Architeuthis

Architeuthis, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Alexandros Marinos, whom I read as engaged-with-but-skeptical-of the “Rationalist” community, says:

Seeing as Marinos’ whole beef with Siskind was about the latter’s dismissal of invermectin as a potent anti-covid concoction, I would hesitate to cite him as an authority on research standards.

Article worth it just for mentioning Scotty hilariously attempting to whitewash phrenology for counter-culture clout, found in another account that seems to be deep in a covid conspiracy rabbit hole at the moment.

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/755791fe-5cc5-4257-8a44-8747ba4df403.png

Architeuthis, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

To be really precise it was about measuring the size and distribution of all sorts of skull irregularities (the proverbial ‘bumps’) and mapping them to various traits, it’s basically palm reading for the head.

Siskind is just being his usual disingenuous self, i.e. ‘everyone always uses skull shape’ (to indicate that my intellectual precursors were clowns) is obviously referencing phrenology, then immediately motte-and-baiieys it to a claim of correlation of cranial capacity and IQ.

Except for M&B sleight of hand to work the claim shift shouldn’t happen in the same sentence, otherwise it’s extremely obvious that you are claiming one thing while carrying water for the other thing (phrenology), which is probably why he ended up deleting the post.

Architeuthis, 4 days ago

Either that or he let his performative contrarianism get out of hand, he did delete the post after all.

Still, it’s just like an HBD enthusiast heavy into eugenic optimisation to think that there might be something to measuring skulls, even if it didn’t pan out the first time, maybe if they had known about IQ it would have been different, it’s a shame the woke mob has made using calipers on school children a crime, etc.

Architeuthis, 3 days ago

Also, since no one has mentioned it in the comments so far, it says he used to actually send money to fucking Quillete.

Architeuthis, 2 days ago

That’s the trouble with talking about thoroughly disingenuous people, you get bogged down with defining if they meant to mean what they wrote. It’s all optics.

Architeuthis, 5 days ago

Did the Aella moratorium from r/sneerclub carry over here?

Because if not

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/7695d330-b809-44c2-a227-e679fc77b430.png

for the record, im currently at ~70% that we’re all dead in 10-15 years from AI. i’ve stopped saving for retirement, and have increased my spending and the amount of long-term health risks im taking

Architeuthis, 11 days ago

Also there was a whole thing about how CGTP tends to use ‘delve’ a lot because it’s been RLHF’d by speakers of nigerian english, so yeah.

Architeuthis, 11 days ago

The slatestar subreddit is doing its regular so what’s up with all the racists constantly crawling out of the woodwork around here surprised pikachu thread, in response to Scotty doing Hanania Week in the substack.

Architeuthis, 11 days ago

HBD is a legit line of scientific inquiry you guys, it’s not just eugenics obsessed weirdoes and fascists trying to bring back birthright as the primary path to privilege.

Architeuthis, 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago)

You can like a thinker without endorsing all of their beliefs, even if their beliefs are evil. Why do people like Schmitt and Heidegger even though they were fascists? Or Foucault given his views on the age of consent? I agree that Hanania’s views are relevant context, but I think it’s fine to write a book review that doesn’t try to analyse the author’s motivations or the book’s place in a wider political context.

Hanania is clearly analogous to Foucault and Heidegger, and also is it even wrong to completely divorce a work from all context.

I think Scott was simply more interested in writing an article on arguments aginst civil rights law than an article on whether Hanania is engaged in an insidious project to smuggle rascist ideas into the mainstream via his legal arguments, and frankly I find that kind of review more interesting too. Perphaps this is irresponsible, but at the end of the day Scott is a modestly influential blogger that just likes to write about things he finds interesting.

uwu smolbean blogger with absolutely no agenda besides the pursuit of truth and civility strikes again.

Architeuthis, 10 days ago

This is almost the plot of The Fifth Season, a hugo winner from a while back.

