blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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"Conspiracy" is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).

A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:

Despite Malparti warning that "it would be a waste of time for everyone" I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as "the unique solution" to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be "eventually achieved", with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.

It's been a while since I've seen a math book review that said "Do not use for anything."

"This book is not a place of honor..."

Sometimes, checking the Talk page of a Wikipedia article can be entertaining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Markov_chain#Proposal_to_reintroduce_peer-reviewed_source_(Wiley,_2017)

In short: There has been a conspiracy to insert citations to a book by a certain P. Gagniuc into Wikipedia. This resulted in said book gaining about 900 citations on Google Scholar from people who threw in a footnote for the definition of a Markov chain. The book, Markov Chains: From Theory to Implementation and Experimentation (2017), is actually really bad. Some of the comments advocating for its inclusion read like chatbot (bland, generic, lots of bullet points). Another said that it should be included because it's "the most reliable book on the subject, and the one that is part of ChatGPT training set".

This has been argued out over at least five different discussion pages.

I'd say that Scott Adams posting under a pseudonym on Metafilter about how Scott Adams was a certified genius was the most entertaining he's ever been.

...a trip to an alternate universe, a road not taken, a vision of a different life where you get up and start the day in dialogue with Agnes Callard

Who? Oh, right, her:

In 2011, Callard divorced her husband, fellow University of Chicago professor Ben Callard, who she had married in 2003.[20] She began a relationship with Arnold Brooks, who was a graduate student at the time.

Dear fellow academics: Live so that the "Personal life" section of your Wikipedia article is empty.

I think I speak for everyone here when I say, "Ew."

And I also think that long-term, the historiography of this stuff will lean more heavily on Kurzweil as a source than Yudkowsky, because Kurzweil is better-organized and professionally published.

That is interesting to think about. (Something feels almost defiant about imagining a future that has history books and PhD theses.) My own feeling is that Yudkowsky brought something much more overtly and directly culty. Kurzweil's vibe in The Age of Spiritual Machines and such was, as I recall, "This is what the scientists say, and this is why that implies the Singularity." By contrast, Yudkowsky was saying, "The scientists are insufficiently Rational to accept the truth, so listen to me instead. Academia bad, blog posts good." He brought a more toxic variation, something that emotionally resonated with burnout-trending Gifted Kids in a way that Kurzweil's silly little graphs did not. There was no Rationality as self-help angle in Kurzweil, no mass of text whose sheer bulk helped to establish an elect group of the saved.

Autocorrect-ism for "metaverse", perhaps?

Sheesh. Everyone knows you keep the phenethylamines inside the fridge proper, not on the door, where the temperature is less stable. (Source: the Shulgins' Kitchen Procedures I Have Known And Loved.)

(Ozymandias voice) "I fully commit to acausal theory twenty-five minutes from now."

"First, he started his blog with the deliberate goal of giving a veneer of respectability to racist pseudoscience. Second, everything else...."

The report received feedback from ~100 AI experts (myself included)

"It's Shake and Bake — and I helped!"

I'm trying to imagine how a John Oliver sketch would introduce them. "The kind of nerds who make you think the jocks in '80s movies had a reasonable point got together and sold 'science' and 'rational thinking' as self-help, without truly understanding either, and it got very culty."

Charts 5 and 7 in particular are giving Pyramid Power and/or Flat Earth.

"Drink deep, or taste not the fanfiction spring"

That image needs a content warning for YouTube Face. Jesus H. Fuck.

8 thousand words of Daria/Hellraiser crossover fic has not been enough to get me invited anywhere.

Laudatory quote number 3 is from Cremieux....

... the EAristocrats!

Good grief, this brings me back to college.

The NYT also ran this little story about Bloomberg having "to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this year".

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/business/media/bloomberg-ai-summaries.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k4.rrgt.pt3AGFekgpT3