site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Why is Lex Fridman single?

(I apologize if this is brief for a top level post. I just want the community's take on it.)

  • -52

(I apologize if this is brief for a top level post. I just want the community's take on it.)

Then give the community your take, or something. If you want to post small questions, post in a small-scale Sunday thread.

Took you (plural) long enough.

The inappropriateness of the comment should have been obvious to the OP by now thanks to all the downvotes and the multiple comments explicitly saying it's inappropriate. (I wonder, could that be the most downvoted comment ever on The Motte?)

I wonder, could that be the most downvoted comment ever on The Motte?

Yes, it could be.

Huh, it was surprisingly close.

Congratulations on beating Droog. We should have a badge for this

Who is Lex Fridman and why should I care about his romantic life?

who knows, who cares. gossip goes in small questions thread

In the spirit of brutal honesty.

Autistic, 'nerdy conservative'-coded, I'd imagine is attempting to find a woman of similar academic achievements/intellect (which skews pretty damned left), unsure if he's sufficiently culturally Jewish to tap that market/soft arrangement marriage space, I'd guess his particular slice of Austin (Moneyed, conservative, techy) skews overwhelmingly male as well.

I'm sure there's women who'd be up for the task, but from how he talks about relationships he's probably pretty narrow-focus in terms of who exactly he'd accept.

The whole nerdy conservatism thing is just increasingly toxic to getting laid. My own misadventures on dating apps found that presenting anything adjacent to that had a dramatic panty aridification effect even in wealthy, educated circles and geographies.

His podcast seems like the exact kind of thing I should be into and yet I can't stand to listen to it. Perhaps women get the same feeling from him on dates.

My strategy is to only listen to episodes with an interesting guest, skip any boring parts, and stop listening if it seems like the guest isn't that interesting after all. This has been working out great; for example, I really enjoyed the recent interview with Tim Dodd (of Everyday Astronaut) where the guest goes into a bunch of long and interesting monologues about rocket engineering.

It's because he could easily be replaced by a chatbot. He talks frequently about "love" and yet seems completely incapable of expressing love.

He has also had some morons on his show, and he acts like they're providing some sort of profound insight on life. For instance: Destiny, Chamath. He also let the founder of Cardano on his show, and let him spew absolute verbal diarrhea for like 5 hours. Lex is supposed to be some sort of intelligent computer programmer, but was unable to identify this guys completely nonsensical technobabble. And I'm not kidding, this went on for 5 motherfucking hours.

He also constantly preaches love and how we should be willing to have difficult conversations, and yet is pretty notorious on reddit for banning anybody from his subreddit who even vaguely questions him.

Finally...he really leaned into "MIT artificial intelligence researcher" but his degrees actually come from Drexel University, where his father is a physics professor. He isn't exactly lying about his education, since it does seem like he did something at MIT at some point, but he isn't really being honest either. It also seems sortof rude/insulting towards his dad to imply that Drexel isn't good enough to be proud of.

I don't know. I really used to like Lex, and I really should like the people he has on his podcast, but he just seems so fake that it's hard to get past him anymore.

For instance: Destiny, Chamath.

Any bitcoin person for that matter: Michael Saylor, Balaji Srinivasan, etc.

i don't think he researches his guests that well before he interviews them, so his questions tend to be vague instead of specific . This does not mean it's bad. his success demonstrates that whatever he does is working. Sometimes just letting an expert talk for hours works, too.

I thought the same, but most of his podcasts are really shallow. Last one I checked is the most recent with Python creator, the conversation started and the guest asked what's the target audience, to understand how much deep can he go explaining a concept:

Fridman: Imagine my listeners vary from a normal fisherman to an experienced elite programmer.

Guest: so programming is like a kitchen recipe...

And so a whole conversation by analogy ensues. I didn't catch any detail that would be interesting for a programmer.

Maybe that's okay, but I always expected something more interesting given his brand as an academic. To be fair, more detailed information would probably be better in another format like text.

But anyway, the original question of OP is not related to culture war thread.

too long. a good use for AI would be to compress a 3 hour show into 30 minutes by removing filler and speeding it up

A better use would combining this with transcription, since it's far easier for me to read text than listen even 30 minutes of prattle anyhow.

If this is worth posting at all (ehhhh) it belongs in the "Friday Fun Thread", not here, "main thread" comments should have an interesting topic and at least a few paragraphs of context/commentary.

He's a fed and disclosing his wife and kids would blow his cover, clearly.

