there were bits and pieces that made me feel like Jon Evans was being a tad too sympathetic to Elizer and others whose track record really should warrant a somewhat greater degree of scepticism than he shows, but i had to tap out at this paragraph from chapter 6:

Scott Alexander is a Bay Area psychiatrist and a writer capable of absolutely magnificent, incisive, soulwrenching work … with whom I often strongly disagree. Some of his arguments are truly illuminatory; some betray the intellectual side-stepping of a very smart person engaged in rationalization and/or unwillingness to accept the rest of the world will not adopt their worldview. (Many of his critics, unfortunately, are inferior writers who misunderstand his work, and furthermore suggest it’s written in bad faith, which I think is wholly incorrect.) But in fairness 90+% of humanity engages in such rationalization without even worrying about it. Alexander does, and challenges his own beliefs more than most.

the fact that Jon praises Scott’s half-baked, anecdote-riddled, Red/Blue/Gray trichotomy as “incisive” (for playing the hits to his audience), and his appraisal of the meandering transhumanist non-sequitur reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as “soulwrenching” really threw me for a loop.

and then the later description of that ultimately rather banal New York Times piece as “long and bad” (a hilariously hypocritical set of adjectives for a self-proclaimed fan of some of Scott’s work to use), and the slamming of Elizabeth Sandifer as being a “inferior writer who misunderstands Scott’s work”, for uh, correctly analyzing Scott’s tendencies to espouse and enable white supremacist and sexist rhetoric… yeah it pretty much tanks my ability to take what Jon is writing at face value.

i don’t get how after so many words being gentle but firm about Elizer’s (lack of) accomplishments does he put out such a full-throated defense of Scott Alexander (and the subsequent smearing of his “”“enemies”“”). of all people, why him?

they really are just sitting around the campfire telling the exact same shitty spooky story, back and forth, forever, aren’t they

“rat furry” :3

“(it’s short for rationalist)” >:(

What of the sources he is less favorably inclined towards? Unsurprisingly, he dismisses far-right websites like Taki’s Magazine (“Terrible source that shouldn’t be used for anything, except limited primary source use.”) and Unz (“There is no way in which using this source is good for Wikipedia.”) in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors. It’s more fruitful to examine his approach to more moderate or “heterodox” websites.

wait sorry hold on

in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors

so what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this, if the overwhelming majority of people already agree that far-right “news” sites like the examples given are full of garbage and shouldn’t be cited?

Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others

ahhhhhhh David made fun of some rationalist you like once and in turn you’ve elevated him to the Ubermensch of Woke, didn’t you

i started to read and just about choked when i got here

Why did evolution give most males so much testosterone instead of making low-T nerds? Obviously testosterone makes you horny and buff. But I think there is a second reason: you might kill yourself without it. Trans women have high suicide rates.

congrats on the most baffling, condescending explanation for the epidemic of suicidality among trans women. silly transes, it’s not the persistent and systemic transphobia that makes you want to kill yourself, it’s actually the fact that you have lower testosterone now. it’s just science! wait what? “trans men have high rates of suicide too”? nah probably not

Anecdotally, my smartest oldest brother had low sex-drive and small muscles and killed himself. Eliezer’s brother killed himself [citation needed] and if he was like Eliezer then he probably had low-T. My low-T nerd friends seemed kinda suicidal sometimes.

it was gross enough to watch this person try to prop up dead trans people to prove their point but even more bizarre to watch them do the same for their own older brother. not gonna even comment on the retroactive diagnoses based on “had small muscles” and “seemed suicidal to me”

and later in the footnotes

Nobody in the comments has presented any first-hand counter-evidence.

“nobody proved me wrong yet” is peak crank

You’re implicitly accepting that eventually AI will be better than you once it gets “good enough”. […] Only no, that’s not how it’s likely to go.

wait hold on. hold on for just a moment, and this is important:

Only no, that’s not how it’s likely to go.

i regret to inform you that thinking there’s even a possibility of an LLM being better than people is actively buying into the sci-fi narrative

well, except maybe generating bullshit at breakneck speeds. so as long as we aren’t living in a society based on bullshit we should be goo–… oh fuck

good longpost, i approve

honestly i wouldn’t be surprised if some AI companies weren’t cheating at AI metrics with little classically-programmed, find-and-replace programs. if for no other reason than i think the idea of some programmer somewhere being paid to browse twitter on behalf of OpenAI and manually program exceptions for “how many months does it take 9 women to make 1 baby” is hilarious