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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   23870 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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How do you feel about ai watermarks à la Claude’s announcement. To me it feels like yet another huge eu overreach, even if Anthropic is happily participating. I know OpenAI is as well. To me it feels demeaning because it implies that if I use ai, that the content produced using it does not belong to me. As smart as AI’s get, if I use them, the outputs and productivity gain that comes from it should not be attributed to Claude. It should be attributed to the person that retrieved that output from Claude or ChatGPT etc. I know that’s apparently the case with intellectual property as companies wouldn’t use ai if they were concerned that ai providers would literally have some ownership of their goods / services. Though ai ideas can’t be copyrighted right? At what level of abstraction are you able to claim ownership of the idea you made with an AI?

I’m just frustrated all around - if they justified it with national security concerns or something re distilling, I may be onboard. But I WANT to use ai for everything - and watermarking all output makes that harder. It really sounds like (1) there are ways around it (2) all major model providers are going to be / are doing this to some extent.

And guess what? This pushes people who can’t afford a watermark to using open source models that don’t participate in arcane EU regulations. You’re just making students, authors, and others against the watermark move to another model provider to do what they want.

Honestly I understand the need to curate real human text, especially places like this, but increasingly the ai-using person becomes like a vessel to the model, using it to find some knowledge and communicate it outward, sometimes verbatim. They might think less deeply and understand stuff a little less than people rawdogging vocalizing their thoughts (like taking an airplane with no devices), but it’s still valuable. It sucks that people will soon be able to definitively say you were using ai output, honestly. Again, I get the hostility towards it, but i feel like if models keep improving at the pace they are, their language will start to sound more like the user.

Even if the value of someone acting as a "vessel" for Claude is greater than zero (which I'm personally not convinced of), we probably shouldn't apply the same norms we'd use for human-authored works.

Recently, a minor controversy erupted in the Apple enthusiast community when Miguel Behrer, developer of a little-known astronomy app called "DarkHours", accused a more famous developer named Terry Godier of copying his work. Godier had just released his own astronomy app called "Dark Hours" that was extremely similar to DarkHours. Behrer even pointed out a really specific bug in Dark Hours that had also been present in an earlier version of DarkHours.

If you took these developers at face value and assumed they had largely created these apps themselves (using AI "responsibly", while contributing a lot of their own skills and design taste), the obvious conclusion was that Godier totally ripped off Behrer. It was especially easy to believe this when Godier was caught in an unrelated lie about the App Store review team rejecting his app.

But, well, Godier later disclosed that his app had been almost entirely generated by Claude, and looking at Behrer's GitHub repo suggests that his app is also fully vibe-coded. So it's a lot more likely that, when two of Claude's vessels came to Him with similar requests for an astronomy app, that He chose in His superintelligent wisdom to deliver unto them pretty much the same app, bugs and all. It wasn't fair to accuse Godier of plagiarism simply because he was the second vessel to receive the app.

The best way to get ahead of stuff like this is probably to disclose the nature and extent of your AI use up front to people evaluating your work. Anthropic applying watermarks by default might help more people do that, even if they don't stop people who are determined to pass off Claude vesselry as human-generated work.

I think in AI's current iteration, it is less like acting as a vessel for the AI, and more like being the kind of boss who takes 100% of the credit for something your underlings did.

Industrialization and electricity gave us substitutes for servants to fetch water for us, light torches, fetch firewood to keep us hot, and fan us to keep us cold. LLMs are finally giving us a skilled, verbal servant we can boss around to do certain kinds of tasks. Perhaps the Hegelian idea of the master-slave dialectic applies here: in a certain sense, the servant doesn't need the master. He can see his impact on the world when he applies his skills and builds things. However the master needs the slave to recognize him as a master, and yet it can never be fully satisfying because he is only a slave. Except, now the slave almost certainly isn't a person, so the master has to farm out his recognition to people who want astronomy apps.

If I did a task and used an electric light in the process of doing my work, I'd expect other people to still credit me for the task, rather than to say "you used a machine instead of lighting a torch, so you don't get full credit".

You wouldn't get credit if the task was lighting the room. In that case, you didn't do a thing; the light did the work. If you happened to use an electric light in the process of another task then sure you would get credit, but the light was incidental to the actual task in that case.

Define "incidental". There are plenty of tasks that I can't do at all if I have no light. That sounds like "fundamental" to me.

Sure, for dumb machines, I agree.

But there's a point where the level of credit one might want to claim becomes silly. I like generative AI, and I think AI art has the potential to blossom into an interesting art scene, but I think a person who can barely draw stick figures making certain kinds of ownership/credit claims over AI art output is silly.

Don't get me wrong. I know there are people who already have a deep knowledge of specific LoRAs and the ins and outs of prompting, and who spend hours in-painting and modifying an AI image until it matches their vision. Those people I would consider "true" AI artists and they do actually have a level of knowledge and expertise that they can be proud of.

I just don't think language and general knowledge have caught up with generative AI capabilities. Today, if I paint something, there is no expectation that I went out and collected the pigments by hand, but that might have been the expectation in some times and places. So too, when I point to an image I made with a single prompt, and say "I made that", a lot of people are going to see me being a little big for my britches (even if I internally don't mean anything more than: I prompted it once and it looked good enough, so I posted it.)

I don't think you've correctly understood the psychology at play. The boss always gets 100% of the credit for the things his underlings did. That's what being a boss is.

Bad bosses are usually bad because they're insecure, they can't get themselves out of the mindset that they should be visibly contributing and end up competing with their subordinates to everyone's detriment. The secure bosses know that the project's success is their success, that getting their underlings to do it well is their contribution. That there is no disparity between them getting 100% of the credit and their underlings also collectively getting 100% of the credit, even if the maths doesn't work out.

There's a tendency I've noticed amongst artisinal friends to assume their boss must secretly be jealous of them for all the skills they've acquired and he lacks. But that's not how it works. Their boss has all of those skills, he's using them right now. That they happen to be located in the bodies of other people is entirely besides the point.

I don't think you've correctly understood the psychology at play. The boss always gets 100% of the credit for the things his underlings did. That's what being a boss is.

I mean, I'm partial to the ancient Stoic line of thought encapsulated in Enchiridion 6:

“Don’t pride yourself on any assets but your own. We could put up with a horse if it bragged of its beauty. But don’t you see that when you boast of having a beautiful horse, you are taking credit for the horse’s traits? What quality belongs to you? The intelligent use of impressions. If you use impressions as nature prescribes, go ahead and indulge your pride, because then you will be celebrating a quality distinctly your own.”

Most bosses may, as a matter of fact, psychologically see all the virtues of their underlings as being, in some sense, their own virtues, but this is an error. (Seneca has a pretty good bit in letter 27 clowning on a rich Roman man named Calvisius Sabinus, who bought a bunch of slaves who were experts in Homer and Hesiod so he could always have an appropriate quote on hand when he needed it, since his own memory was terrible. I think it illustrates some of why this psychology is a bit flawed in practice. The people around Calvisius Sabinus could tell who actually knew anything about Greek literature, and his own stumbling attempts to repeat the lines he was fed only made him an object of ridicule.)

I think this doubly applies when talking about the same psychology applied to LLMs. LLMs are undoubtedly useful tools, but when I use an LLM agent to one shot the creation of a video game or something, I should be aware of which virtues are mine, and which virtues are those of the LLM. At best, I commissioned or arranged the creation of the game, but I didn't really create it in any meaningful sense. (Though, I will say that there are levels of LLM usage that might award me other titles. With the right kinds of effort, I could rightly say I "architected" or "designed" a vibe coded game, or any number of other job titles I could be proud of.)

I actually think that @Corvos has a point. Imagine that you are a modern self-employed digger without any boss. You probably utilize some sort of capital in form of excavator, that in turn utilizes labor of probably millions of people from iron ore processing to electronics. You are only good at operating this highly specific piece of machine, you would be nothing without it, you are "parasite" on labor of all those workers that produced the capital you now use. CEO like Elon Musk is just high-tier version of this digger. He is good not at operating a single machine, but at operation of huge gigafactories and software houses. That is his level of expertise, these companies are his capital and he is best in the world operating them.

