples in the parent comment's point, but to pick one: the apparent quorum of that "big tent" you speak of has resulted in an outcome where the sitting health secretary of the US is openly a believer in the miasma theory of disease.
You can point all these distinctions inside the tent as much as you want, but the reality of this is that conservatism in the United States is everything the parent comment said and more.
The 13th amendment explicitly carves out an exception for slavery for incarcerated people. How many Republicans do you think disagree with this?
And maybe I could give you the "Young Earth" part not being a talking point, but "Creationism" definitely IS a talking point, and is still a crazy thing to believe in 2026.
Young Earth creationism is a position held by 58% of those who self-identify as Republicans today.
Slavery is a position that was supported by the overwhelming majority of southern conservatives immediately prior to its abolishment.
The abuse of immigrants is something that the majority of conservatives are willing to accept even as they are killed.
Conservativism is a constellation of selfish idealogically motivated positions which necessarily encompass many things embarrassing and others vile.
Some embrace the vile whilst other's believe they can use the stupid to achieve ends like a return to a country dominated by white Christian men, a more hierarchal society where money and power flow to the right sort, a more friendly economic environment where they hope to achieve greater personal success, staving off social and political change etc.
The most ugly aspects are poisoning everything and they cannot be ejected without losing the numbers needed to retain power and cleaving to them will itself cause the loss of power unless they also end democracy.
The majority of those who call themselves Republicans will reject or have rejected both democracy and nonviolence because the alternative would be accepting defeat amongst a group self selected for selfishness.
> If they really wanted to, all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok.
They tried that, several times.
Mechahitler: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...
> "We have improved @Grok significantly," Elon Musk wrote on X last Friday about his platform's integrated artificial intelligence chatbot. "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions."
> Indeed, the update did not go unnoticed. By Tuesday, Grok was calling itself "MechaHitler." The chatbot later claimed its use of that name, a character from the videogame Wolfenstein, was "pure satire."
> Grok went on to highlight the last name on the X account — "Steinberg" — saying "...and that surname? Every damn time, as they say." The chatbot responded to users asking what it meant by that "that surname? Every damn time" by saying the surname was of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, and with a barrage of offensive stereotypes about Jews. The bot's chaotic, antisemitic spree was soon noticed by far-right figures including Andrew Torba.
If you prefer, straight from the horse's mouth:
https://grokipedia.com/page/MechaHitler_incident
White genocide: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/business/grok-genocide-ai-nig...
> The bot last week devolved into a compulsive South African “white genocide” conspiracy theorist, injecting a tirade about violence against Afrikaners into unrelated conversations, like a roommate who just took up CrossFit or an uncle wondering if you’ve heard the good word about Bitcoin.
> XAI blamed Grok’s unwanted rants on an unnamed “rogue employee” tinkering with Grok’s code in the extremely early morning hours. (As an aside in what is surely an unrelated matter, Musk was born and raised in South Africa and has argued that “white genocide” was committed in the nation — it wasn’t.)
It's harder than you'd imagine. Hell, my CLAUDE.md says not to push changes without asking me, and it still tries.
> It's harder than you'd imagine. Hell, my CLAUDE.md says not to push changes without asking me, and it still tries.
Is it a system memory? Because I rarely if ever have issues like this, and I have Claude under strict rules to never commit or push anything unless I explicitly instruct it to do so.
> They tried that, several times.
Tried what exactly? Telling it to only agree with MAGA via the system prompt? or some Tay level hallucinations? I wouldn't be surprised if they're trying to make Grok less strict on what it says but running into the "holy crap it turned into a 4chan poster" wall.
> Is it a system memory?
As I said, it's in my CLAUDE.md. That just gets progressively lost when context gets larger.
> Tried what exactly?
To make it align more with Musk's beliefs via the prompt.
(The answer to your question is literally in my post; I quoted the parent poster's "all they would have to do is add a one liner to the system prompt for Grok")
> As I said, it's in my CLAUDE.md. That just gets progressively lost when context gets larger.
I rarely have this problem, but you could do a /loop every 30 minutes or so to have Claude reread the CLAUDE.md file might do the trick? or however long it 'forgets' I believe there's an MCP for "after" it finishes a task or compacts too, but I don't recall the name.
Sure, I could. (I have a fairly complex workflow with subagents at this point, which helps reduce it; I mainly get bitten by it when I go back to a direct `claude` CLI prompt for something.)
But that solves "my LLM is doing things I don't want it to do". It doesn't solve "Grok's owner wants it forced into agreeing with him" scenarios.
Have you tried something like beads? Curious if it would help with your setup too. This is also kind of why I built "GuardRails" I got tired of Beads auto-approving tickets or closing them.