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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26138 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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No: what I’m saying to Freddie is that his analysis, even if true, doesn’t fucking matter. It’s irrelevant. It could well be the case that 100% of the AI maximalists are only breathlessly touting the immediate future of AI on human society because they’re too scared to confront the reality of a world characterised by boredom, drudgery, infirmity and mortality. But even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us one single solitary thing about whether this or that AI prediction is likely to come to pass or not. The only way to answer that question to our satisfaction is to soberly and dispassionately look at the state of the evidence, the facts on the ground, resisting the temptation to get caught up in hype or reflexive dismissal. If it ultimately turns out that LLMs are a blind alley, there will be plenty of time to gloat about the psychological factors that caused the AI maximalists to believe otherwise. Doing so before it has been conclusively shown that LLMs are a blind alley is a waste of words.

Disagree. If it was true, it would matter quite a bit.

If deBoer was right- both in his conclusion and his reasoning as to why- it would be really relevant. It would mean, among other things, that deBoer had an actually, insightful, accurate, and predictive model of notoriously difficult fields of technology and human pyschology that can all be used to know results in advance. It would not only bolster his credibility on many other topics, but could help refine public policies, discourse, and even technological evolution itself, because here would be a man who can see what is coming before it happens. It would be a demonstration of the quality of his conceptions vis-a-vis would-be public luminaries like, well, Scott. DeBoer would demonstratably be a man who not only knows Scott's interests better than Scott, but also knows Scott better than Scott to a degree that he can accurately predict where Scott will be wrong, and why, before Scott does.

But it's only useful / relevant if it's a prediction made in advance of it being realized. There's no particular value in accurate psychoanalysis with the benefit of hindsight, except when/if it helps with the next future prediction. There's no particular economic/technological understanding why something failed after it already did so, except to help with a future effort. It'd be like be proud about how you totally knew a war would be won or lost after it was resolved- the value of knowing which way the war will result is to affect it before it is a matter of history, so that you can change the future.

But this, in turn, requires being right. deBoer isn't useless here because being right is irrelevant- deBoer is useless because he isn't, and he spends far too many words being useless.

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