I'd guess a combination of high standards on his part, social ackwardness, lack of time to go out due to working on stuff, and a strong desire not to be in a relationship with the kind of woman who'd want to date him for his fame and money. Lex seems to hold a very Romantic and idealistic view of relationships and love, and he wants to find someone with the same point of view who isn't a gold digger, and there are probably incredibly few social opportunities for him to meet someone like that.

What social opportunities exist to find someone who believes in love?

Well, social opportunities that aren't full of social climbers. If he goes to the sort of parties thrown by Musk, Rogan, etc., then any single young woman there is immediately under suspicion of being a gold digger or worse.

The real mystery is when it went from "Friedman" to "Fridman". Or am I going crazy?

I had a similar thing with Josh Zepps/Szeps and thought I'd dropped into an alternate timeline for a while there.

The real mystery is when it went from "Friedman" to "Fridman". Or am I going crazy?

Friedman is more common.

What the fuck, I vividly remember it being Friedman with an e.

Is this the Berenstin timeline?

Is that meant to be a third timeline, or did you mis-spell the mis-spelling Berenstein?

Here in the Berenstain timeline, I now have to do penance for calling out a spelling mistake in a spelling flame. Hail Mary, full of Grace...

Why would you expect anyone here to know who this person is, much less have an opinion on their relationship status that is worth listening to?

Because people are making jokes that if you fall asleep with youtube on outplay, you'll wake up to a Lex Fridman podcast.

I would imagine a fair number of people here know who he is. I take it you don't - he has a series of interviews on youtube where he has a variety of guests. I've only seen one or two, but found that I enjoyed his interviewing style. He manages to balance asking challenging questions with being respectful, which I enjoyed. He also apparently had a successful career as a ML researcher before that.

Now as to the other part of your question, I agree. Nobody here should be expected to know about his relationship status.

Now that you describe him I do feel like I may have come across one of his interviews at some point and just ignored the interviewer in favor of the guest.

TBH from the vaguely Jewish-sounding gender-neutral name and @gosouthyoungman's proclivities I just kind of assumed that this had something to do with whatever the latest bit of poly/trans drama amongst Bay Area Rationalists is.

He also apparently had a successful career as a ML researcher before that.

Did he? I'd check first, maybe check what ML people say on him. His MIT affiliation is .. suspect..

He doesn't have a degree from there. He teaches an unimpressive, low profile course there.

Much about the guy screams 'fraud'. Starting e.g. with his profile picture.

He's widely detested for being a huge bore, asking plain bad questions yet being inexplicably popular.

People (mostly RW, but also Greenwald) suspect he has some inexplicable algorithmic favor.

Maybe Lex, being a clever and driven status seeker figured how to do that. Beats being just another overworked techie with no status and more money than he has time to spend, I guess.

Or it could be that the reason algorithm smiles on him is that he's part of the 'containment'.

That's a theory I've mostly seen Neema Parvini push - that IDW and various seemingly dissident influencers / intellectuals like e.g. Peterson, Eric Weinstein, Bari Weiss cooperate with the less insane parts of the ruling regime. That is, they're part of a show, earning goodwill by standing up for common sense, goodwill they'd use to help smash any actual challenge to the system.

It's not that they're totally fake, or don't have things worth saying, just that they're deemed reliable enough. E.g. Peterson has a lot of interesting things to say, but he's quite shallow on history* and very much lives inside the Boomer moral universe.

Beattie on the IDW:

Here I describe the IDW two-step to Noor bin Laden. They earn your trust with “boys have penises girls have vaginas”… then when you’re hooked they shove establishment line on all else

*I don't remember what it was but I physically cringed listening to him explaing something about 20th century European history. Basically a an American schoolkid's version of it.

What is "the system" or "the establishment" to which you are referring? And who are its real opponents and what do they want?

Managerial regime.

People in US state bureaucracies, major foundations, notorious think tanks (CFR, for example), media corporations that are comingled with these two and where there exists a revolving door.

For a more concrete description, I recommend this video by Academic Agent on the topic..

It basically does what Moldbug never really tried to do: explains the Cathedral and describes it, instead of just sketching it out.

This is amazing. Can't believe I never heard of the guy.

if you search Lex Fridman on google scholar he did publish a number of unremarkable but technically-involved papers.

That doesn't explain why someone with zero charisma is getting so much exposure.

I get Joe Rogan, he's funny, he seems genuimely curious about people. Fridman is stiff, boring and not charming enough to get away with saying cringe.

Why did he ever get more views than say 5k? SEO bs may be part of it, but it's just very weird.

He doesn't have zero charisma. He's providing a product people want.

