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self_made_human

Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet

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joined 2022 September 05 05:31:00 UTC

I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.

At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!

Friends:

A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.


				
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self_made_human


								

								

								
								
									
								
								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet

				
				
				

				

					15 followers  

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					joined 2022 September 05 05:31:00 UTC
				


				
					

					
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.


At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!



				

				
					
Friends:

					
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.


				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was kidding, I get what you mean, and agree.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you? What am I supposed to do now, warn myself? Temp-ban myself? I believe that the Ancient Chinese have written on the topic, but I'll leave it in the hands of the other mods.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You know, I'm a person who has been described, in this very thread as:




I definitely don't have @self_made_human's endless energy for arguing here, but his takes tend to be quite grounded




Consider what that means when someone actually exhausts my patience. I think that says more about you than it does about me.




I'm a pretty pleasant guy. What have I said that is not pleasant




After all, even the most saintly are unlikely to like you very much if you say things along the lines of:




Now you're just throwing a hilarious Internet Shit Fit for having gotten called out on it. (About three comments! That's "for a while"! Mucho Internet Shit Fit...)




I'm sure you think you are very pleasant, and that you are a great conversationalist. I'm sure your mother thinks you're very handsome too.




Just a piece of advice, though; thinking that you're going to be able to avoid the problem by avoiding the person who points out the problem never works.




I think it works great. If I didn't have a firm commitment to not blocking anyone on this site, I would have blocked you a long time back. The next best thing is to ignore you, which is what I'm doing from now on. Being "unMottley" doesn't come at the cost of my sanity.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Is your "AI Assistant" smarter than an Orangutan? A practical engineering assessment
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks. For what it's worth, I find the framework for that particular "experiment" just as dubious as you or Nostalgebraist think, but I don't come out of this with a takeaway that it discredits most of Anthropic's research.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would argue that this is a temporary state of affairs. Current AI coding is at the level of an over-caffeinated intern (who is very knowledgeable, but less than practical). Thus, a great deal of oversight is necessary to make sure they aren't shooting themselves in the foot.


But consider the potential SOTA in a year or two, when they're comfortably at par with mid-level coders. A senior SWE is usually happy to delegate to multiple experienced juniors, without worrying too much about the exact implementation details. My impression is that we're not there yet.


https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/1955747420324946037




Even when agents pass on all human-written test cases, we estimate that their implementations would take 20-30 minutes on average to get to a mergeable state—which represents about a third of the total time needed for an experienced developer to complete the tasks.




In other words, a lot (but not all) of the theoretical time savings are eaten up by the need to understand, edit and improve their code. At present.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No, I showed that my point was coherent, it is beyond me why you don't see that. It's not really my problem at this point.




Would you like to take a shot at your negative claim with analogy to philosophy of mathematics? Any sort of clarity or argument there?




Not with you, I'm afraid. @Primaprimaprima is far more pleasant to talk to, hence I am more than happy to discuss that in detail with them. You're welcome to read that thread and make of it what you will.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


BTW, did you not realize that @walruz was joking? What he linked is a fun Magic: The Gathering construction. If the Twin Primes conjecture is true, then the loop never ends. If it's not true, it does end, after 10^10^10^10^whatever years. It may be slightly optimistic to describe that as "paying dividends"...




I was leaning into the joke. MTG nerds are a different breed.


On the topic of conic sections, the poster claimed:




However most histories of Greek mathematics say that conic sections were invented/discovered by Menaechmus, as a tool for doubling the cube, which is of course a useless problem from our modern point of view.






EDIT 3. Parabolic mirrors is not a real application. Of course, this is a nice property of parabola, but conic sections have many other nice properties. The legend of Archimedes burning ships with them is a legend, nothing more






Conic sections and integral transforms are high-school or early university math




They very much didn't start out that way.




And non-Euclidean geometry is useful in many other realms than special relativity, like, oh, say, navigating the Earth!