Architeuthis, 17 days ago

They say at one point that by being flaky, aloof and indifferent while rich SBF may have accidentally discovered the rules of pickup artistry for VCs, which is not a bad take.

Architeuthis, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Over time FHI faced increasing administrative headwinds within the Faculty of Philosophy (the Institute’s organizational home). Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.

Sound like Oxford increasingly did not want anything to do with them.

edit: Here’s a 94 page “final report” that seems more geared towards a rationalist audience.

Wonder what this was about:

Why we failed […] There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities. When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders is important.

Architeuthis, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

American white supremacist, pedophilia apologist, alt-right pseudointellectual, grifter, transphobe, anti-feminist, ableist, eugenicist and fake contrarian Richard Hanania jumps on the siskind-is-basically-a-prophet bandwagon in order to (checks notes) shill designer mouth bacteria.

If I had a 1980s sitcom mom sitting next to me here, she might ask “If Scott Alexander told you to jump off a bridge, would you do that too?” To which I’d respond probably not, but I would spend some time considering the possibility that I had a fundamentally flawed understanding of the laws of gravity.

Architeuthis, 1 month ago

Sad upvote.

Architeuthis, 1 month ago

Promptfondler proudly messes with oss project (OpenAI subreddit)

To be clear nothing in the post makes me think they actually did what they are claiming, from doing non-specific ‘fixes’ to never explicitly saying what the project is other that that it is ‘major’ and ‘used by many’ to the explicit ‘{next product iteration} is gonna be so incredible you guys’ tone of the post, it’s just the thought of random LLM enthusiasts deciding en masse to play programmer on existing oss projects that makes my hairs stand on end.

Here they are explaining their process

It’s code reading and copy pasta.

Architeuthis, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

At least they get called on being a word salad merchant in that sub, the response in r/openai is basically rapturous.

Architeuthis, 1 month ago

there are errors and you read them into the ai. Someone alerted that a build wasn’t working.

Somebody set up us the bomb. Main screen turn on.

Architeuthis, 1 month ago

HPTMOR is so obviously and unequivocally terrible that I can’t help thinking I must be missing something significant about it, like how it could be scratching a very specific itch in young people on the spectrum.

As always, all bets are off if it happens to be the first long form literature someone read.

Architeuthis, 1 month ago

Yet AI researcher Pablo Villalobos told the Journal that he believes that GPT-5 (OpenAI’s next model) will require at least five times the training data of GPT-4.

I tried finding the non-layman’s version of the reasoning for this assertion and it appears to be a very black box assessment, based on historical trends and some other similarly abstracted attempts at modelling dataset size vs model size.

This is EpochAI’s whole thing apparently, not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. I was just hoping for some insight into dataset length vs architecture and maybe the gossip on what’s going on with the next batch of LLMs, like how it eventually came out that gpt4.x is mostly several gpt3.xs in a trench coat.

Architeuthis, 1 month ago

Surely an April Fools’ thing?

Still, if it’s just a parody someone seems to have gone above and beyond in generating content for it.

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/70a10ba6-fc0d-485f-85d4-7d2a993bd1b2.png

Architeuthis, 1 month ago

If I remember correctly SBF taking the stand was completely against his lawyers’ recommendations, and in general he seems to have a really hard time doing what people who know better tell him to, such as don’t DM journalists about your crimes and definitely don’t start a substack detailing how you felt justified in doing them, and also trying to ‘explain yourself’ to prosecution witnesses is witness tampering and will get your bail revoked.

Architeuthis, 1 month ago

Guy who was previously featured here for championing the merits of dropping the n-word when meeting new (white) people in order to judge them worthy had an extensive twitter rant about how scott alexander may be an actual prophet, while quote-twitting another similarly afflicted person.

If you bother, which I barely did, this is what you’re in for:

Trace says Scott has given up his will to power. but it’s not a giveaway, it’s a trade: if you don’t seek power you retain the ability to seek unpolluted truth. here’s this tradeoff explained by Curtis Yarvin, another reluctant prophet, whom Scott has definitely read:

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