That's a theory I've mostly seen Neema Parvini push - that IDW and various seemingly dissident influencers / intellectuals like e.g. Peterson, Eric Weinstein, Bari Weiss cooperate with the less insane parts of the ruling regime. That is, they're part of a show, earning goodwill by standing up for common sense, goodwill they'd use to help smash any actual challenge to the system.

After the 'toadie' disaster , the IDW/Substack angle/pivot revived her career and credibility.

https://twitter.com/turncoatd/status/1268691071342501888

(still painful to watch...)

Maybe you are right that it's an attempt at gatekeeping. I wonder why some people are so heavily promoted.

Yep, painful.

With Weinstein, Shapiro, Weiss - I don't think there's any mystery.

Israel's national security literally depends on them having supporters among elites in the US.

Of course they're going to engage in robust influence operations. Ask the ghost of Senator Fulbright about that.

One can hardly begrudge Israelis for doing what they do.

Fridman, although he's Jewish doesn't seem like one of them. Or maybe, as it's been said, he's not ripe yet so they won't try to use them. E.g. he recently got criticised by some Israeli activists for being too soft on some Muslim he interviewed who described Israel as an genocidal apartheid state, yada yada.

I'm not much certain about the gatekeeping / containment theory that posits a degree of kayfabe among pundits.

It'd fit in with how the American political system used to work, however, I just see it as a possibility.

You need to do better than link some random reddit post of a screenshot of someone anonymous making a vague statement. And then pretend it's damning evidence.

Im no Lex fanboy, but I am a fanboy of the motte not dropping its standards to rDrama level of hyperbole and sensationalism.

Also FYI as an ML person myself, his research output is average, just look at his google scholar. He's not moving and shaking the field of ML but he's not lying when he says he is an ML researcher, he is more of that than most people who claim to be one. Seriously you could have just looked at his published research output instead of linking to a post of a screenshot from a "mit person" in the fucking Brendan Schaub subreddit. And before I get dogpiled on how his research is mediocre, so is the majority of ML research, the field of ML has a power law distribution of quality like no other, Out of maybe 100 people, no one in the world is producing really impactful ML research.

It's not a 'vague' statement. Lex didn't graduate from MIT, he graduated from Drexel. T

Yet he aggressively markets himself as a 'researcher' at MIT despite being very from an excellent one as would fit with MIT's reputation. This was noted by the far-left comp-bio prof I linked in my previous post in this chain.

Looking at his video output, that looks a little funny, but whatever. Maybe he does nothing but research and podcasts.

Here's some more detail on the smelly things about Lex the [twitter anon Aristophanes:]

(https://twitter.com/Aristos_Revenge/status/1621201783518265345)

Incredibly interesting how whenever you talk about Fridman or Weiss, people like the Weinstein bros just spontaneously appear.

We were having a Space to talk about Fridman and how he gets the access he does, just a bunch of rando anon right wingers with a typical audience.

We couldn't be more far removed from Eric Weinstein in Twitter terms, but sure enough, he showed up maybe 30 minutes into the Space, which had about 100 people listening. He shows up and it brings hundreds of his credentialist simps with him.

He requests the mic, I give him permission to speak. Goes on and on about how the internet always tries to burn down good people who try to do anything, how Lex is some "immigrant success story" etc. Totally neglects to mention how he was the one who arranged his MIT relationship

Then one of our 20 year old shitposter anons who doesn't even know who Eric is starts talking about "How Fridman didn't respond or try to refute Kanye talking about the JQ" and Eric goes ballistic and asks the rhetorical question "Wait a minute explain this 'JQ' to me" lol

While I have not done some definitive deep dive on the specifics of the issue, it seems rather clearly apparent that Weiss, Daily Wire & Co, Fridman, are at the very least financially linked to what I assume are Israel connected funds from Likud or something.

But Lex looks like a blank slate that they are building up out of literally nothing. No real origin story or adequate credentials, just being puffed up and boosted by specific actors, probably so he can hit his own escape velocity and be an effective propaganda asset.

So whenever you say anything about Fridman, these hitters get sent after you to disrupt the conversation, and I assume it's because Fridman is in a "growth" phase as an asset and hasn't hit maturity, and criticism or skepticism as to his authenticity would disrupt that.

But a hit dog will holler, and the type of people who come running when you ask open questions about these people tell you more about who they are than what they themselves actually say.

You are aware that you can research at an institute you didn't graduate from right? Once again, you don't need to speculate anything about his caliber, you can just check his google scholar profile. It's not rocket science my guy he literally published research from MIT with other researchers at MIT, and all of this is a trivial google search away. Lex has an h-index of 23, which is not going to get him a Nobel Prize anytime soon but that is by all means respectable research output. Some of your professors in college probably had a lower h-index than him. He is a ML researcher at MIT, there is no conspiracy here. MIT website literally says he is a Research Scientist there, why do we need to play guessing games??

