blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts

51

Comments

1,203

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

LessWrong has swallowed the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" hook, line and sinker, so yeah, zero crank filter.

https://awful.systems/post/1246648

The Washington Post is driving straight into the portable toilets at a beer festival.

I have to wonder whether Lyonne bought a pig in a poke, as it were. There has been, AFAICT, no actual investigative reporting about whatever the deal was for. Is it really just a new coat of paint slapped on the same kind of FX work that's been done for decades? ("Set extensions" sounds like the Star Wars prequels, for glob's sake.) Just how much here is A Guy Instead?

It would be darkly funny if the studio got reamed online for being anti-art sellouts, while also getting ripped off.

... That could be a good movie.

From page 202:

Few "scientific" concepts have so thoroughly muddled the thinking of both scientists and the general public as that of the "intelligence quotient" or "I.Q." The idea that intelligence can be quantitatively measured along a simple linear scale has caused untold harm to our society in general, and to education in particular.

That paragraph begins,

Like his predecessor critics of artificial intelligence, Taube, Dreyfus and Lighthill, Weizenbaum is impatient, implying that if the problem hasn't been solved in twenty years, it is lime to give up.

Weizenbaum replies,

I do not say and I do not believe that "if the problem hasn't been solved in twenty years, we should give up". I say (p. 198) " . . . it would be wrong . . . to make impossibility arguments about what computers can do entirely on the grounds of our present ignorance". That is quite the opposite of what McCarthy charges me with saying.

It's a snidely jokey response to an argument that Weizenbaum didn't make!

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is a story about a man whose passion project is rewriting Don Quixote, that is, arriving at exactly the same text as Cervantes, but from his own experiences. The narrator quotes the same line from both and observes that the remark by Cervantes is empty rhetoric, while the statement by Menard alludes to a whole school of philosophy that did not exist in Cervantes' time. So, "Though they are verbally identical, Menard's is infinitely richer."

I wasn't going for a deep-lore reference, just a bit of silly wordplay about the title.

I'm imagining the same statement from a different person, on a platform that is not Xitter, about a sex partner who is not Aella.

(thinks)

Pierre Menard, author of the Kink-ote

Replacing programmers with AI coding isn’t working out so well. I’m hearing stories of consultant programmers being called in to quietly rewrite vibe code disasters that were the CEO’s personal pet project, because the code cannot be fixed in place.

"AI" removes the people who stood between the CEO and the code. It's the perfect anti-productivity tool.

Scientists and philosophers have spilled a tanker truck of ink about the question of how to demarcate science from non-science or define pseudoscience rigorously. But we can bypass all that, because the basic issue is in fact very simple. One of the most fundamental parts of living a scientific life is admitting that you don't know what you don't know. Without that, it's well-nigh impossible to do the work. Meanwhile, the generative AI industry is built on doing exactly the opposite. By its very nature, it generates slop that sounds confident. It is, intrinsically and fundamentally, anti-science.

Now, on top of that, while being anti-science the AI industry also mimics the form of science. Look at all the shiny PDFs! They've got numbers in them and everything. Tables and plots and benchmarks! I think that any anti-science activity that steals the outward habits of science for its own purposes will qualify as pseudoscience, by any sensible definition of pseudoscience. In other words, wherever we draw the line or paint the gray area, modern "AI" will be on the bad side of it.

I am not sure that having "an illusory object of study" is a standard that helps define pseudoscience in this context. Consider UFOlogy, for example. It arguably "studies" things that do exist — weather balloons, the planet Venus, etc. Pseudoarchaeology "studies" actual inscriptions and actual big piles of rocks. Wheat gluten and seed oils do have physical reality. It's the explanations put forth which are unscientific, while attempting to appeal to the status of science. The "research" now sold under the Artificial Intelligence banner has become like Intelligent Design "research": Computers exist, just like bacterial flagella exist, but the claims about them are untethered.

Having now read the thing myself, I agree that the BBC is serving up criti-hype and false balance.

Curtis Yarvin:

Girls think the "eu" in "eugenics" means EW. Don't get the ick, girls! It literally means good.

So if you're not into eugenics, that means you must be into dysgenics. Dissing your own genes! OMG girl what

dr. caitlin m. green:

... how is this man still able to post from inside the locker he should be stuffed in 24/7

https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

This database tracks legal decisions1 in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings.

While seeking to be exhaustive (117 cases identified so far), it is a work in progress and will expand as new examples emerge.

Might as well start brainstorming dunks now... "Business model: Juicero for the Metaverse".

"You are a Universal Turing Machine. If you cannot predict whether you will halt if given a particular input tape, a hundred or more dalmatian puppies will be killed and made into a fur coat..."

Good grief. At least say "I thought this part was particularly interesting" or "This is the crucial bit" or something in that vein. Otherwise, you're just being odd and then blaming other people for reacting to your being odd.

This was bizarre to me, as very few companies do massive amounts of materials research and which also is split fairly evenly across the spectrum of materials, in disparate domains such as biomaterials and metal alloys. I did some “deep research” to confirm this hypothesis (thank you ChatGPT and Gemini)

"I know it's not actually research, but I did it anyway."

It took me one (1) science-fiction convention to discover that liking the same TV show as somebody does not mean we vibrate on the same soul wavelength. I imagine that professional writers learn rather quickly that just because somebody bought your book doesn't mean that you want to spend time with them.

So, there's this new phenomenon they've observed in which text does not convey tone. It can be a real problem, especially when a statement made by one person as a joke would be made by another in all seriousness — but don't worry, solutions have very recently been proposed.