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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   31499 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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

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?

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.

...

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

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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...

...

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.

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