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.”

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!

There’s just something so … basic about HPMOR. Oh, so you wrote a Harry Potter story? Targeted at emotionally vulnerable neurodivergent young people? That’s playing fanfiction on easy mode. Meanwhile, people are out there inventing a whole sui generis fandom about humanity being force-femmed by communist space plants. I don’t understand it, but (stirring brass band) by Gad, I respect it.

One erratum: the review that goes into how HPMOR’s science is bad was by “su3su2u1”, not Dan Luu (who just archived it from the original Tumblr).

On that note, I would recommend perusing Underwood Dudley’s Mathematical Cranks, not so much for the details of any math topic like trisecting an angle, but for the tone and psychology of the crank letters.

One area where I don’t know of good recommendations is theoretical computer science. I am not sure what to suggest that would accessibly teach topics like algorithmic/Kolmogorov information theory without sliding downhill into “we can automate the scientific method” crankery. Or, perhaps, which teaches the relevant concepts clearly and solidly enough to make it obvious that LW use of them is crankery.

Another suggestion: Instead of indulging in LW-style Feynman worship, read James Gleick’s biography of him. It does a pretty good job covering the actual science while giving a warts-and-all portrayal of the man.

Does this need to be marked NSFW? I think the joke about tagging the more serious posts that way ran its course a while ago, and we haven’t been sticking to it.

For an exposition of Bayesian probability by people who actually know math, there’s Ten Great Ideas About Chance by Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms (Princeton University Press, 2018). And for an interesting slice of the history of the subject, there’s Cheryl Misak’s Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (Oxford University Press, 2020).

For quantum physics, one recent offering is Barton Zwiebach’s Mastering Quantum Mechanics: Essentials, Theory, and Applications (MIT Press, 2022). I like the writing style and the structure of it, particularly how it revisits the same topics at escalating levels of sophistication. (I’d skip the Elitzur-Vaidman “bomb tester” thought experiment for reasons.)

The description of “The questions ChatGPT shouldn’t answer” doesn’t seem to go with the text. Did you mean to link something else?

Hashemi and Hall (2020) published research demonstrating that convolutional neural networks could distinguish between “criminal” and “non-criminal” facial images with a reported accuracy of 97% on their test set. While this paper was later retracted for ethical concerns rather than methodological flaws,

That’s not really a sentence that should begin with “While”, now, is it?

it highlighted the potential for facial analysis to extend beyond physical attributes into behavior prediction.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

(At the brainstorming session for terrible software names)

“PedoAI!”

The MIRI, CFAR, EA triumvirate promised not just that you could be the hero of your own story but that your heroism could be deployed in the service of saving humanity itself from certain destruction. Is it so surprising that this promise attracted people who were not prepared to be bit players in group housing dramas and abstract technical papers?

Good point.

Logic. Rationality. Intelligence. Somewhere in all these attempts to harness them for our shared humanity, they’d been warped and twisted to destroy it.

Oh, the warping and twisting started long before Ziz. (The Sequences are cult shit.)

LaSota and those in her orbit alleged that CFAR and its leadership were laced with anti-trans beliefs and practices. (“That’s preposterous,” one member of the rationalist community, who is also trans, told me. “Rationalists have the most trans people of any group I’ve seen that isn’t explicitly about being trans. You’d just show up at a math event or house party, and it would be 20 percent trans.”)

The leadership can’t be transphobic because 20% of the membership is trans. In related news, the United States government cannot be sexist because [breaks down into bleak and bitter laughter]

Don’t think in detail about the future superintelligence that can hug you and turn you into TANG!

I was tempted to give them their free ticket to the egress for saying “paint their discourse with the purples”.

All Person Of Interest fanfiction must by Internet law be extremely gay to spite Caviezel.

• The Fifth Element as a Root/Shaw story
• Pacific Rim as a Finch/Reese story