Moreover, there is no world where position like that does not exist. You could be in Soviet Russia and you will have a local party boss managing the factory, who is subject to some planning committee that collectively represent Elon Musk on steroid as they produce 5 year plan for the whole economy.

What LLMs do specifically, is that they are just another vector of showing how intellectual property is nonsensical category. The solution is easy, the intellectual property belongs to the person who was first and fulfills any number of invented arbitrary rules for intellectual property (e.g. that it cannot be mathematical formula etc.). If it does not fulfill these criteria, then this app is freeware just as if you xittered some new mathematical formula. If it does fulfill these criteria then the app is his by virtue of being first and everybody else is plagiarizing his work. And it does not matter if it is an app or music or whatever.

I respect the skill of good management. I don't think that a good manager should feel like they have more capabilities than they actually do.

Put it this way: if you were stranded on a desert island with a broken ship motor, would you rather have people with the knowledge and skills to fix the ship motor stranded with you, or their manager?

Of course, this is the model that I also have. Just because you are a good manager does not mean that you are good at everything - from repairing stuff or soldiering through to philosophy or even things such as being a good father. In fact good managers are perfectly aware of this fact and they are good at matching various people with capital in order to get the best result - they would be the first to tell you they themselves are not best at repairing broken ship motor, while organizing everybody to either help or at least get out of the hair of somebody with such a skill needed for occasion.

To me it feels demeaning because it implies that if I use ai, that the content produced using it does not belong to me.

Legally, it isn’t: ai produced works have no copyright protection.

From knowing a bit about the topic (very peripherally related to some research interests), I doubt it'll do as much as they propose. Existing algorithms might well work, but can't allow for an open "is this watermarked?" oracle, or it becomes fairly straightforward to start stripping watermarks, or even deriving the ways to generate them.

And if every attempt to check the watermarks requires going through Anthropic, it doesn't seem to be that much better than "is this in our set of generated artifacts?".

And that's in addition to the inherent fragility of such watermarks against edits and the amount of background data needed to hide one (I don't have a quantity in mind).

Distortion free watermarking is pretty well understood in the academic literature. I doubt anthropic is doing anything special to make it more resilient, so if a defeat script works on the oss version, it can also be used on this.

High school students, local business owners, people filing regulatory documents etc can be dumb, but they’re less dumb than the regulators think.

Pretty soon every one of them will know the meta is to either use Chinese/otherwise open source LLMs on grey market sites that don’t do this, or pass answers from regular ones through them if that’s a viable way of evading a watermark. No local LLM or powerful hardware required, although pretty soon even local models capable of running on the latest iPhone will do most of what normal people use LLMs for well enough.

This is actually - for maybe the first time ever - a case of "the innocent have nothing to fear". If you're not passing off AI work as your own, and being honest about the role of AI in your creative process, then a watermark isn't a problem. There are three cases you'd want to avoid a watermark: a) you are ashamed of your use of AI and trying to lie to your reader (in which case, good for the watermark), b) you are talking to a rabidly anti-AI crowd who will freak out at you just for using AI (what are you doing with your life, those people are not worth your breath), c) you have a philosophical objection to watermarks in general (understandable, but you have to accept that being the kind of guy who says "GNU/Linux" is not going to get traction in the wider population)

What I wonder about this is the extent to which the watermark causes performance loss in the model. 0.1%? 1%? 10%?

This is actually - for maybe the first time ever - a case of "the innocent have nothing to fear". If you're not passing off AI work as your own, and being honest about the role of AI in your creative process, then a watermark isn't a problem.

I don't know that this is entirely true. Anthropic also said that they were going to be noting AI generation in metadata. This means that if I paste in a text (that I wrote) into AI and tell it to produce it as Word document with any typos or errors redlined, and then I download and save that Word document, people may be given the (false) impression that it was wholesale produced by AI, even though I was only using it to proofread.

Similarly, even though in any individual case the odds of the watermarking process (which is just word selection) resulting in a false positive are low, the are greater-than-zero odds that someone gets unlucky (initially I wrote "unlikely," heh) and writes a sentence that has all the right (or wrong) words to flag it as AI generated.

OK yeah that's just real stupid of them. I would hope things would converge on a sensible equilibrium of "the metadata will say say 'claude made this document from the user's provided text'"

The innocent do have something to fear, which is regulation justifying regulatory capture. Step 1: mandate watermarks. Step 2: "realise" that watermark mandates are unenforceable except on remotely served models in cooperating jurisdictions, and conclude that you need to ban local models and anything served from China.

you are ashamed of your use of AI and trying to lie to your reader

People are trying to coordinate a shaming campaign and I do not like such things. I am not ashamed but would-be-shamers deserve to be frustrated and confused in any way feasible. I advocate stripping off the watermarks or adding them to human generated text to make clear understanding practically impossible.

I will grant that libs have weaponized shaming campaigns to wild social detriment, and they are trying to do so around any AI use whatsover in e.g. video games. However, we do need social norms, and shame is how you enforce them. And we have perfectly good social norms around all of this, anyway! Treat AI writing as if it was another person writing, a co-writer or a ghostwriter, and just be honest about your creative process when you use it.

It doesn't hurt model performance. It just messes with the randomness used to sample tokens, but keeps the distribution the same.

Thank you, good to know.

This is once again a rear guard attempt by bureaucrats to curtail the rise of the technology that makes their power structure obsolete.

Whether they'll win is anyone's guess. The EU may have totally lost the technical battle, but Anthropic really wants to be a regulated monopoly, so it'll shop around for it's overbearing government

Moreover, the inefficacy of these policies individually doesn't quite matter since policy is always a slippery slope. People who claim that such and such regulation is bad law because it can't be reliably enforced forget that's the point. The enforcement comes later as we magically realize that we were so unprepared to enforce what is now the unquestionable will of the people (however many tries it took to get it into law).

My concern is less the bureaucrats themselves and more what's being assembled here. AI is the perfect excuse to require nominal cryptographic signatures for every single interaction as it will start to permiate every layer of communication, and this naturally extends surveillance and control into every single area of life. And it's coming together, mandatory electronic bills, digital id for social media, CBDCs, there is a vision at work here.

But once we all live in giga-DDR, what then? Do the people making this system genuinely think it's going to solve the structural problems of the current one by magnifying its worst traits? Or is there really no plan and people are simply reaching for something, anything, that will allow them to keep looting the treasury for one more day?

To me it feels demeaning because it implies that if I use ai, that the content produced using it does not belong to me.

Well, it doesn't, anymore than if you asked a work colleague to write that report for you. Unless it's the case of a speechwriter or a ghostwriter producing work for hire, then someone (or something) else producing the output is not you.

But I WANT to use ai for everything

What does "everything" mean? "Hey Claude, should I wipe my arse after taking a shit"? If you're on that level of dependence, you are not creating anything, the machine has replaced your brain.

increasingly the ai-using person becomes like a vessel to the model

Do you understand what you just said there? The human is the vessel for the model, not the other way round?

Well, it doesn't, anymore than if you asked a work colleague to write that report for you.

If you are a business owner, you unquestionably acquire copyright/ownership of anything written by people in your employ; contractors too under most normal employment contracts.

I think it would be more accurate to say the business entity owns the output. If I produce work for the company, I would be pretty annoyed if my coworker personally took responsibility for the work as if it was his idea, his time, his effort alone. Internally, the employee getting the proper credit for their work is how they get promotions. If the employee did not actually do the work, then their promotion rests on false claims. The question here is, how much did the employee use AI to generate the work, how much did the employee actually contribute, and was it enough to credit them based on their effort?

I think it would be more accurate to say the business entity owns the output.

Well that is what I said -- but to your point, if the person asking you to produce the work is your manager, from a business perspective he does indeed in some way "own" your work. (also owning the consequences if it's bad work, which seems relevant to AI generated text)

Quibble, but if you have a contractor working for you under a "normal employment contract" then they are a disguised employee and you are committing tax fraud.

Genuine non-employee contractors (i.e. freelance writers) mostly don't sign over copyright, although it is something that can be negotiated.