That depends on how strict you want to be on the definition of non-Euclidean, spherical geometry, a limited subset, was used in celestial and terrestrial navigation as early as the first century CE, though real usage only boomed in the Age of Sail.


But that was for a very specific purpose, the idea that space itself was non-Euclidean came about much later. That is a lag of about 21 centuries.




While there is zero chance of any of the math I linked above being useful, I admit that cryptography isn't the only example of surprising post-hoc utility showing up. As theoretical physics has gotten more abstract (way way beyond relativity), some previously existing high-powered math has become relevant to it. (The Yang-Mills problem, another Millennium Problem, unites some advanced math and physics.) But I absolutely defy the claim that there is a "tendency" for practical applications to show up. Another way to frame the fact that 0.01% of pure math has surprised us by being useful over the last 2,000 years is... that we're right that it's useless 99.99% of the time. I wish I had that much certainty about the other topics we discuss here!




I am happy to acknowledge availability and recall bias here. If there are topics in maths that have remained utterly useless and purely theoretical to this day, I am unlikely to have heard of them.


My overall point is that:


    

  • 

    Maths is incredibly productive on net.
    

    • 

  • 

    Even if we do have "99.9%" certainty that a particular field is unlikely to have practical applications, the benefits in the unlikely case that it does are usually substantial. If I came across a normal lottery and saw that my ticket had a 0.1% chance of winning billions, then I'd be spending quite a lot of money on lottery tickets.
    

    • 

  • 

    Ergo, it is immensely sensible to subsidize or invest in maths as a whole. The expected value from doing so is positive. Our entire society and civilization runs on mathematical advancements.
    

    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Hmm.. It seems that my wording was imprecise. Reflecting on it, I guess the best explanation is that I think that frameworks, specifically in moral philosophy are unfalsifiable. There is nothing intrinsically superior about being Kantian or Utilitarian, to entities that aren't swayed by practical considerations.


In other cases, I think it is eminently possible to say that certain "philosophical" claims are, in fact false, because they don't hold up in the face of empirical scrutiny or are based off faulty premises.


In those scenarios: I've made factual claims about these topics. I believe Searle is wrong about the Chinese Room, that illusionists are wrong about consciousness, and that moral realists are wrong about the nature of morality. I believe they are wrong not because they have a different "perspective," but because their models of reality are, in my estimation, incorrect. They make claims that are either inconsistent with a physicalist worldview or are simply less parsimonious than the alternative.


Let's take the Chinese Room. My claim that the system as a whole understands Chinese is a functionalist hypothesis. It is a claim about what "understanding" is at a physical level. I posit that understanding is not a magical, indivisible essence, but a complex process of information manipulation.


Searle's argument is pure sleight-of-hand that works by focusing our attention on a single component: the man who cannot understand Chinese, while glossing over the fact that the man is merely the CPU. The system's "understanding" resides in the total architecture. To say the system doesn't understand because the man doesn't is like saying a computer can't calculate a sum because a single transistor has no concept of arithmetic (or my usual go-to, that no individual neuron in a human brain speaks English). Searle's argument only works if you presuppose that understanding must be a property of a single, irreducible component, which is precisely the non-physicalist assumption I reject. My position is a testable model of cognition, his relies on an appeal to "intrinsic intentionality," a property he never defines in a falsifiable way.


The same logic applies to my rejection of p-zombies. The concept of a philosophical zombie is, in my view, physically incoherent. It presumes that consciousness (or "qualia") is an optional extra, a layer of paint that can be applied or withheld from a physically identical object. This is closet dualism. At least real dualists are honest about their kooky beliefs.


My hypothesis is that consciousness is (likely) what a certain kind of complex information processing feels like from the inside. It's an emergent property of the physical system, not a separate substance or field that interacts with it. You cannot have a physically identical replica of a conscious human, down to the last quantum state, that lacks consciousness, for the same reason you cannot have a physically identical replica of a fire that lacks heat. The heat is a macro-level property of the underlying molecular motion.


