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6 hours agoOK, this isn’t about AI slop, but it is complaining about Wikipedia. Its article about that kind of “amnesia” named by gobshite Michael Crichton is shoddily sourced and seemingly in violation of the site’s policies.
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023
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Even setting aside the fact that Crichton coined the term in a climate-science-denial screed — which, frankly, we probably shouldn’t set aside — yeah, it’s just not good media literacy. A newspaper might run a superficial item about pure mathematics (on the occasion of the Abel Prize, say) and still do in-depth reporting about the US Supreme Court, for example. The causes that contribute to poor reporting will vary from subject to subject.
Remember the time a reporter called out Crichton for his shitty politics and Crichton wrote him into his next novel as a child rapist with a tiny penis? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I’m going to take the fact that this was downvoted independently by all three site admins as sufficient reason to escort this commenter to the egress.
That Wikipedia article is impressively terrible. It cites an opinion column that couldn’t spell Sokal correctly, a right-wing culture-war rag (The Critic) and a screed by an investment manager complaining that John Oliver treated him unfairly on Last Week Tonight. It says that the “Gell-Mann amnesia effect is similar to Erwin Knoll’s law of media accuracy” from 1982, which as I understand it violates Wikipedia’s policy.
By Crichton’s logic, we get to ignore Wikipedia now!
Also on the BlueSky-o-tubes today, I saw this from Ketan Joshi:
Used [hugging face]'s new tool to multiply 2 five digit numbers
Chatbot: wrong answer, 0.3 watthours
Calc: right answer, 0.00000011 watthours (2.5 million times less energy)
NOT THE (PORK-FILLED) BEES!
Is that the tomato scale guy?
“The man in the glowing rectangle is Mark Kretschmann, a technology enthusiast who has grown out of touch with all but the most venal human emotions. Mark is a leveller, in that he wants to drag all people down to his. But as Mark is about to discover, there’s no way to engineer a prompt for a map out of… the Twilight Zone.”
Vacant, glassy-eyed, plastic-skinned, stamped with a smiley face… “optimistic”
I mean, if the smiley were aligned properly, it would be a poster for a horror story about enforced happiness and mandatory beauty standards. (E.g., “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” from the famously subtle Twilight Zone.) With the smiley as it is, it’s just incompetent.
The only one I’ve met is Carlo Rovelli, at the APS March Meeting in 2019. We work in adjacent topics, but I don’t travel much. I know people who know him better, and I haven’t heard stories of him being horrible, for whatever that’s worth. He does come across as a bit of an eager self-promoter. I can easily imagine him accepting an invitation on the “a gig’s a gig” principle.
“Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’”
https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.bsky.social/post/3lne5zqaxyc2c
Yep, he’s been operating in obvious bad faith since the conceptual penis days, at least.
But I’m not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already
Yeah, I didn’t write at truly Rationalist length about it, but I did spend longer than was healthy.
An lesswrong:
countless articles that have ruined careers, stifled research, and brought entire fields of inquiry into undeserved disrepute.
uh-huh
An different lesswrong:
LLMs can provide reasonable fact-checks.
Christ on a futa dick
The closest I could find to an official statement is at the bottom here:
We are under advisement from counsel not to discuss any ongoing litigation in public at this time. We’ll let you know the status of the current issues when we are able to. Your patience and understanding are most appreciated.
Further up the page, an IP editor says that another user is probably TW; the user in question has since been blocked for “ban evasion”. Dunno what that’s about.
Dan Olson finds that “AI overviews” are not as constant as the northern star.
The phrase “don’t eat things that are made of glass” is a metaphorical one. It’s often used to describe something that is difficult, unpleasant, or even dangerous, often referring to facing difficult tasks or situations with potential negative outcomes.
But also,
The phrase “don’t eat things made of glass” is a literal warning against ingesting glass, as it is not intended for consumption and can cause serious harm. Glass is a hard, non-organic material that can easily break and cause cuts, damage to the digestive tract, and other injuries if swallowed.
Olson says,
Fantastic technology, glad society spent a trillion dollars on this instead of sidewalks.
Kicking off the week’s Stubsack with the evening’s example of “why do I know who these people are”:
Paul Graham approvingly mentions Jordan “Cremieux” Lasker as one who “has spoken out against both wokeness and authoritarianism”.
Via the above search, here’s some made-up bullshit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_self-improvement
And there’s a random LessWrong reference in the goddamn introduction here:
Ah! Further fucking around leads to a search query for all instances of
lesswrong.comin page source:
Buh bye now.