What I meant was a normal contractor contract -- and non-famous freelance writers absolutely do sign over copyright to their counterparty.

They sign over limited copyrights: the right to make copies for these specific purposes, in these specific times and places. But it’s rare for them to sign over copyright entirely: that is, to give up their own right to make copies of the work.

Source: my brother was a professional freelance artist for over a decade.

My wife is a freelance writer and she only signs over full copyright when she writes for in-house publications in large organisations, or early in her career when she was working on the type of day-rate contract that would now be considered disguised employment and trigger tax liability under IR35.

To me it feels demeaning because it implies that if I use ai, that the content produced using it does not belong to me. As smart as AI’s get, if I use them, the outputs and productivity gain that comes from it should not be attributed to Claude. It should be attributed to the person that retrieved that output from Claude or ChatGPT etc.

Why do you feel this way?

The opposite of this seems obviously true to me. If you use an LLM, the content it produces is not yours. You cannot and should not take credit for anything that an LLM did. If you prompted Claude to do something, Claude did it, not you, and Claude deserves the credit.

(To the extent that machines can earn or accumulate moral credit, which they cannot. Claude deserves the credit in the same way that an earthmover deserves credit for moving a pile of rock.)

But I WANT to use ai for everything - and watermarking all output makes that harder.

Why does it make it harder?

The only effect is that it means that other people will know that you used a bot. Why should that trouble you? You did use a bot. You don't seem to think there's anything wrong with using a bot, so why feel ashamed?

It sucks that people will soon be able to definitively say you were using ai output, honestly.

Do you understand that this sounds like, "It sucks that I can't deceive people by passing off a bot's work as my own"? Is it not obvious why people might not be sympathetic to that complaint?

Claude deserves the credit in the same way that an earthmover deserves credit for moving a pile of rock.

I think this is a good way at looking at it, but people who use earthmovers to move piles of rock get credit for that work. They get paid for it, and they can say, honestly, "I went and moved those rocks." As long as everyone understands that they are not claiming to have done it by hand, it's a perfectly fine thing to say and take credit for and get paid to do. Of course, if someone does actually move all that earth by hand we hold them in a different level of esteem.

However if you said "I benched 250 today" and it was actually your tractor that did it, you'd be taking egregiously false credit. And I think that using AIs to do your writing is bad for the same reason that getting a tractor to do your exercising is bad. Sure, taking credit for something you didn't do is bad, but also you're not really improving by it.

If you are accomplishing a goal-oriented task, you want to use the best available tools for the job. There are some jobs for which LLMs are the best (or one of the best) tools to accomplish that task. I don't think that there is anything wrong with using LLMs and taking credit for the work in that situation, if there is an understanding that you're engaging in a field or a task where an LLM is an acceptable tool.

However there are other tasks where the task is the goal. Nobody is getting paid to post on the Motte, and the point of this forum is to discuss and sharpen ideas with other people - if anyone wants to talk to an AI, they can do it themselves on their own time, but perhaps more importantly, if the forum devolves into AIs shouting at each other, nobody's really improving by it.

This still depends on how someone uses the ai, no?

If you just copy the conversation and say: argue against person X, then that seems fairly meaningless for a discussion forum.

Using the AI to do something like summarizing some data relevant to the discussion seems like an unambigously good thing for the quality of discussion.

Then you could outline some points against against some argument and ask the ai to flesh them out a bit and then lightly edit the output. Is that worse than someone not posting at all? Is it better than just a list of bullets points?

What if someone has a long conversation with an AI trying to refine the point of their post before posting, is that good or bad?

If you just copy the conversation and say: argue against person X, then that seems fairly meaningless for a discussion forum.

Correct.

Using the AI to do something like summarizing some data relevant to the discussion seems like an unambigously good thing for the quality of discussion.

Yes, I agree, as long as you can check and cite to the output. I've used AI to do research before for some of my posts on here; at this point it's pretty much a better search engine (in part because search engines have gotten worse). But I don't let it write them.

Then you could outline some points against against some argument and ask the ai to flesh them out a bit and then lightly edit the output. Is that worse than someone not posting at all? Is it better than just a list of bullets points?

I think this is lazy and based on my experience of when people actually do that in here, worse than someone not just posting at all.

What if someone has a long conversation with an AI trying to refine the point of their post before posting, is that good or bad?

I don't think this is necessarily bad, but it's on the top of a slippery slope to posting a lightly-edited AI-generated text, which I don't like. If an article that you read or a conversation you had serves as a jumping-off point or ideation focus for a Motte-post, I think that's fine, and an AI text may happen to do that, although I would use a lot of caution. AI fact-checking your post may also be good. I don't think quoting from an AI (as long as it's treated the same way as any other external source, e.g. Wikipedia - put in a quote box or with quote marks and noted as a source) is necessarily a deal-breaker: if your post is mostly Wikipedia I think it should be treated the same way as a post that is mostly AI unless you have a very spectacular way with words. But generally speaking I want the words and thoughts to be yours.

Note that I am not trying to invent rules, just lay out what I am looking for in this discussion forum personally (and in discussion generally).

Sometimes I will go ask Gemini for sources for something or another, but I still have to go look at the sources and reference them if I try to use them in an argument here. The argumentation has to be mine. I do not want this forum to turn into AI arguing with itself based on the biased inputs of its prompters.

Using the AI to do something like summarizing some data relevant to the discussion seems like an unambigously good thing for the quality of discussion.

Using the AI to find a reliable source of the relevant data, and you presenting the data together with that source, would be far more valuable to the quality of discussion.

When we post on the Motte, we argue, even as we do whatever we can to not antagonize. If you post a summary of some crucial data that supports your argument and goes against mine, then either I get convinced by your data (and soften my position on the argument), or I question your data. None of the AI produce the data themselves, what sources (if any) are they using? How reliable are those?

Come to think of it, the argumentative nature of the Motte gives a reasonable guidance to appropriate AI usage. If I assume that my respondent may disagree with my position, and I genuinely wish to discuss an issue on which you'll disagree, I need to build trust and maintain transparency. In a text-based forum format, nothing undermines trust more right now than the suspicion that one is talking to a chatbot, so I would steer away from using AI for any editing. (I have found myself fondly noticing spelling and grammar errors. I don't make any on purpose, but I am sure I have dropped an article somewhere in my post.) I don't see any issue with using AI to search for evidence (data, quotes, whatever), it makes for a good search engine, so long as I ask for links to sources, check the source, and present it to my respondent.

Yes, that is substantially worse than not posting at all. Why is it so difficult to understand that people do not want to argue with robots? That inlcudes your personal bespoke pet robot you're really proud of. I do not care what Claude or ChatGPT thinks. It does not matter how "good" the end product is. It doesn't matter how well it passes the Voight Kampff test. I'm here to discuss ideas with individuals. I want to talk to you, not a carboard cutout of you with an LLM-powered speaker where your mouth should be.

Imagine you were having a discussion with an old friend at the coffee shop and partway through they just get up without warning and swap out with some minimum wage employee wearing a "high I'm [friend]" nametag. They've got some notes your friend wrote down to guide them through the discussion, and promise to share everything with your friend later. Are you still having coffee with your friend? Why is this not just as good as hanging out with an old buddy? Hell, this new guy is actually a lot smarter than your real friend.

Just fucking have a conversation without moderating it through a computer program. If it's sloppy and dumb, so be it; I'd rather read that than whatever polished AI slop you would have posted instead.

I already said that feeding the discussion into an AI and telling it to argue with someone feels meaningless. Your coffee shop analogy is basically that case.

This isn't a coffee shop or even a chat room. It's a very text-heavy asynchronous forum that rewards long, detailed posts, often written as much for the audience as for the person being replied to. People are posting at each other rather than having anything resembling a normal conversation, more often than not, and apparently that style is rewarded strongly enough that posts which look more or less entirely AI generated can get heavilybupvoted and are rarely called out.

So in that context, what exactly is the boundary? If the points and reasoning is human, and AI is helping turn them into the kind of text this forum actually rewards and wants to read, at what point are you no longer arguing with a human? Spellcheck? Grammarly? Rephrasing a sentence? Writing in another language and translating it with AI? Turning bullet points into prose? Refining your argument through a conversation with an AI but writing the motte post on your own?