Likewise, consciousness is a macro-level property of the underlying neural computation. To claim otherwise is to make a claim that violates what we know about physical cause and effect. Again, this is not a "perspective"; it is a hypothesis about the identity of mind and specific physical processes.


Finally, coming to "objective" morality. My claim that it does not exist is an empirical one, based on the lack of evidence. It is a claim about the contents of the universe. If moral realism is true, then moral facts must exist somewhere. Are they physical laws? Are they non-physical entities that somehow interact with our brains? The burden of proof is on the realist to show me the data, to point to the objective moral truth in a way that is distinguishable from a deeply felt human preference. Absent that evidence, the most parsimonious explanation is that "morality" is a complex set of evolved behaviors, game-theoretic strategies, and cultural constructs. It is real in the same way that "money" or "governments" are real, as a shared social reality, but not in the way that "gravity" is real.


So yes, I engage in philosophy. But I do so with the conviction that these are not merely questions for eternal debate. They are unsolved scientific problems. (In some cases, they might not even be solvable, such as the issue of infinite regress)


My positions are hypotheses about the nature of reality, and I hold them because I believe they are the most physically plausible and parsimonious explanations available.


I believe that this position is tantamount to philosophical naturalism, but correct me if I'm wrong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, duh. SSRIs work even if the original hypothesis was proven flawed. Hand washing worked, even before we had the germ theory of disease.


https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9632745/


If it works, it works, and knowing why it works is always nice.


I recall that you, in your Deiseach avatar, were noted to be the most prolific commenter of all time on both of Scott's blogs (in that recent guest post). In that case, you shouldn't be surprised at all to learn that Scott has written multiple posts about the topic:


https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/05/chemical-imbalance/


To this day, I don't know why people float it as such a gotcha. Psychiatrists have known better for a long time now, and the critique makes us groan in the same manner that economists are tired of claims that they only study perfectly spherical/rational humans in a vacuum.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
https://people.seas.harvard.edu/~salil/am106/fall18/A Mathematician%27s Apology - selections.pdf




It will probably be plain by now to what conclusions I am coming; so I will state them at once
dogmatically and then elaborate them a little. It is undeniable that a good deal of elementary
mathematics—and I use the word ‘elementary’ in the sense in which professional mathematicians
use it, in which it includes, for example, a fair working knowledge of the differential and integral
calculus—has considerable practical utility. These parts of mathematics are, on the whole, rather
dull; they are just the parts which have the least aesthetic value. The ‘real’ mathematics of the ‘real’
mathematicians, the mathematics of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost
wholly ‘useless’ (and this is as true of ‘applied’ as of ‘pure’ mathematics). It is not possible to justify
the life of any genuine professional mathematician on the ground of the ‘utility’ of his work




https://mathoverflow.net/questions/116627/useless-math-that-became-useful




Number theory, in particular investigations related to prime numbers, was famously considered useless (e.g., by Hardy) for practical matters. Now, since "everybody" needs some cryptography it is quite useful to know how to generate primes (e.g., for an RSA key) and alike, sometimes involving prior 'useless' number theory results




That thread, in general, seems to have a great many examples. Other quotes from it:




The Radon transform, when introduced by Johann Radon in 1917, was useless, until Cormack and Hounsfield developed Tomography in the 60's (Nobel prize for Medicine 1979).






The most famous example is conic sections. Conic sections were of great interest to Greek mathematicians, and their theory was highly developed in the 2-nd century BC.






However I don't know of any application until Kepler's discovery that celestial bodies move on conic sections. Thus 18 centuries passed between math research and the first application!






Number theory, in particular investigations related to prime numbers, was famously considered useless (e.g., by Hardy) for practical matters. Now, since "everybody" needs some cryptography it is quite useful to know how to generate primes (e.g., for an RSA key) and alike, sometimes involving prior 'useless' number theory results.




