Redneck Lefty

a particularly Bluesky-flavored obnoxious reply is when you note a good thing a bad entity did (eg the 1992 apartheid referendum) and people are like "oh so you think apartheid was good? you support everything they ever did?? you want to hug and kiss the Sharpeville massacre???"

Do we have a name for this type of reply yet, like someone else pointing to waffles/pancakes?

Does this failure of rhetoric have a name yet?

Related: “There are serious problems with the proposed ways of addressing X.” “So you’re in favor of X.”

This the grandchild of Glenn Reynolds' etc "objectively pro-Saddam" shtick during the second Iraq war.

There's something magical about how very-online quantitative social scientists are letting AI Sokal Hoax their discipline.

Economists: we award Nobel Prizes for work on efficient institutions and minimizing transaction costs.
Also Economists: the review process at the American Economic Review.

Who loses from the Anthropic fight? Maybe Elon Musk and Alex Karp. Arbitrary state power can cut in many directions

"the enthusiasm of the Trump administration to threaten Anthropic with quasi-expropriation for not embracing its program 100%, suggests that [billionaires] are not nearly as safe as they might like to be, and that this is especially true of billionaires like Musk and Karp"

I also made episode 2

not now honey 🙄🙄

I'm making dark fantasy movies with our cats🙀 🧙‍♂️

"We should worry less about autonomous robots, and more about pseudo-autonomous systems embedded in bureaucracies that enable them to do things that they used not be able to do, but with a lot of slop."

Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?—Asterisk There’s a lot to like about the Rationalist community, but they do have a certain tendency to spawn — shall we say — high demand groups. We sent a card-carrying Rat to investigate what’s really going ...

9. It can reasonably be objected that the starry-eyed advocates of LLMs are themselves cultists. Even some inside the tribe accept that it is so! But too much Bluesky AI discourse reminds me of vintage Dawkins/Harris atheism - taking up the bad intellectual habits of those they condemn. Finis.

See also university administrators who want to use "AI" to justify doing what they already wanted to do.

Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh

Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below

Nonesuch A spellbinding tale about an ambitious young woman who must thwart an occult plot by time-traveling fascists during the chaos of the London Blitz—f...

You GUYS you GUYS

did you know we are less than a week from the new Francis Spufford????

www.simonandschuster.com/books/Nonesu...

Right up his alley, so to speak. 😀

this is the category error all the AI maximalists make

if I had to break down what I think the impact of AI would be by field, I'd have to first talk about which *subtasks* it's helping people with

the amount of variability by field and task is MASSIVE, ranges from 90% takeover to 0%

one of the reasons being that humans are responsible for fitting the external world into the computer

bsky.app/profile/tlec...

What if you have no information about recall/precision aka false/positives/negatives and their costs? Or worse, false information?

In ML world, that stops being true. The output of an ML system is a guess. The computer is now giving you its best guess about the answer. This isn’t new but it’s newish, something that changed over the last 15 years or so as ML really started to take off. It’s of course accelerated in LLM world.

An aside, but I’ve been marinating an idea for an article about how computer programs don’t work the same way as they used to and people still aren’t used to the new regime. Computers used to be like calculators where when the computer gave you an answer you would know that the answer was right.

to some extent this was also true even about classical programs the more they interacted in any way with the external world

Yeah, one of the things that's sort of undergirding this, is that even classically programmed computers are simply so good at solving computer-shaped problems, that we have been busily trying to turn everything in the world we can into a computer-shaped problem for at least the past 40 years.

After Software Eats the World, What Comes Out the Other End?

Law professors are torn between (a) their anxiety that a discipline where students are gatekeepers to publication can't be taken seriously, and, (b) their laziness and resulting reluctance to do the serious peer review that changing (a) would require. So, far, (b) is winning.

Long custom sort of numbs folks to how bizarre the arrangement is. I can’t think of any other discipline where students in their early 20s are the arbiters of what merits publication in the most prestigious scholarly journals.

Seems particularly dodgy when a lot of legal scholarship now consists of JDs cosplaying as historians. And, as the birthright citizenship business shows, often in ways actual historians find laughably inept.

Here is the spreadsheet DOGE had ChatGPT produce, to determine which grants were too DEI www.historians.org/wp-content/u...

When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities

Huge NYT article on the back story of those two weeks in March/April 2025 when DOGE illegally terminated hundreds of NEH grants. Gift link!!

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

Wondering if the media would've chosen "honored" as the verb if Obama had saluted fallen soldiers in a fucking baseball cap