I am a ML researcher myself, I really don't need some comp-bio professors' politically motivated opinions to judge things I can google myself.

And honestly, I don't care about rDrama level schizo theories based on tweet frequency about IDW drama.

It's such a weird critique to say he didn't graduate from MIT when he's a grown ass adult. Like criticizing an NBA player for being a low draft pick after they're 4 years into their career.

That thought process isn't as alien in my part of The World. I still dread telling people about that time I did badly in that one specific math exam in school... even though I have an Electrical Engineering degree. They inevitably give me that "you are such a dumbass fraud" look once I tell them that I did badly in a math exam at the age of 17 (while skipping school to fuck around and play CSGO).

Credential dick-measuring contests are weird, you can be employed by MIT and publish papers at MIT but you still catch flak for it for not having gone to MIT.

Most of OP's points can be "debunked" with one or two google searches, With regards to this specific topic, he is in some insane twitter dirt-bag-left bubble where the schizos have control over the narrative. I really don't understand how can there be a 100 comment plus reddit post speculating Lex's connection to MIT and not a single person decided to just check the MIT website and instead rely on twitter screenshot anecdotes and heuristics.

you are right. he never said he graduated from MIT.

People (mostly RW, but also Greenwald) suspect he has some inexplicable algorithmic favor.

Network effects may be at play, but it's more likely that he's popular because -for whatever reason* - he gets good guests. Way more likely that he just has an "in" to the right circles (which is really most of it, in the content game) than Google or whoever is putting a finger on the scales for him specifically.

* When I see popular "nepobabies" online I assume 'their parents know someone" but not necessarily at Google.

The most likely theory I've seen is the one that claims he is secretly part of a media initiative of a pro-Israeli influence group, supposedly the one connected to the Daily Wire.

That'd explain why he's so prominent and getting high profile guests despite lacking charisma and being very fake..

yet being inexplicably popular

Now that clip is incredibly unfair and completely misreads the relationship between Rogan and Lex. Lex does ask extraordinarily predictable questions, and is just incredibly naive at times, but I don't believe for a second that he isn't genuine. He's a very un-cynical and charitable guy. To my eyes Rogan gave him his favorite watch as a gesture of love to a friend he likes, it seems like Glennwald and Beattie are too old and cynical to even recognize a mental state of friendly-love. They're completely stumped by the gesture and have to interpret it through their bizzare worldview where everything is a political machination.

edit: okay after looking a bit more into his "MIT credentials", it does seem like Lex was some wannabe social climber dude. My opinion of him is dropped significantly

edit2: out of curiosity I went to read his phd thesis from Drexel University, since it's kind of related to my field. To be frank, his thesis is shit. He basically applied standard ML methods to the problem of identifying internet users from their click patterns and other info. His approach is basically what you'd immediately come up with once the problem of "use ML to identify users from browser data" presented itself, there isn't a non-trivial idea in there that I can see. I'm honestly somewhat baffled that you can get a PhD with a thesis like that...

but I don't believe for a second that he isn't genuine

I find that very hard to believe.

There are people who are as genuinely naive and full of wonder as he pretends to be.

They even may be smart.

But the way he's presenting himself makes it clear he's socially rather savvy, so that doesn't make any sense at all.

You can't have naive people who are networking as aggressively as he is. Unless, of course, the joke about Fridman not being an MIT AI researcher, but actually the MIT AI research is true.

On trivial PhD.

Old professors and academics are often unaware of how easy it is to spin up a ML model using sk-learn or a Neural Network using pytorch or keras. They think the students are programming backpropagation from scratch. So a lot of ML-related research is a lot more trivial than it looks to non-programmers, this includes theoretical CS academics who don't program much. Some of my GitHub repos could be turned into conference papers.

I predict a lot a lot of careers will be built on kaggle level Jupyter notebooks before the system catches up to it.

Lex might be a spook, designed to boost certain conservatives or infiltrate conservative-adjacent podcasting or something. Like, he’s not particularly good at his job, and his appearance isn’t particularly attractive to people who want to listen to podcasts, and neither does he have a sonorous voice. His proximity to Joe Rogan and Elon is bizarre, so I do wonder if both of them know he’s “their guy” from some federal agency.

Pretty much only he could answer such a question. I'd imagine it's not for lack of options.

Better to ask in the small questions thread.

Who cares?

If you have nothing to say, don't say anything.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats