magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
24d ago
Ugh, fine, I didn't read the essay at the time but I did now.
The question is whether the essay, which was bad, was bad enough to earn a 0/25 rather than a higher-but-still-low score like, I dunno, 2/25 or 5/25. "The soft sciences are sufficiently corrupted by ideology that their politically-relevant outputs should asymptote to a low level of Bayesian evidence" is a highly-plausible and highly-relevant proposition to discussing any research article that's come out of them, and she did hint at it; that's better than literally nothing. Grading does need to discriminate between different degrees of badness, after all, and in this specific case we have proof that the instructor was marking down due to taking personal offence at the positions taken:
“Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” the instructor wrote in feedback obtained by The Oklahoman. Instead, the instructor said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment.”
The paper “contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive” the criticism went on.
(AP, emphasis mine)
I will note that, regardless of your opinion of the essay's quality, "writing a bad essay" is not a moral failure in the way that, say, plagiarism would be (even though plagiarism is not actually a crime)... or in the way that scientific fraud is. I'm not actually sure whether this is literally fraud in the legal sense; I don't know whether "you agree to not tamper with your data" was part of the contract to receive a research grant ("you agree to actually do the study" presumably is, but the study does appear to have been performed in all these cases). Nonetheless, it seems obvious to me that a university that allows its scientists to tamper with data would stop getting government grants in a hurry (because, well, the actual state interest in issuing research grants is to uncover scientific truths, not to produce papers full of literal lies; there are of course private funders who want to buy propaganda, but the state shouldn't be doing that) and thus it is reasonable for a university (at least, one that intends to continue performing government-funded research) to fire scientists that have repeatedly performed such tampering (and thus ensure that they don't do more of it).
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
But in turn, that doesn't make his proposed answers better or useful.
but it does have some genuine benefits... and we have no way to implement them, and no way to validate or even seriously consider whether we're even looking at the most important measures.
Note that these are useful if you share the Yudkowskian view of neural nets. Specifically, the view that it is impossible to align a neural net smarter than you; "a technique, inventable before the Singularity, that will allow us to make neural-net ASI and not die" is a contradiction in terms. There are thus no "useful" answers, if you define "useful" as "works on neural nets".
In this paradigm, 100% of surviving worlds follow this two-point plan:
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Neural nets are totally and permanently abandoned until after the Singularity; they are banned in all countries (convincing everyone is hard; easier is convincing enough nuclear powers, hard enough, that the holdout countries are either occupied or obliterated).
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Non-doomed versions of AI research (e.g. GOFAI, uploads) continue.
The reason you need #1 is that #2 is going to take at least 50 years to hit the Singularity. The reason you need #2 is that #1 is only metastable, not actually stable; sooner or later, in a hundred years or a million, the Butlerian Jihad will break down, at which point everybody dies unless we've hit the Singularity in the meantime.
And hence, work on how to make non-neural-net AI work is necessary (if less urgent than stopping neural nets, on which point Yudkowsky is indeed currently focusing).
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
"Dutch"/"Deutsch" are actually the same word whose spelling was standardised a slightly-different way; the Netherlands was part of the Holy Roman Empire and is thus part of Germany in the broad sense. Same reason there are "Pennsylvania Dutch" (who are German).
It's basically the same issue as the ambiguity of "Congolese" or "Korean", just old enough to predate spelling standardisation.
magic9mushroom
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26d ago
I must confess that I've never really understood the US habit of self-censoring profanities. You are allowed to say "fuck" here - there is no word filter - and implying you said "fuck" is approximately as discourteous as actually saying it. So, what is gained by censoring yourself?
magic9mushroom
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27d ago
And yet, many people have still not seen it (as I have not seen... oh, it's actually called "Play it Again, Sam"), and while the first Banepost actually achieved something other than memeing (and thus was fine), the second was meaningless and the third and fourth were actively goading the by-then-clearly-clueless @Capital_Room.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
Surely if there's enough evidence for the police to charge a crime there's enough evidence for a school to act.
It should be noted that police are much, much better at acquiring evidence than schools, and it's likely they didn't hand all their evidence over to the school.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
28d ago
· Edited 28d ago
@ABigGuy4U's post "A lotta loyalty for a hired gun!" is a quote from the memetic first scene of The Dark Knight Rises (his username is also a quote from said scene, the line immediately preceding the "loyalty" quote is "Tell me about Bane! Why does he wear the mask!", and "Somebody get this hothead outta here!" is a quote from later in the movie).
@sun_the_second linked to a video of said first scene.
So, instead of an attack aimed at me, this is, what? Low-effort "chan behavior," not making a clear point, not writing for everyone, and not in keeping with the standards of the Motte, then?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
I think it does acknowledge the existence of competence; it simply argues that an IQ test would be more cost-effective than years of education (remember that a lot of the use of tertiary degrees and even secondary degrees as proxies for competence is based on education in irrelevant subjects to the actual job requirements), and unlaundered carve-outs (if one chooses to use them for political reasons) would be more cost-effective than laundered ones.
The top line doesn't really represent the rest of the post.
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