I hope this shores up my claim that even branches of maths that their creators (!) or famous contemporary mathematicians called useless have a annoying tendency to end up with practical applications. It's not just in the natural sciences, I've certainly never heard cryptography called a "natural science".


Also, see walruz's claim below , that even what you personally think is useless maths is already paying dividends!


Maths is quite cheap, has enormous positive externalities, and thus deserves investment even if no particular branch can be reliably predicted to be profitable. It just seems to happen nonetheless.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I hate to do this, but last time we did this, you were unable to even explain what it is that those terms meant. Would you like to take another go at it?




Thank you for reminding me of that rather unpleasant experience. I would actually not like to take another go at it. Anyone wanting elaboration is welcome to read the thread.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Note that I claimed that the support of experts (Geoffrey Hinton is one of the Nobel Prize winners in question) strengthens my case, not that this, by itself, proves that my claim is true, which would actually be a logical fallacy. I took pains to specify that I'm talking about Bayesian evidence.




Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, one of the classics that humans have noted since antiquity.




Consider that there's a distinction made between legitimate and illegitimate appeals to authority. Only the latter is a "logical fallacy".


Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics, but for the invention of neural networks. I can hardly see someone more qualified to be an expert in the field of AI/ML.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority




An argument from authority can be fallacious, particularly when the authority invoked lacks relevant expertise.






This doesn't mean your claims are false, of course, just that the argument you made in your previous post for your claims is weak as a result.




It would be, if it wasn't for the veritable mountain of text I've written to explain myself, or the references I've always cited.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It would be one thing if I was arguing solely from credentials, but as I note, I lack any, and my arguments are largely on perceived merit. Even so, I think that calling it a logical fallacy is incorrect, because at the very least it's Bayesian evidence. If someone shows up and starts claiming that all the actual physicists are ignoring them, well, I know which side is likely correct.


I have certainly, in the past or present, shared detailed arguments.


https://www.themotte.org/post/2368/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/353975?context=8#context




Think of it as having the world's worst long-term memory. It's a total genius, but you have to re-introduce yourself and explain the whole situation from scratch every single time you talk to it




https://www.themotte.org/post/2272/is-your-ai-assistant-smarter-than/349731?context=8#context


I've already linked to an explainer of why it struggles above, the same link regarding the arithmetic woes. LLM vision sucks. They weren't designed for that task, and performance on a lot of previously difficult problems, like ARC-AGI, improves dramatically when the information is restructured to better suit their needs


https://www.themotte.org/post/2254/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/346098?context=8#context


I've been using LLMs to review my writing for a long time, and I've noticed a consistent problem: most are excessively flattering. You have to mentally adjust their feedback downward unless you're just looking for an ego boost. This sycophancy is particularly severe in GPT models and Gemini 2.5 Pro, while Claude is less effusive (and less verbose) and Kimi K2 seems least prone to this issue.


https://www.themotte.org/post/1754/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/309571?context=8#context




The good news:






It works.






The bad news:






It doesn't work very well.






Abysmal taste by default, compared to dedicated image models. Base Stable Diffusion 1.0 could do better in terms of aesthetics, Midjourney today has to be reined in from making people perfect.




https://www.themotte.org/post/1741/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/307961?context=8#context




It isn't perfect, but you're looking at a failure rate of 5-10% as opposed to >80% when using DALLE or Flux. It doesn't beat Midjourney on aesthetics, but we'll get there.




I give up. I have too many comments about LLMs for me to go through them all. But I have, in short, said:


    

  • 

    LLMs are fallible. They hallucinate.
    

    • 

  • 

    They are sycophantic.
    

    • 

  • 

    They aren't great at poetry (they do fine now, but nothing amazing)
    

    • 

  • 

    Their vision system sucks
    

    • 

  • 

    Their spatial reasoning can be sketchy
    

    • 

  • 

    You should always double check anything that is mission critical while using them.
    

