I don’t know why they decided to put an AI slop image right up top in their banner and then repeat it later.

Falling down the “Rationality Trap” rabbit hole (illustration by ChatGPT 5 Thinking)

Yeah, the washed-out faux-Ghibli aEStheTiC was a bit of a clue. Gonna go scrub my brains with the Tenniel illustrations for Alice now, with a Ralph Steadman chaser.

Afterthought: This kind of brainrot, the petty middle-management style of ends justifying the means, is symbiotic with pundit brainrot, the mentality that Jamelle Bouie characterizes thusly.

It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

Both reject the idea that words mean things, dammit, a principle that some of us feel at the spinal level.

The way these people treat the written word confounds me. Whenever I cite a source, it’s because I’ve read it and know what it says. The fact that “AI” facilitates the process of deciding on your conclusion and then filling in bullshit to prop it up makes “AI” corrosive to a person’s moral fiber.

But I just met 'er!

Startup carcass in alley this morning. Tire tread on burst bubble. This Valley is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The prediction markets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the techbros will drown. The accumulated filth of all their microdosing and Soylent will foam up about their waists and all the accelerationists and effective altruists will look up and shout “Save us!”

And I’ll whisper, maybe later.

Don’t worry, Kelsey Piper managed to use it as an opportunity to be a bluecheck dipshit.

(via)

Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources

womp, and wait for it, womp

The gateway into the online rationalist world is often effective altruism, which is grounded in the genuinely reasonable idea that those who donate to charity should get the most bang for their buck. […] The focus of the movement shifted to existential concerns around humanity’s survival, such as multi-planet living (so humanity could survive the end of Earth), and artificial intelligence – both to ensure it doesn’t wipe out humanity once it emerges, but also to make sure it does emerge, because of a belief in its massive potential to fix our societal issues.

As so often happens, this downplays the extent to which the batshit was within them all along.

That included a piece of rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, written by the controversial AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, which deconstructs the contradictions of the wizarding world.

“AI theorist” really does just mean “guy who makes shit up”, doesn’t it? And that seems a generous description of HPMoR, which was really more about inventing problems that the HP books didn’t have while ignoring those that they did, since it was really based on fan wikis instead.

(massive bong rip) the aliens already came here and put us all in the Matrix, dude

That’s just yer bog-standard “the best lie has a seed of truth”, ainnit?

(Peer review in its modern form was adopted gradually, with a recognizable example in 1831 from the same William Whewell who coined the word scientist. It displaced the tradition of having the editor of a journal decide everything himself, so whatever its flaws, it has broadened the diversity of voices that influence what gets officially published.)

Behold the power of this fully selective quotation.

The Wall Street Journal came out with a story on “conspiracy physics”, noting Eric Weinstein and Sabine Hossenfelder as examples. Sadly, one of their quoted voices of sanity is Scott Aaronson, baking-soda volcano of genocide apologism.

At least with Ulysses, there’s a brothel chapter.

The Grauniad has a new piece today about the underpaid human labor on which the “AI” industry depends:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/11/google-gemini-ai-training-humans

Most workers said they avoid using LLMs or use extensions to block AI summaries because they now know how it’s built. Many also discourage their family and friends from using it, for the same reason.

I noticed that Hanson speculated that “most of the Great Filter is most likely to be explained by […] the steps in the biological evolution of life and intelligence”, and then lied by omission about Sagan’s position. He said that Sagan appealed to “social science” and believed that the winnowing effect is civilizations blowing themselves up with nukes. He cites an obscure paper from 1983, while ignoring the, again, most successful pop-science book of the century.

this review has a number of issues

For example, it doesn’t even get through the subhead before calling Yud an “AI researcher”.

All three of these movements [Bay Area rationalists, “AI safety” and Effective Altruists] attempt to derive their way of viewing the world from first principles, applying logic and evidence to determine the best ways of being.

Sure, Jan.

“We predescribed our methodology in enough advance detail for Polymarket to run a real-money prediction market, and traders trusted us enough for the market to be liquid” would be overwhelmingly more credible than “we published our results in a big-name science journal”.

https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1933973423472164955

Good sneer from user andrewrk:

People are always saying things like, “surprisingly good” to describe LLM output, but that’s like when 5 year old stops scribbling on the walls and draws a “surprisingly good” picture of the house, family, and dog standing outside on a sunny day on some construction paper. That’s great, kiddo, let’s put your programming language right here on the fridge.

Also a concept that Scott Aaronson praised Hanson for.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210425233250/https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/994112139420876800

(Crediting the “Great Filter” to Hanson, like Scott Computers there, sounds like some fuckin’ bullshit to me. In Cosmos, Carl Sagan wrote, “Why are they not here? There are many possible answers. Although it runs contrary to the heritage of Aristarchus and Copernicus, perhaps we are the first. Some technical civilization must be the first to emerge in the history of the Galaxy. Perhaps we are mistaken in our belief that at least occasional civilizations avoid self-destruction.” And in his discussion of abiogenesis: “Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet. But life did not evolve beyond blue-green algae for three billion years, which suggests that large lifeforms with specialized organs are hard to evolve, harder even than the origin of life. Perhaps there are many other planets that today have abundant microbes but no big beasts and vegetables.” Boom! There it is, in only the most successful pop-science book of the century.)

I borrowed a copy of Quantum Computing Since Democritus and read a bit of it. As can happen in books based directly on lectures, it has more “personality” overtly on display than the average technical book. That goes for good and for ill. What Alice finds engaging, Bob can find grating, and vice versa. In this case, I noticed some passages that sound, well, smarmy. I personally can’t help but read them through the lens of everything that’s happened since, and all the ways that Aaronson has told the world what kind of person he is. Through that lens, there’s a kind of self-deprecating arrogance on display, as though the book is saying, “I am a nerd, I hold the one true nerd opinion, and everything I assert is evident and simple if you are a nerd, which again, I am the defining example of.” It’s possible that I would have skipped past all that a decade ago, but now, I can’t not see it.

There are big chunks of it that I’m not the best reader to evaluate. I’m a physicist who has casually studied computer science along with many other interests; I haven’t tried to teach P vs NP in a classroom setting. But where the book does overlap with more serious interests of mine, I found it wanting. There’s a part (chapter 9) about exploring where the rules of quantum theory could come from, and how the mathematics of the theory could potentially be derived from more basic premises rather than taken as postulates. I found this discussion badly organized and poorly argued. In 2013, it was historically shallow, and now in 2025, it’s outdated.

Everything he says about Bohr is caricatured to the point of absurdity.

His history of the halting problem is conventional but wrong.

The last chapter is called “Ask me anything” and records a Q&A he held on the last day of the course upon which the book was based. It gets onto the topic of evolution, veers into naive adaptationism and blends that with social Darwinism… yeaahhhh.