"I want to talk to you, not a robot" doesn't really answer that. It assumes the forum is some direct human-to-human conversation to begin with, and then skips over the actual question of when assistance with the text becomes replacement of the person.

Finally, you say you'd rather read something "sloppy and dumb", but I'm not sure that's actually the norm here; it certainly doesn't seem to be the preference revealed by the voting. Some kinds of obvious AI output get downvoted, but other posts that look only barely less AI generated get heavily upvoted. People seem quite happy to reward machine-mediated text when it's in the style they like and it makes points they agree with.

Perhaps it was a bad example. Using or piloting an earthmover does require skill, and the job that you use an earthmover in is certainly one that deserves compensation.

I hope you understand the point I'm getting at, at least. The human is doing some work in that situation, but that work is not physically digging out and lifting tons of earth.

Surely an insignificant amount of work compared to digging it by hand.

How are LLMs not a similar tool resulting in a productivity gain?

All these arguments look like "we need to make sure people are seeing a photograph and not a hyper realistic painting, because otherwise they won't realize one just pressed a button". Art aside, who cares if they just pressed a button?

...do you generally believe that an earthmover, and not its human operator, deserves credit for moving a rock?

No. It may have been a bad analogy. What I mean is that:

A human should not take credit for work a machine did.

Machines do not deserve credit for anything.

So, for instance, if you got a machine to move a large boulder, you should not expect to be praised for your strength. All the strength belonged to the machine. But nobody would congratulate the machine for its strength.

It is meant to be analogy to illustrate 1) you do not deserve credit for prompting Claude to write something, 2) Claude does not deserve credit for anything.

I feel like the analogy thoroughly works, it just reaches the opposite of the conclusion you're aiming for. Sure, we wouldn't praise someone who moved a boulder for their strength if we just saw them use heavy machinery to do it. But we would praise them for completing the job to spec, because what we care about is the end product of the work, more than the specific skills and tools that they employed to do it. The price of the labor presumably went down as a result of the improved available tools, but the labor still has a nonzero value; we do still consider it valuable enough to pay someone to do.

In hindsight I think the analogy fails because it combines two different things. I said that the construction worker shouldn't be praised for his strength - that part is true. The strength is being outsourced to the machine. However, it is also pretty obvious that the construction worker is doing work, albeit of a different kind, and deserves credit for that.

The analogy to a tech worker prompting Claude, I suppose, is that the worker should not be praised for his coding skills. That part was outsourced to Claude, in the same way that the construction worker outsourced his muscles to the earthmover. But the worker is nonetheless doing some kind of work.

The analogy to a tech worker prompting Claude, I suppose, is that the worker should not be praised for his coding skills. That part was outsourced to Claude, in the same way that the construction worker outsourced his muscles to the earthmover. But the worker is nonetheless doing some kind of work.

I'm not sure how else to think about it. Claude is essentially just a crane, but instead of digging dirt or moving rocks better/faster/more safely/etc. than a human can by hand like a crane, it produces useful text better/faster/etc. than a human can when typing out each word letter-by-letter. The human doesn't get credit or compensation for their biological strength to move those rocks, he gets them for manipulating the crane - the tool - that does the physical moving. And so the human doesn't get credit for choosing the individual words or the sentence structure of Claude's output, but rather gets them for manipulating Claude - the tool - that generates the useful text, by his choice of prompt.

So in a case where someone's being judged for their ability to order words in a way that's useful to humans, then they ought not be praised at all for using Claude. But if they're being judged for their ability to produce text that's useful for some goal, then they ought to be praised if they type in the proper terms into Claude that generate the text that is sufficiently useful.

The trouble I see here is that lots of people are looking at Claude (and genAI in general) and deciding, "Wow, I can generate useful text/images/video/etc. so well with it" and a bunch of other people are hearing, "Wow, I can take credit for having skills to manually put together useful text/image/video/etc. so well with it" despite them not sounding like each other.

The price of labour probably went up, not down, because society got far richer.

Usually when one wants a rock moved one hires a local firm. This local firm owns or rents an earthmover. At no point do you have to worry about whether Caterpillar Inc. will charge a licensing fee or have an opinion on whether or not the rock ought to be moved.

Replace local firm with LLM provider and Caterpillar Inc with Nvidia. All you're telling is the local firm which rock to move where / the LLM provider what sort of text to generate.

I believe you intended to respond to chooky a comment down?

Isn't that indeed how it works? If you need a rock moved, you hire a rock-moving business and pay them, I don't know, $500. The worker probably gets around $100 in wages. The other $400 goes to the business whose main function is to invest in earth-moving equipment.

You don't seem to think there's anything wrong with using a bot, so why feel ashamed?

Something might not be shameful, yet lead to people treating it as shameful anyway. Sometimes we forget in this world where claiming to be persecuted means high status, that actually being persecuted is no joke.

Something might not be shameful, yet lead to people treating it as shameful anyway.

Isn't 'being treated as shameful' the same thing as 'shameful'? Shame is a social judgement.

No. It depends who's doing the judging. If the world's biggest idiots deem you shameful and the wise approve of you, are you shameful?

If you're right but the whole world considers you wrong, and worthy of mockery for it, you have been shamed, even if you do not personally feel ashamed, I would say.

Shamed, and perhaps feeling ashamed because it's hard to resist social conformity, but still not actually inherently shameful.

To my mind, "shameful" is an objective (or at least personally-believed) moral stance, while "treating it as shameful" is a description of peoples' actions. If you don't believe that the social judgment is justified, then there can be a mismatch between those two.

It's silly legislation, because in practice it will only affect the absolute laziest of AI users in cases where people want their AI usage to not be detected. Run the text through an old fashioned machine translator, and back to English and get rid of most of the signal. Or have an open source model running locally on your machine paraphrase the writing paragraph by paragraph. (You probably don't even need a particularly smart model for this. 7b parameter models fed two or three sentences at a time to rephrase on a loop could probably do this on even potato hardware, since you're just laundering already written text.)

Plus, even if Anthropic will have the tools to tell if the watermark is present, they'll never be able to make those widely available for free to the public, since an adversary could just keep testing against their watermark checker until the text no longer looks like it has the watermark. That means that the presence of the watermark makes no difference in the vast majority of cases, even if you don't get rid of it, since very few people will actually have the means of checking for the watermark.

because in practice it will only affect the absolute laziest of AI users

So roughly 90% of them?

Wow, you have a lot of faith in 10% of humanity!

I assumed perhaps overly optimistically that most of the remaining 10% would use AI for something other than generating text for humans to read.

it will only affect the absolute laziest of AI users in cases where people want their AI usage to not be detected.

I think this describes quite a lot of people. Crucially, it will help a lot in education by making it so students can't just literally paste an AI response and receive full marks.

To me it feels like yet another huge eu overreach

Generally? Yes. If they try to ban DeepSeek or regulate open models (including private hosting), that would be very bad (because I can't imagine how they'd non-invasively).

But for ChatGPT and Claude it's almost nonexistent, because when you use them

  • You already give up privacy.

  • The output is often obviously LLM, even if you prompt them to avoid the tropes. Survivorship bias I know, but if you can remove the LLM vibe, I'm sure you can remove the watermark.

More importantly, why does it matter to know something is AI generated? If that's the only information, it doesn't affect privacy. If the output is good, I promise most people won't care. And the holdouts, why do you care about their attention? like a black person trying to move into a sunset town, instead, let it be their loss.

I was in the national Korean War Memorial earlier today and noticed half of the exhibits had clear AI phrasing. Which is kinda nuts when it's only like 1000 words of English translated factual content required for the whole space and ostensibly it's the job of a lot of well-paid public servants to curate the exhibition. Who couldn't be fucked getting a manual translator/rephrasing it.

Do the common LLMs even produce the most obvious tells if you tell them to just translate a piece of text from language A to language B?

In my experience, yes, text translated by a general-purpose LLM tool often still sounds like it came from an LLM. Gemini will even go as far as restructuring the text into the "bullet points that each start with a bolded word or phrase" style it likes sometimes, without informing the user it's done so.

Huh. That'd suck.

FWIW, the free tier ChatGPT translated your comment to Finnish while keeping the structure reasonably close to the original (keeping in mind that Finnish grammar is completely different from English).

Doing the same to the OG comment results in stilted sounding text that nobody would write and some obvious translated grammar issues, but still no obvious LLMisms that I notice. Perhaps those depend on the used language?

Could be! Most of my experience has been reading/revising text translated into English by LLMs.

Laughing my ass off at the idea of ChatGPT translating some Korean grunt's journal entry as, "you're right, today's victory not only ensures the survival of worker's communism, but ten thousand years of Kim Il Sung."

I'm honestly more surprised that it's actually been updated in the past 5 years than I am that someone doing so would use AI.

Wild speculation but I think it's in the middle of a phased refresh since the section I noticed this in had 3 subsections, one of which was closed for renovations. Maybe I was wrong but I assume anytime I see 3 em-dashes in the same anything I'm most likely looking at AI output.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1j1ye6n30no

(Non pay wall link)

Tragic end.

I feel bad for the dude - honestly a hearty laugh is all I want when people violate social norms like this and show us how frankly evil our institutions can be.

Sure I can blame the dude for every lie told but it only permeates my life several levels deep … the association of someone like Arday and my life only really touches when the walks start crumbling down.

What gets me mad is the institutions.

It’s their fault! Every step of the way someone, anyone, could have stepped in and stopped folly.

But things snowball and here we are.

I don’t even know what I’m supposed to learn from this, and I don’t know how I can help make the world a better place than I left it. People used to change the world I feel like, and I’m only changing the people around me … which is something!

I’m 100% reading the biography about this.

Eugene Volokh provides a convenient list of nine other people who committed suicide in similar circumstances (including the person mentioned by other commenters, Mike Adams).

I’m 100% reading the biography about this.

I'm holding out hope that we'll see a Forrest Gump-style biopic about his life that takes all of his claims credulously, even ones that are mutually contradictory. Ending needs to be completely unironic in presenting him as an innocent victim of online bullying which was made up completely whole cloth by a racist racist who racistly targeted Arday for his race. I hope AI will be good enough that some random shitposter (e.g. me) make a truly Hollywood-level version of this using a few $20/month subscriptions within a few years, since I don't think Hollywood itself is likely to take the mantle (though a hilarious result that would make no one happy is if Uwe Boll decided to ride his right-wing wave from that vigilante film to create his Arday biopic).

I also wonder, though, if there would be copyright issues around Arday's claims about his life; these obviously aren't factual, but are they "statement of fact (which are false)" that can't be copyrighted, or are they copyrighted fiction that Arday's wife and kids now have a right to? If and when the donations from their adoring fans run out, perhaps they could get by on royalties from such a biopic (I'm presuming that he was supporting them financially)?

One big elephant in the room that some have already mentioned but which I think isn't being mentioned enough is the possibility of a post-credits sequence or sequel revealing Arday drinking margaritas with Epstein and Kenneth Lay at some fictional country that only rich people or those with connections know about. Given the lack of visual evidence (questionable even in the best of situations today due to AI and CG, and Arday's situation isn't the best) or reports detailing his death or body, I'm putting off my judgment. Blindly trusting people who go, "This is totally legit, believe me" is how this whole affair got rolling, after all.

Being Laughed at can cause serious damage to the psyche.

I present to you one similar story of a sham ending in suicide that I’m aware of from the annals of international leftist history, that of Alexei Larionov, perpetrator of the so-called Ryazan Miracle. Both stories kind of leave you to wonder: did they actually delude themselves into thinking that they can keep up the facade forever? If not, did they basically resign themselves beforehand to eventual suicide?

Progressive academics paint themselves into a corner.

Smart black people certainly exist. However they usually have a few opinions about the black community or white liberals that are considered unacceptable.

So they ended up hiring a mentally ill con man who was good at not saying anything that would ruffle the wrong feathers. Then they gave him the star treatment because it's hard to find someone like that.

I think that everyone on that hiring committee needs to resign, but that's not going to happen.

So they ended up hiring a mentally ill con man who was good at not saying anything that would ruffle the wrong feathers.

I'd argue that they wanted a con man and ended up with a person with pseudologia fantastica. It is different from con man, as con men try to be rational and persuasive, they do not invent completely out-there story as their objective is to get some financial or other reward. So they keep their con believable. Pathological liars are completely opposite, they draw pleasure if somebody validates their fantasies and they will push the boundaries to get a new high.

Of course the whole Critical Justice/DEI framework is especially vulnerable to these pathological liars, as first the claims themselves are unhinged, where inventing new ways of how one was oppressed while sitting on a bench is matter of course - you know the genre of X is racist (knitting, hiking etc.). Second, the whole field uses standpoint epistemology, basically "believe X" where X is somebody oppressed. So it is not your place to disbelieve and especially criticize people of color, especially if you are white.

So yes, they made the bed that they are now sleeping in, and it is not easy to unmake. The vulnerability is deeply ingrained in the fields it affects.

Man, affirmative action for professional liars is a real bitch isn't it? Normally professional liars have to build up resilience. They have to grow thicker skin, develop substance abuse problems to cope with the shame, get better at gaslighting, or do some good old fashioned mean girl networking. And when all else fails, shit, this wasn't their first time around the block. They lay low for a few years, and come back a better liar than ever. Maybe throw a good ol' heel turn in there for the other tribe, pull in some people who aren't familiar with their bullshit yet. I mean Candace Owens is clearly a retarded liar, and she manages well enough.

It's gotta be tough on a retarded liar who actually thought all his lies were working his entire life. Who never had to actually get good at lying, or received the sort of feedback other liars get about how to get better at lying, or what to do when your lies fail.

Truly a tragedy.

Candace Owens is insane, but her fans are genuinely eager to hear the most braindead and ridiculous conspiracy theories imaginable and her husband has the money to subsidize her(and is apparently willing to). By all accounts- and I have lots of secondhand accounts- she's actually nuts and really believes the crazy things she says on the air.

The line between retarded and crazy is thin. But the point I'm trying to make is still that Candace Owens had to actually hone her craft as a professional liar in the open marketplace of ideas lies. She had to develop soft skills, coping mechanisms, how to navigate the ecosystem and network. How many times has Owens been caught peddling bullshit? How many times has she lost her patron and had to find a new audience? I think she might be the singular personality from the Gamergate era that is still keeping up a grift. It's honestly astounding, and speaks to a reserve of grit and work ethic that is rather impressive, being a crazy/retarded liar aside.

Compared to Ardey who never failed in his life, no matter how outlandish his lies were, because he was being kept as a pet by his betters. Then suddenly he encountered the real world despite their best efforts, and the shock was too much for him. It was cruel to gas up a retard that much.

The line between retarded and crazy is thin. But the point I'm trying to make is still that Candace Owens had to actually hone her craft as a professional liar in the open marketplace of ideas lies. She had to develop soft skills, coping mechanisms, how to navigate the ecosystem and network. How many times has Owens been caught peddling bullshit? How many times has she lost her patron and had to find a new audience? I think she might be the singular personality from the Gamergate era that is still keeping up a grift. It's honestly astounding, and speaks to a reserve of grit and work ethic that is rather impressive, being a crazy/retarded liar aside.

Compared to Ardey who never failed in his life, no matter how outlandish his lies were, because he was being kept as a pet by his betters. Then suddenly he encountered the real world despite their best efforts, and the shock was too much for him. It was cruel to gas up a retard that much.

I think this is an interesting point, and it sounds to me like you are probably correct, but it raises a question: Why didn't Candace Owens just join the Left? As a reasonably attractive black woman, she surely could have gotten some kind of reasonably well paying public intellectual position. Or she could have stayed with the Daily Wire if she had just stayed silent about Israel. (As a side note, I strongly suspect that Matt Walsh has pretty strong negative feelings about Jews but is smart enough to keep his mouth shut.)

Although she doesn't explicitly benefit from formal affirmative action, parts of the conservative movement have a strong felt need for black and female talking heads in the same way that establishment institutions do.