    • 





they can reason, they can perform a variety of tasks well, that hallucinations are not really a problem, etc




These two statements are not inconsistent. Hallucinations exist, but can mitigated. They do perform a whole host of tasks well, otherwise I wouldn't be using them for said tasks. If they're not reasoning while winning the IMO, I have to wonder if the people claiming otherwise are reasoning themselves.


Note that I usually speak up in favor of LLMs when people make pig-headed claims about their capabilities or lack thereof. I do not see many people claiming that modern LLMs are ASIs or can cure cancer, and if they said such a thing, I'd argue with them too. The assymetry of misinformation is, as far as I can tell, not my fault.




Somewhat off-topic: the great irony to me of your recent "this place is full of terrible takes about LLMs" arguments (in this thread and others) is that I think almost everyone would agree with it. They just wouldn't agree who, exactly, has the terrible takes. I think that it thus qualifies as a scissor statement, but I'm not sure.




What of it? I do, as a matter of fact  know more about LLMs than the average person I'm arguing with. I do not claim to be an expert, the more domain expertise they tend to have, the more they tend to align with my claims. More importantly, I always have receipts at hand.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Fair points, but verification is usually way cheaper than generation. If one actual human PhD can monitor a dozen AI agents, it is plausible that the value prop makes sense.


In a lot of tasks, including AI research and coding, you can also automate the verification process. Does the code compile and pass all tests? Does the new proposed optimizer beat Adam or Muon on a toy run?




There is probably perfectly adequate shareholder value in getting a billion lonely midwits to pay $10/month rising to $inf/month in the way of all silicon valley service models, and keeping them hooked with the LLM equivalent of tokenized language loot boxes. I'd wager its even the more significant hill to climb for shareholder value.




That might be true today (and tomorrow, or next year), but the companies are betting hard on their models being capable of doing much more, and hence getting paying customers willing to shell out more. The true goal is recursive self-improvement, and the belief that this has far more dollars associated with it than even capturing all the money on earth today. Of course, they need market share and ongoing revenue to justify the investments to get there, which is why you can buy in relatively cheap. Competition also keeps them mostly honest, OAI would probably be charging a great deal more or gatekeeping their best if Google or Anthropic weren't around.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Anyway, it's all exactly as you describe. Some people do just want to endlessly polish for its own sake. That's what they like to do. And that's ok with me. You get the same thing in STEM too. Mathematicians working on God knows what kinds of theories related to affine abelian varieties over 3-dual functor categories or whatever. None of it will ever be "useful" to anyone. But their work is quite fascinating nonetheless, so I'm happy that they're able to continue on with it in peace.




Isn't it a massive meme (based in fact) that even the most pure and apparently useless theoretical mathematics ends up having practical utility?


Hell, it even has a name: "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"


Just a few examples, since you probably know more than I do:


    

  • 

    Number theory to modern cryptography
    

    • 

  • 

    Non-Euclidean geometry was considered largely a curiosity till Einstein came along.
    

    • 

  • 

    Group theory and particle physics
    

    • 



So even if the mathematicians themselves want to claim their work is just rolling in Platonic hay for the love of the game, well, I'll smile and wait. It's not like it's expensive either, you can run a maths department on roughly the budget for food, chalk and chalkboards.


(It's amazing how cheap they are, and how more of them don't just run off to a quant firm. Almost makes you believe that they genuinely love maths)




I'm a bit confused here. I believe you've claimed before that a) first-person consciousness does exist, and b) sufficiently advanced AI will be conscious. Correct me if I'm wrong here. You asserted these claims because you think they're true, yes? And so anyone who denies these claims is saying something false?




Have I? I'm pretty sure that's not the case.


