This piece links to a recent New York Times story about our very good friends, by Cade Metz. Nothing in it will surprise SneerClub regulars too much, including how it ends up giving Yudkowsky too much credit. It says that the Sequences taught critical thinking, when they were cult shit all along; it says that in HPMoR, Harry uses real science, which is balderdash.

(If anyone says “Gell-Mann amnesia” I will fucking cut you.)

(Image description: meme of a woman yelling in a man’s ear. Captions read, “Their foundational text is a Harry Potter fanfic that supposedly teaches science. But it gets ninth-grade biology wrong by fucking up Punnett squares.”)

“The word blueberry contains the letter b 3 times.”

Also reported in more detail here:

The word “blueberry” has the letter b three times:

• Once at the start (“B” in blueberry).
• Once in the middle (“b” in blue).
• Once before the -erry ending (“b” in berry). […] That’s exactly how blueberry is spelled, with the b’s in positions 1, 5, and 7. […] So the “bb” in the middle is really what gives blueberry its double-b moment. […] That middle double-b is easy to miss if you just glance at the word.

(via)

ChatControl in the EU, the Online Safety Act in the UK, Australia’s age gate for social media, a boatload of censorious state laws here in the US and staring down the barrel of KOSA… yeah.

Back in 2017, Freddie lost an argument with Malcolm Harris, lobbed some completely made-up sexual harassment allegations against Harris, and then blamed the whole thing on a bipolar episode. Nowadays he just makes up professors to get mad at.

Wikipedia has higher standards than the American HIstorical Association. Let’s all let that sink in for a minute.

There was just recently a dust-up wherein authors quit a romance con because it was to feature someone who published a Harry Potter fic with the serial numbers filed off, and supporting anything that keeps the brand going is putting money in Rowling’s pocket and thus actively making trans people’s lives worse. People care about this kind of thing; at least, some of 'em do. There are reactions. Some of those are talk about “reclaiming the fandom”, while others regard that as untenable self-justification… But any way you slice it, the subject is very clearly coming up.

In the year since the Neil Gaiman unpleasantness dropped, I’ve lost count of all the threads where people have said that they can’t enjoy his work again, that they are painfully re-evaluating their relationship with Sandman or Coraline or American Gods. They can’t help but engage with the subject. And, hey, I get it! I generally liked his stuff and saw him live at a few events over the years, where he was an enjoyable public speaker. I don’t have a Death tattoo that now needs covering up, but I can still register a loss. Discovering Sandman while visiting a friend on vacation when they were checking it out of the public library… that was an uncomplicatedly happy memory!

This kind of thing grips a person and compels a response. Even if that’s only a self-justifying rationalization of the status quo! But Yudkowsky (to my knowledge) has said nothing, none of the lesswrongs commenting on that interview said anything… I expected something, like a “Rational!Harry is the only canon now”, or a “Methods of Rationality is the greatest fic to be based on the works of Hatsune Miku”. Anything, you know? But I haven’t even seen the step that elsewhere would be the bare minimum.

Lightcone Infrastructure is running The Inkhaven Residency. For the 30 days of November, ~30 people will posts 30 blogposts – 1 per day. There will also be feedback and mentorship from other great writers, including Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Gwern, and more TBA.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CA6XfmzYoGFWNhH8e/the-inkhaven-residency

“Hmm, your blog post is good, but it would be better with more Adderall, less recognition that other people have minds distinct from your own, and 220% more words.”

Because I read Yudkowsky being interviewed about writing HPMoR, and you should suffer too.

Funniest bits:

Yudkowsky still thinks that he described Mendelian inheritance, despite everyone from FF.net commenters on pointing out his mistake.

Wandering off into “the multiverse” and algorithmic information theory to fumble at explaining that magic works the way it does in a book because the writer made it that way.

This paragraph:

So to generalize that, let’s talk about the principle of “Make All the Characters Awesome.” This was an explicit process as I was envisioning the story, where I thought, for each character, how can I make this character awesome?

This comment:

My own belief about why so many people didn’t want to believe Quirrell was Voldemort is that Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike (perhaps due to, as mentioned: “make every character awesome,” “give characters understandable flaws drawn from real life”).

Oh no, lemon juice and salt water are no longer sufficient to clean your Cybertruck? Try Drano!

In non-tsunami news tonight:

Starting August 13th, YouTube will detect underage users in the US based on their activity and the age of their account, allowing the platform to automatically apply restrictions.

Welp, I guess I have two weeks to download all the YouTube videos I will ever want to watch again.

(pauses, thinks)

The once-lost Evangelion AIDS PSA it is, then

All the cited URLS in the footnotes end with “utm_source=chatgpt.com”.

I just do not understand these people. There is something dead inside them, something necrotic.

DO NOT, MY FRIENDS, BECOME ADDICTED TO TOKENS

So, the chatter over on Reddit sneerclub is that the author is a transphobic sex pest

https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1maslci/sam_krissagainst_truth_also_against_rationalism/

I only know about the latter

https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/kriss-facebook-note

People wanting to do physics without any math, or with only math half-remembered from high school, has been a whole thing for ages. See item 15 on the Crackpot Index, for example. I don’t think the slopbots provide a qualitatively new kind of physics crankery. I think they supercharge what already existed. Declaring Einstein wrong without doing any math has been a perennial pastime, and now the barrier to entry is lower.

When Devereaux writes,

without an esoteric language in which a field must operate, the plain language works to conceal that and encourages the bystander to hold the field in contempt […] But because there’s no giant ‘history formula,’ no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there are but you don’t work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible.

I think he misses an angle. Yes, physics is armored with jargon and equations and tables of symbols. But for a certain audience, these themselves provoke contempt. They prefer an “explanation” which uses none of that. They see equations as fancy, highfalutin, somehow morally degenerate.

That long review of HMPoR identified a Type of Guy who would later be very into slopbot physics:

I used to teach undergraduates, and I would often have some enterprising college freshman (who coincidentally was not doing well in basic mechanics) approach me to talk about why string theory was wrong. It always felt like talking to a physics madlibs book. This chapter let me relive those awkward moments.

Some archive links here: https://mastodon.art/@indieDevCurator/114909188230349545

River crossing puzzles are a genre of logic problems that go back to the olden days. AI slop bots can act like they can solve them, because many solutions appear in their training data. But push the bot a little harder, and funny things happen.

Nobody wants to join a cult founded on the Daria/Hellraiser crossover I wrote while emotionally processing chronic pain. I feel very mid-status.

I found this because Greg Egan shared it elsewhere on fedi:

I am now being required by my day job to use an AI assistant to write code. I have also been informed that my usage of AI assistants will be monitored and decisions about my career will be based on those metrics.

It gets worse from there.

There’s an “I am no man” joke in here somewhere that I am too tired to figure out.