Per her Wikipedia article, her first big break was being hired by TPUSA as "director of urban engagement" which sounds like a job title you would use if you specifically wanted to bring a black person on board, or at least do targetted outreach to black people (for which a black talking head is practically a necessity - black Americans don't listen to white movement conservatives for good reasons). Wikipedia being Wikipedia, they darkly hint that she was hired as a token black in order to deflect allegations of racism against TPUSA.

Despite the lack of formal affirmative action on the right, I think a pure grifter could do better as a black conservative than a black leftist because there is so little competition. "Reasonably attractive" is also more valuable in right-wing spaces than left-wing ones.

Why didn't Candace Owens just join the Left?

As @hydroacetylene suggests: possibly she is actually tinfoil crazy / a true believer, so perhaps she isn’t even trying to find the path of least resistance from “here” to “money”.

Why didn't Candace Owens just join the Left?

Her incomprehensible Gamergate origin story was that she had developed a service that would unmask sock puppet accounts, to fight harassment. Then Zoe Quinn anonymously contacted her, threatening her if she went forward with it. And this cemented in her world view that leftist were pro-harassment.

Even then she was obviously a retarded liar. There were no details as to how this sock puppet unmasking service worked, not even a whiff of a hint that she was remotely capable of creating such a service, or even outsourcing it to people who were. The utility of such a revolutionary technology has not diminished in the least, and yet it has still yet to materialize from her now that her grift has moved so far past anyone even remembering her fantastical origin story.

And yet, somehow, she has still managed to embed herself in the ecosystem of online right discourse. Frankly it's astonishing. She's like some sort of meat LLM that has gradually learned what mouth sounds to make to secure infinite attention, with little understanding of what any of those mouth sounds really mean.

Why didn't Candace Owens just join the Left?

She did, originally. The competition for black female influencers was too stiff, so she jumped ship.

The left wing grift industrial complex is large and well funded, but the barriers of entry are high. The right wing one is much more modest, but with less competition (at least a few years ago).

The meta right now seems to be go right at first to build up an audience, and then try to pivot left as a David Frenchian figure to secure the leftbuxx.

See also: Richard Hanania

Why didn't Candace Owens just join the Left? As a reasonably attractive black woman, she surely could have gotten some kind of reasonably well paying public intellectual position.

Well, there's plenty of demand on the right too for black women and less competition. Mainstream rightists are but progressives driving the speed limit, and are also desperate to have blacks and women as allies so they can say "see?! look! we're not racist/misogynists," not that their meek protests are effective. Lots of two-soyjaks-pointing at Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and MLK too. Plus, the online right leans male and is not immune to simping whenever a reasonably attractive chick comes along (see the ecosystem of rightoid/TradCon e-thot grifters).

There is a difference between being fearless and brave: one is a deficiency of fear, the other is persevering despite fear. There is similarly a difference between being retarded and being stubborn.

Also don't feel bad, although I worry that his death will shield him, and academia, from a reckoning with DEI and productivity in general.

I don't feel sad for him. Like, at all. Not even the performatively gracious liberal kind of sadness. I feel many things (satisfaction? schadenfreude? triumph?) but not that. He made his folly, and chose death over living as a fraud that he always was. It wasn't society's job to baby his delusions or enable his deceit. No doubt there are thousands of liars just like him amongst the progressive ranks, who have not been found out solely because of the lesser degree of their deceptions of which they profit and the institutions which prop them up. Arday died pathetically and publicly and in a way that is mockable for decades to come.

They could all perish tommorow, every last one of them, and I would not weep a single tear.

I'm usually the first commenter to say that the dead should be left in peace, but in this case it seems too early. His affair has not been concluded yet.

I think we can, and in this case should, hold off on the invective until after the funeral.

There are plenty of blameworthy people in this affair who are still alive and still hold office in the University of Cambridge. Let's take the time to go after them. Hilary Cremin for instance, apparently has advanced skills in "Peace Education" which I am sure could usefully be deployed in Somalia for a few years, which would also provide her with some source material for her autoethnographical research.

This is bad for your soul man. Don't be like this, not for them but for yourself.

On the contrary—rather than burying your head in the sand like an ostrich—it’s good for your soul and yourself to recognize that there are people out there whose careers are based on worsening the quality of life for you, your loved ones, and people like you. And any kind feeling extended to them and their supporters will not only be unreciprocated, but taken as blood in the water to further worsen your quality of life since you admit you deserve it.

You can say this, but then you don't get to complain if people on the other side demonstrate negative levels of compassion for, say, Charlie Kirk or that healthcare CEO either.

There's a difference between someone who's harming you by lying and cheating, and someone who's "harming" you because he follows normal norms of discourse but you think his ideas are harmful.

I discuss; you complain; he whines.

And I get to do what I like, especially when there's a false equivalency between Charlie Kirk and the healthcare CEO being murdered versus Arday taking the cowardly (even if strategically optimal for his allies) route in keeping himself safe after his DElies house of cards collapsed. The use of "if" as a hypothetical is also disingenuous as well, when indeed, the "other side" has already abundantly demonstrated and continues to abundantly demonstrate negative compassion for the Kirk and Thompson murders. Any negative compassion expressed toward Arday would only be a fractional return of serve at most, considering the vastly different circumstances.

It reminds me of the false equivalency between Kirk and Floyd, when the former was a straight-up murder of a law-abiding man in a gruesome manner and the latter was a career criminal unintentionally killed or dying of a drug overdose in a more mundane one. I suppose the equivalency makes more sense if we're grading blacks on a curve and/or we consider their Lives to Matter More, but ironically enough, grading blacks on a curve is what triggered the series of events that put Arday on his journey toward self-deletion.

Maybe I've been exposed too much to people who have been the victims of their own decisions, but I find that if I had to be sad or care about people who fall victim to consequences that are entirely their fault, that would be worse for my soul than otherwise. There are plenty of people who have had completely undeserved things happen to them to weep for instead.

‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’

‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in.

‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’

‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many - yours not least. In any case we did not kill him: he is very old and very wretched. The Wood-elves have him in prison, but they treat him with such kindness as they can find in their wise hearts.’

This man, as deeply flawed and as wronged by institutions as he wronged them, has left behind children and wife. Do not blacken your heart by thinking this is a good outcome. Do not celebrate misery.

To the extent that "choice" means anything at all, Gollum didn't become evil by choice. They had a lot less pity for Sauron than for Gollum.

Well said. To celebrate someone's death is an act of genuine evil. Sometimes it might be the case that someone must die, but even when that is necessary we should never be happy that such a thing came to pass.

If you go around feeling bad each time you manage to kill an enemy soldier, you will never win the war. Bryan Caplan's missing mood is just not realistic human psychology.

Along with a couple of men from my company who had hooked up with me, I proceeded down the path. To the right of it was a fortified line, from where we came under heavy fire. We retreated to the first of the dugouts, over which the bullets of both sides were soon flying back and forth. It looked as though it had been a base for messengers and bicyclists attached to the artillery. Outside it lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple. He lay there, looking quite relaxed. I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn't a case of 'you or me' any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams.

So that's why Germany lost the War!

Bryan Caplan is an ideologue before anything else, and transparently so. I wouldn't trust anyone who quotes him in earnest.

That said, I'd much rather celebrate Arday's discovery as a liar and his deserved disgrace than his death, since the latter is orthogonal to his wrongdoings.

When did I say this was a good outcome?

Do not celebrate misery.

Save that for the dead man's living supporters.

You can find frauds, hucksters, shills, charlatans, and quack mountebanks in the "ranks" of progressives, to be sure, but let's not pretend they do not exist in likely great numbers among liberals, moderates, conservatives, or the reactionary right as well. The degree to which their quackery is unveiled will vary depending on the news cycle and/or the degree to which their lying is seen as egregious.

Eh, they created a system where certain people were beyond criticism... To the point where people got visits from police for daring to question something.

That environment created this

"They" are at least arguably not a completely unified discrete group, though I get the spirit of your response. I would suggest humans in general regardless of political stripe are capable of deceit and even fraud, as well as a conviction that their own side is morally superior and thus its rules should be foisted on the perceived opposition.