The closest I can recall going is:


    

  • 

    We do not have a complete mechanistic model of consciousness in humans
    

    • 

  • 

    We do not know what the minimal requirements of consciousness even are in the first place
    

    • 

  • 

    I have no robust way of knowing if other humans are conscious. I'm not an actual solipsist, because I think the odds are pretty damn solid (human brains are really similar), but it is not actually a certainty.
    

    • 

  • 

    Ergo, LLMs might be conscious. I also always add the caveat that if they are, they are almost certainly an incredibly alien form of consciousness and likely to have very different qualia.
    

    • 



In a sense, I see the question of consciousness as irrelevant when it comes to AI. I really don't care! If an ASI tells me it's conscious, then I'll just shrug and go about my day. What I care far more about is what an ASI can achieve.


(If GPT-5 tells me it's conscious, I'd say, great, now where is that chart I asked for?)




In the early 20th century you had New Criticism, and people criticized that for being overly formalist and ignoring social and political context, so then you had everything that goes under the banner of "postmodernism", ideology critique, historicism, all that sort of stuff, and then you had some people who said that the postmodernist stuff was leading us astray and we had gotten too far from the texts themselves and how they're actually received, so they got into "postcritique" and reader response theory, and on and on it goes...




It looks to me like less of a crisis rather than business as usual. What I see is a series of cyclical fads going in and out of fashion, and no real consistency or convergence.


How many layers of rebuttal and counter-rebuttal must we go before a lasting consensus is achieved? I expect most literary academics would say that the self-licking nature of the ice cream cone is the point.


Contrast with STEM: If someone proves that the axiom of choice is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, that would cause a revolution. Even if such a fundamental change doesn't happen, the field will make steady improvements.




I'd be happy if you could direct me to any of these novel and esoteric readings.




Uh.. This really isn't my strong suit, but I believe that the queer theoretical interpretation of Moby Dick or the post-colonial reading of The Tempest might apply.


I do not think Shakespeare intended to say much on the topic of colonial politics. I can grant that sailors are hella gay, so maybe the critical queers have something useful to say.




Well, that's something that psychoanalysis actually does take a theoretical stance on. You can't trust the patient about what the problem is. Frequently, what they first complain about is not the root cause of what's actually going on. It might be. But frequently it's not. Any "shared understanding" after a one week period of consultation is illusory, because people fundamentally do not understand themselves.




I don't think you really need psychoanalysis to get there. Depressed people are often known to not acknowledge their depression. I've never felt tempted to bring out a psychoanalysis textbook to solve such problems, I study them because I'm forced to, for exams set by sadists.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The total salary of all therapists is surely far higher than the combined salary of all nuclear engineers?




Almost certainly true, and my analogy is imperfect.


In the limit, AI are postulated to be capable of doing {everything humans can do}, physically or mentally.


But AI companies today are heavily compute constrained, they're begging Nvidia to sell them more GPUs, even at ridiculous costs.


That means that they want to extract maximum $/flop. This means that they'd much rather automate high value knowledge work first. AI researchers make hundreds of thousands or even millions/almost billions of USD a year, if you have a model that is as smart as an AI researcher, then you can capture some of that revenue.


Once those extremely high yield targets are out of the way, then you can start creeping down the value chain. The cost of electricity for ChatGPT is less than that hourly fee most therapists charge.


Of course, I must hasten to add that this is an ideal scenario. The models aren't good enough to outright replace the best AI researchers, maybe not even the median or subpar. If the only job they can do is that which demands the intelligence of a therapist, then they'll have to settle for that.


(And of course, the specter of recursive self improvement. Each AI AI researcher or programmer can plausibly speed up the iteration time till an even better researcher or coder. This may or may not be happening today.)


In other words, yhere are competing pressures:


    

  • 

    Revenue and market share today. Hence free or $20 plans for the masses.
    

    • 

  • 

    A push to sell more expensive plans or access to better models to those willing to pay for them.
    

    • 

  • 

    Severe compute constraints, meaning that optimizing revenue on the margin is important.
    

