The Mad Hatter Works Out

An interesting exchange on Twitter between the mainstream media and the owner of Twitter, which came to my attention via @RMac18 and @karaswisher.

Over a year ago, an American professor wrote a column on MSNBC noting a trend of far right groups using fitness chat groups to recruit and radicalize young men. 

One of the co-founders of Open AI (yes, him) chose to interpret this as asserting that you're a nazi if you work out. There are several possible interpretations of this tweet.

The most unlikely explanation is that a person with a good STEM education and (supposedly) a high IQ has committed a serious error in elementary logic. As in some cats are grey therefore all grey objects are cats.

A slightly more plausible explanation is that the tweet was produced on their behalf by a large language model (LLM), operating a symmetric bi-logic (Matte-Blanco) rather than conforming to classical logic. In the dream world of the unconscious, or in the hallucinations of chat algorithms, the idea that all grey objects are cats might seem perfectly reasonable.

You might just as well say, added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, that I breathe when I sleep is the same thing as I sleep when I breathe! It is the same thing with you, said the Hatter.

However, the most likely explanation is that the message was deliberately designed to flout logical validity in order to generate the desired affective response - simultaneously appealing to audience A and provoking audience B. (I guess I must be in audience B.) Chasing clicks, as @zsk suggests elsewhere.

Many of the responses adopt similarly dodgy logic, including those that observe (ad hominem) that there are some fat and flabby people on the far right.

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Arwa Mahdawi, Why is EM borrowing insults from white supremacists? (Guardian, 11 July 2023)

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Pandemic fitness trends have gone extreme — literally (MSNBC, 22 March 2022)

For more on LLM and Matte-Blanco, see my post From Chat GPT to Infinite Sets (May 2023)