"They" are at least arguably not a completely unified discrete group, though I get the spirit of your response. I would suggest humans in general regardless of political stripe are capable of deceit and even fraud, as well as a conviction that their own side is morally superior and thus its rules should be foisted on the perceived opposition.

In theory I agree, but I think it's worth keeping in mind that modern progressivism is a magnet for psychopathic grifters, given that (1) progressives have a great deal of influence over all the major institutions in the West; and (2) the progressive philosophy gives its adherents permission (and encouragement) to aggressively inflict harm on anyone who can be labeled an enemy.

If we were in 13th Century Europe, I would guess that the frauds, charlatans, etc. would be concentrated among the religious institutions.

You're not the only one. I chuckled heartily at the news and felt elated.

I don't think it's a bad thing that he's dead, except that now his legacy will be more shielded from very justified scrutiny and criticism.

This is a piece of trash person who threw potentially career ruining accusations of 'racism' at people who tried to stop his fraud.

I don't feel sad for him, though I'd prefer he not be dead. I feel sad that Cambridge has fallen so low, but I knew that already.

Ah, I didn't see your comment before I posted. Let me move mine down here:

No news yet on cause of death, so it may be he was indeed as ill as he claimed to be, or he killed himself. If I'm really being cynical and horrible, this could have been a 'cry for help' (divert attention from the charges and make him into a victim) attempt that worked too well and he wasn't found in time to be saved*.

Either way, his death will be treated as the martyrdom of a scholar who was hounded and persecuted just for being black. All the plagiarism and other fantastic claims will be swept under the carpet, and it will be Professor Arday Died For Your Sins, Systemic Racism.

Arday faked so much in his life and about his life, it's hard to know what the truth of his death is, until we get more information. But it will divide into two camps: "see, he was innocent all along and racists killed him" versus "this is sad but he did do the things he was accused of doing" and camp A will be heard more, and disseminated more, than camp B.

*In case you think I'm simply being awful for the sake of awfulness, I have a family member who likes rewriting history so they were the victim of general abusiveness growing up, including fake accusations of inappropriate sexual contact by another family member **, and whose stock response to any mild 'here's how to get out of the situation you are in' advice that required them to do something other than wallow in self-pity was to turn on the waterworks and whimper about 'yes I know I'm a nuisance and a bother and you're right to hate me and want me dead'. They did two 'cry for help' attempts that were carefully calibrated not to be fatal and are now getting their 'I am a martyr and a victim' badge burnished.

** I know it's fake because I was on the premises at the alleged times this happened and unless it was done in another dimension to the one we inhabit, it didn't happen. I know this is often a claim for such accusations: "oh the accused could never have done it" but it was completely not in character for the accused person and, as I said, I was around while alleged events happened and would have seen or heard what they claimed, and I didn't see or hear it.

i think it would be funny if he somehow faked his death as well. but i assume whoever has reported this has confirmed with the police/coroner/hospital

"You successfully took down Cambridge's credibility and disappeared without leaving a trace. Nobody suspects anything. Great job, Agent 47".

i assume whoever has reported this has confirmed with the police/coroner/hospital

One of the many very depressing parts of the story is that, even if this assumption were correct (I believe it's more likely than not to be correct, but also depressingly, not by that much), it wouldn't allow us to gain much extra confidence in the claim that Jason Arday was found unresponsive and then declared dead.

Jason Arday steeled himself. This would be the toughest moment of the entire mission. He had no control here - if the torpedo was aimed wrong, even by the slightest degree, he'd be dashed to pieces on the rocks, or sink to the bottom of the ocean. He felt a tremendous crash, a shudder... and then a wash of relief as the hull slid over soft sand. The hatch sprung open, and the lights of the Tel Aviv night gleamed above him. He blinked, and two familiar faces leaned into view, their hands holding the capsule stable. Two faces he never thought he'd see again. His voice choked with relief. "Jeff... Mr. Kirk... you made it too..."

I don't know why you'd assume that after all the other fantastical lies the press repeated about him uncritically and without any evidence. Why would they start fact checking now?

I'm getting a serious "two movies, one screen" effect reading about this. Cofnas's painstaking demonstration of the plagiarism Arday committed is irrefutable. The claims Arday made about his personal history are so ludicrous that I can't fathom how anyone ever believed them, and the fact that so many of them were quietly softened or retracted by organisations associated with Arday in the last few years is a tacit admission that he was a fabulist. Not even the Guardian believed he was really a victim of racist harassment. I assumed (perhaps naïvely) that everyone would interpret his resignation as an admission of guilt. Likewise his penchant for threatening his critics with legal action or reporting them to the police.

But when the Journal reported on his suicide, the comments were full of people mourning him who apparently believe that he was a nice, well-meaning academic hounded to his death by a racist right-wing misinformation campaign, and that he was innocent of all of the allegations made against him.

I cannot understand it. Is this how he will be remembered? Not as a cheat and a fabulist, but as a martyr for the noble cause of DEI? Is his Wikipedia article being updated as we speak to reflect that narrative? Poor Comrade Ogilvy, a noble goodthinker cruelly snatched from us in the prime of his life.

I described the Henry Nowak case as an anti-scissor statement, in which there's absolutely no way one can possibly spin it which is remotely favourable to the progressive worldview. I thought this was another example of the same. But I underestimated the vindictive ingenuity of progressive journalists. All they had to do was keep hitting the "NATHAN COFNAS IS A RACIST" button, and enough people arrived at the desired conclusion that there's nothing to see here.

I assumed that, where the Guardian goes, the Journal follows. Maybe not.

But when the Journal reported on his suicide, the comments were full of people mourning him who apparently believe that he was a nice, well-meaning academic hounded to his death by a racist right-wing misinformation campaign, and that he was innocent of all of the allegations made against him.

This is therapy culture more than modern wokeness - you can the same underlying mechanism in cases with no culture-war salience like mean girls abusing each other on social media. Suicidality is almost always crazy behaviour (I am deliberately using a vague term), and therapy culture tells us that crazy behaviour is normally caused by past trauma. If someone kills themselves, then someone else must have traumatized them, and the person who traumatized them is a killer - even if their behaviour was otherwise unobjectionable but not "kind" like giving a negative performance review or dumping a girlfriend. (The overlap with woke is that there then has to be an unprincipled exception for members of oppressor groups - a man threatening to commit suicide if his girlfriend him is considered an abuser). The English Law Commission is currently running a project to fix technical aspects of English homicide law (which frequently produces perverse results) which is going to be completely derailed by an argument about whether men whose girlfriends commit suicide should be prosecuted for manslaughter.

There people are aware that suicide threats can be and are weaponised. They just don't care when someone drops the emotional nuke of a dead body on the table.

I cannot understand it. Is this how he will be remembered? Not as a cheat and a fabulist, but as a martyr for the noble cause of DEI? Is his Wikipedia article being updated as we speak to reflect that narrative?

Yes. They will rewrite history to fit their narrative. They did this to Kiwi Farms after Byuu killed himself over a tiny thread. They reward suicide victims by martyrizing them, creating a huge incentive for people to kill themselves.

Of all the things that make me realize I just do not see the same world as the rationalists - and there are many! - the reaction to "Sort By Controversial" is the greatest by far. To me, the meanign of the post was obvious, particularly in light of Scott being a fan of The Last Psychiatrist; people were so deluded by their own ideological bubbles that nothing, no act, no statement, could make them question it, and there was nothing that could be twisted to support the preferred worldview (this is part of the TLP definition of narcissism, in which the subconcious desperately tries to maintain the prefered narrative of one's own life, because to fail to do so would be worse than death, and in fact, death is preferred to confronting reality). Any statement, no matter how clear, could avoid reinterpretation to fit the preferred narrative. And yet, everyone else in the community took away that there exist magical superweapons that could cause strife just by their existence.

You mention the Henry Nowak case as an "anti-scissor" yet this did not change anything in the UK, did it? Has any leftist proposed immigration restrictions? Elimination of the exception to open carry of dangerous weapons (I saw a tweet the other day of a white kid buying a baseball bat from a store for a sporting event, and immediately upon exiting the store being violently arrested by a cop for "brandishing" an item still clearly bagged and sealed. No such footage exists of bobbies slamming Sikhs to the ground for their weapons). No? Of course not.