    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
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I have considered it, and found that hypothesis lacking. Perhaps it would be helpful if you advanced an argument in your favor that isn't just "hmm.. did you consider you could be wrong?"


Buddy, to put it bluntly, if I believed I was wrong then I would adjust in the direction of being... less wrong?


Also, have you noticed that I'm hardly alone? I have no formal credentials to lean on, I just read research papers in my free time and think about things on a slightly more than superficial level. While we have topics of disagreement, I can count several people like @rae, @DaseindustriesLtd, @SnapDragon, @faul_sname or @RandomRanger in my corner. That's just people who hang around here. In the general AI-risk is a serious concern category, there's everyone from Nobel Prize winners to billionaires.


To think that I'm uncritical of LLMs? A man could weep. I've written dozens of pages about the issues with LLMs. I only strive to be a fair critic. If you have actual arguments, I will hear them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Is your "AI Assistant" smarter than an Orangutan? A practical engineering assessment
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Regarding anthropic, reread Nostalgebraist's post.




Revisiting this conversation with more time in hand, I'm not sure which post you're talking about. RITOT has nothing to do with Anthropic as far as I can tell, and Google seems to turn up this:


https://www.tumblr.com/nostalgebraist/778409187704193024/anthropics-stated-ai-timelines-seem-wildly


Which doesn't seem to be a criticism of Anthropic's research, just a claim that their timelines are too aggressive.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's good to have you lay out the evidence behind your claims, better late than never. I must note that that's not the point, both me and Nara are asking you to submit such evidence proactively, and not  after moderation.


You do not need citations for saying that water is wet. But if you are making an inflammatory claim (and someone arguing that they didn't think it was inflammatory is not much of an excuse), then you need to show up and hand receipts before being accosted by security.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Whatever you're doing, you're doing it right, because I see nothing but a dozen AAQCs in the mod log.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you had cited studies, then you wouldn't have been modded.


@faceh and @Sloot have... cynical opinions about women. But they usually submit substantial arguments to back that up. Usually, I'm not sure if the latter's ban has expired yet.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Hmm.. I'm not sure what to do in that situation. My best guess is to plead utter uncertainty, and ask it to formulate the most probable issues in the order of likelihood.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I know, but it's one of the few things in their worldview that I agree with.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Archeology? Historical records?


If someone claims that the the primary language of ancient Rome was Chinese, they would be laughed out of the room. When the BBC claims that there were black people in high society during the Regency, there are enough honest historians around to criticize them.


While historians are prone to fads and stretching plausibility at times, the field as whole is far healthier than literature. At the end, it is a matter of degree, not kind.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can't really ask for a better steelman for the positions I'm against, so thank you.




You have previously shared your own philosophical views on machine consciousness and machine understanding.




You accuse me of engaging in philosophy, and I can only plead guilty. But I suspect we are talking about two different things. I see a distinction between what we might call instrumental versus terminal philosophy. I use philosophy as a spade, a tool to dig into reality-anchored problems like the nature of consciousness or my ethical obligations to a patient. The goal is to get somewhere. For many professional philosophers I have encountered, philosophy is not a tool to be used but an object to be endlessly polished. They are not in it to dig, they're here to argue about the platonic ideal of a spade.


(In my case, I'm rather concerned that if we do instantiate a Machine God: we'd better teach it a definition of spade that doesn't mean our bones are used to dig our graves)


This is especially true in moral philosophy. I have a strong conviction that objective morality does not exist. The evidence against it is a vast, silent ocean; the evidence for it is a null set. I consider it as likely as finding a hidden integer between two and three that we've somehow missed. This makes moral arguments an interesting class of facts, but only facts about the people having them. Potentially facts about game theory and evolutionary processes, since many aspects of morality are conserved across species. Dogs and monkeys understand fairness, or have kin-group obligations.




it's just that you think your own philosophical views are obviously correct, and the views of your philosophical opponents are obviously incorrect




I must strongly disagree, this doesn't represent my stance at all. In fact, I would say that this is a category error. The only way a philosophical conjecture can be "incorrect" is through logical error in its formulation, or outright self-contradiction.


