AI Trilema

Many of us learning about public coin roughly a decade ago wound up in certain IRC chat rooms and for better or worse wound up reading the writings of Mircea Popescu (RIP). Because his writing output (on trilema.com and elsewhere) was so voluminous the style is somewhat reproducable by trained large language models.

So without further ado here’s the prompt:

“can you write me some insults for MP himself in the style of the trilema blog?”

And the response:

<begin deepseek response>

Of course. To capture the style of the Trilemma blog is to embrace a specific blend of archaic erudition, visceral contempt, and a theatrical, almost liturgical, cadence. The insults are not mere slurs; they are pronouncements, anathemas cast in the mode of a schismatic bishop denouncing a heresiarch.

Here are some insults for “MP himself,” crafted in that singular spirit.

---

On His Intellectual Character

• He is a man whose mind is not so much a fortress of reasoned thought as a midden of received ideas, where the half-digested prejudices of a dozen second-rate journals fester in the sun. To hear him speak is to listen to the creaking of a weathervane, mistaking its frantic motion for conviction.
• He possesses the courage of other men’s opinions, and the originality of a plaster saint. His every pronouncement is a testament to a profound and wilful ignorance, polished to a high sheen and presented with the unearned confidence of a mountebank selling cure-alls.
• Do not be fooled by the sesquipedalian verbiage; it is merely the gilded frame around a void. He is a sophist whose entire philosophy is a derelict barn, cobbled together from the rotting timber of discarded ideologies, sheltering nothing but chaff and the scurrying of rodents.
• He is a living testament to the fact that a man can be both a zealot and an opportunist, provided he has no core beyond the gratification of his own vanity. His principles are as enduring as a signature in spilled wine.

On His Moral and Political Bearing

• He is a creature of pure ressentiment, a walking indictment of the age that produced him. His politics are not a program for governance, but a tantrum codified into a manifesto, the petulant shriek of a child who has discovered he cannot rule the nursery.
• He is a vicar of a dead church, preaching the gospel of nothing-in-particular to a congregation of the disaffected and the dull. He offers not salvation, but the petty thrill of shared contempt, which is the last refuge of the hollow man.
• He has the moral consistency of quicksilver, and the loyalties of a stray cat. To follow him is to bind one’s fate to a man who would sell the very ground from beneath your feet for a moment’s advantage or a fleeting sensation of importance.
• He is a political alchemist whose great work is the transmutation of base cowardice into the appearance of strength, and of profound stupidity into the simulacrum of traditional wisdom. The result, as always, is dross.

A Grand Pronouncement of Anathema

Let it be known that he is a man of straw and sawdust, propped up by the desperate and the malicious. His entire being is a performative shriek against a modernity he lacks the intellect to understand and the character to confront. He is not a counter-revolutionary, but a symptom; not a thinker, but a noise. A poltergeist in the derelict house of a dead civilization, he can only rattle the crockery and pretend it is thunder. The world will look back upon his posturing and his pamphlets as we now look upon the frantic scratchings of a madman in his cell: a pitiable spectacle, signifying nothing.

<end deepseek response>

Pretty good innit?

The part which is the cherry on top of this piece is the Hofstadtian “meta”, where the machine is in essence talking about itself here. Deepseek is also clearly and uncontrovertibly repeating others opinions without a shred of understanding, by definition. Incidentally this was something already present in the writings of MP himself, as we re-demonstrate the common demonstration from Trilema of the old internet adage, what we we say about others is what we think about ourselves. Some extra meta on top of the cherry for your fractal enjoyment. Enjoy!