My own stance is that I am both a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist, and I deny these claims are contradictory. My preference for my own brand of consequentialism is just that: a preference. I do not think a Kantian is wrong so much as I observe that they must constantly ignore their own imperatives to function in the world.


That makes philosophical arguments not that different to debating a favorite football team. Can be fun over a drink, often interesting, but usually not productive.


This brings me back to your defense of the humanities. You give excellent examples of how these fields can be anchored to reality, like the statistical analysis of a lexicon. I do not doubt these researchers exist, my ex did similar work.


My critique is about the center of gravity of these fields. For every scholar doing a careful statistical analysis, how many are writing another unfalsifiable post-structuralist critique by doing the equivalent of scrutinizing a takeout menu? My experience suggests the latter is far more representative of the field's culture and what is considered high status work. The exceptions, however laudable, do not disprove the rule about the field's dominant intellectual mode.




Of course the possibility of actually confirming this fact once and for all is now forbidden to us, lost as it is to the sands of time




I am a Bayesian, so I am fully on board with probabilistic arguments. Yet, once again, in the humanities or in philosophy, consensus is rare or sometimes never reached. I find this farcical.


The core difference, as I see it, is the presence of a robust error correction mechanism. In my world, bad ideas have an expiration date because they fail to produce results. Phlogiston theory is dead. Lamarckian evolution is dead. They were falsified by reality (in the Bayesian, not Popperian sense). Can we say the same for the most influential ideas in the humanities? The continued influence of figures like Lacan, despite decades of withering critique, suggests the system is not structured to kill its darlings. It is designed to accumulate "perspectives," not to converge on truth.


(Even STEM rewards new discoveries, but someone conducting an experiment showing Einstein's model of gravity works/doesn't work in a new regime is doing something far more important and useful than someone arguing about feminist interpretations of underwater basket weaving)


My own field of psychiatry is a good case study here. We are in the aftermath of a replicability crisis. It is painful and embarrassing (but mostly in the softer aspects of psychology, the drugs usually work), but it is also a sign of institutional health. We are actively trying to discover where we have been wrong and hold ourselves to a higher standard. This is our Reality Anchor, however imperfect, pulling us back. I do not see an equivalent "interpretive crisis" in literary studies. I do not see a movement to discard theories that produce endless, unfalsifiable, and contradictory readings. The lack of such a crisis isn't a sign of stability. To me, it seems a sign the field may not have a reliable way to know when it is wrong. The Sokal Affair, or my own time in the Tate, shows that "earnest" productions are indistinguishable from parody.


This is not an accident. It flows directly from the incentive structure. In my field, discovering a new, effective treatment for depression grants you status because of its truth and utility. In literary studies, what is the reward for simply confirming the last fifty years of scholarship on Titus Andronicus? There is little to none. The incentive is to produce a novel interpretation, the more contrarian the better. This creates a centrifugal force, pushing the field away from stable consensus and towards ever more esoteric readings. The goal ceases to be understanding the text and becomes demonstrating the cleverness of the critic.


Regarding psychoanalysis and outcomes, I am a simple pragmatist. If a person with OCD is happy, I have no desire to treat them. If they are a paranoid schizophrenic setting parks on fire, the matter is out of my hands. In most cases, patients come to us because they believe they have a problem. We usually agree. That shared understanding of a problem in need of a solution is anchor enough.


This is why I believe the humanities are not a good target for limited public funds, at least at present. I have no objection to private donors funding this work. But most STEM and medical research has a far more obvious case for being a worthy investment of tax dollars. If we must make hard choices, I would fund the fields that have a mechanism for being wrong and a track record of correcting themselves, while also raising standards of living or technological progression.