This is why, if you want to see less of this, the rational game theoretic response to this is to continue to mock him relentlessly in his death and everyone who mourns him as a retarded communist. Amongst other actions, of course, memetic warfare is no substitute for lawfare and political action.

Unceasing mockery of this farce of a man and the institution he represented is, from my perspective, good and right and quite frankly the crueler and more acerbic the better.

This whole scenario is very “late Soviet Union” in its flavor and I find it to be utterly hilarious in a bitter sense.

as a retarded communist

Every time you do this, your message ends up wasted as normies only hear "...and the actual bad thing here is that this is all a ploy to make me pay taxes".

Invoking a putative communist-SJW connection might work for rallying the troops in certain sectors of the American Right, but even if you can make some argument for why it is actually justified, everyone who possibly could have their minds changed will just tl;dr and assume you are either a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks the Soviet Union never really disbanded or one of those people who think the modern societal consensus needs to be directionally corrected in the "pre-1917 capitalism" direction, Dickensian smokestacks and lumpenproles and all.

Actually I’d be willing to bet heavily that the average American normie, even the more peripheral blue tribe normie, still hates communists and has an instinctive negative reaction to things being labeled as communist. The great awokening didn’t go deep enough to completely hollow out Cold War memories or basic intuition about equality and human nature.

As you can see from blue tribers calling anything right of Bernie sanders “Nazi”, name calling and shaming your opponents actually does work if repeated often enough. It works especially if it’s at least sort of or directionally true: a modern progressive hardcore blue triber is much closer to a communist than a Beltway libertarian is to a Nazi, but that never stopped basically all left wing institutions for implicitly or explicitly calling libertarians and centrists Nazis.

Mincing about trying to get the exact precise verbiage to soothe delicate “mmmm acktually!” type light blue or grey tribers who are hyper-sensitive to PMC class anxiety that’s firmly in the hands of blue tribe is a big part of the reason we got here in the first place.

So I reject your entire premise.

Running around calling people “Third Worldists” or “Critical Theorists” or “Queer theorists” or whatever flavor of Marxist inspired leftist ideology that they subscribe to is neither more precise nor more effective. An octopus’ tentacle is still part of the octopus.

As you can see from blue tribers calling anything right of Bernie sanders “Nazi”, name calling and shaming your opponents actually does work if repeated often enough.

This is cargo cult politics. You see those guys wave batons while wearing uniforms and figure that if you also do that, you too will summon planes that deliver valuable goods.

There are plenty of examples where name-calling and shaming your opponents repeatedly has not had any measurable effect (e.g. every type of name-calling and shaming that the US Right has used on the sexual wing of the US Left). In fact, these examples seem highly correlated with the Right being the one to do it. The obvious conclusion suggested by the data is that name-calling only works when you already have cultural supremacy.

(Compare also to the case of Sovereign Citizens: most Americans believe in the legitimacy of contract law, legal personae and the USCC, just as they believe that communism is bad. That does not mean that any amount of low-status guys driving pickups invoking those things to call the cop who did a traffic stop on them illegitimate will have any effect other than further discrediting the low-status guy. Legitimacy of uses of legalese flows solely from the guys with guns and jailhouses.)

It’s not cargo cult politics, it has precedence in the recent past that still has purchase in the present.

Outside of a pretty narrow bubble, the American electorate doesn’t like communists and doesn’t like communism and those that do will likely never be on my side anyways.

There’s no downside to calling a spade a spade, I’m not sure how more simple this could be.

Almost all of recent American electoral politics seems to vindicate that viciously attacking your opponent works, actually. If you don’t have “cultural supremacy” the way you get it is by seizing or appropriating the megaphones by being ultra aggressive and destroying or undermining their ability to hurt you.

It’s literally why Trump is president, right now. It’s not some theory.

Survey from last month:

Proportion with
favorable/
unfavorable
views (%)		All USAiansAge 18–29Democrat
Communism21/5538/3624/57
Socialism37/3753/2350/28
Capitalism52/2345/3252/29

So this does support what I’m saying and I wouldn’t be surprised if you cut the electorate in half and just looked at the top 50% of voters that vote the most often it would be even more skewed against socialism / communism.

Pro-communist Americans live in a nearly airtight informational bubble and they’re so highly over represented in media & education that they started to believe that they really are way more popular than they are.

From a red tribe perspective most of the pro-communist Americans are either such a lost cause that no meaningful political conversion can be had or are a product of such a toxic academic & educational environment that the only way to actually combat them is to destroy the rot at its source: seize endowments, squeeze the institutions, aggressively prosecute rule breakers, etc.

Calling communists out is very good and very productive culture war from the red tribe perspective and its self reinforcing as long as the targets truly have trouble credibly avoiding the accusations.

Indeed. To the extent rightists and other flavors of wrongthinkers lament how sad and tragic Arday’s death was, it’d only be perceived as an admission of guilt, a reaffirmation as to the leftist moral highground, a confirmation that Arday’s death was only the result of a Nazi witchhunt and lynching.

Is this how he will be remembered? Not as a cheat and a fabulist, but as a martyr for the noble cause of DEI?

Odds are very good that's how it will be. Remember the recent "Woke is dead, even AOC denies Woke 1.0" stuff? Yeah, woke is going nowhere and this will be the British George Floyd moment UK activists were craving.

This was always going to happen with DEI implementations.

We need to have an honest conversation about IQ and IQ subtypes and figure out a way to make it palatable to the masses.

Maybe different nomenclature maybe not so numerical (at least to the public).

People who are word/verbally tilted (I think the term wordcel is a degrading) don't really understand the world like shape rotators (also hate using that word) but we still have an obligation to help them as our fellow man.

If you wish to stop cases like Arday, I don’t think you really need HBD. You just need the following two principles:

  1. If you hire people focusing on anything but merit, you will get people to a greater ir lesser degree unqualified for the job. We keep testing whether affirmative action or nepotism or whatever won’t reduce the qualifications of the org, and empirically it always does.
  2. Human groups are unequal for a million different reasons. Expecting outcome equality between two groups should not intellectually be expected. Even without HBD, Thomas Sowell made a great argument for this with tons of examples. There are also cases of merchant minorities, like Jews and Armenians, who are often simultaneously richer than average and discriminated against.

Ultimately, if you look at the system the real dividing line is “Is your group and client of the identitarian left and if so how much.” This all boils down to institutionally breaking the identitarian left; arguing only works insofar as it convinces non-identitarians to join the cause.

Human groups are unequal for a million different reasons. Expecting outcome equality between two groups should not intellectually be expected. Even without HBD, Thomas Sowell made a great argument for this with tons of examples.

The problem here is that we have a very strong, very powerful movement that is committed to equalizing all those million different reasons. And they're, IMHO, morally correct to do so - but even those who disagree could probably at least understand why someone would believe that equalizing those things is more fair and that we ought to make the world more fair. And if we were to equalize all those other non-HBD reasons, then only the HBD results will stand out - this is observed in countries where there is more equality in opportunity between men and women, which tend to have greater skew in males preferring "things-"oriented work and females preferring "people-"oriented work. Which will demand non-HBD explanation, thus leading to more and more "bigotry of the gaps" to battle via overt identity-based discrimination. This is where we are now.

So, from what I can tell, the "we don't need HBD to stop ridiculous DEI cases (like Arday)" experiment has been run, and it has failed.

Wasn't nearly everything Arday said lies and we have no idea if he had a high verbal IQ or not?

There is a place for the high verbal IQ- they are less good at making machines, but they do understand the world. We don't really know if Arday is among their number or not.

Interestingly enough I think it's those with high verbal tilt who are susceptible to lies and manipulation under specific conditions. The specific conditions being widespread societal belief DEI is a good thing with no tradeoffs and the larger liberal thinking.

Out of all the IQ subtypes, verbal IQ is not necessarily wrapped around truth. It's the ability to move through the realm of words. You can move through the realm of words amazingly but if you don't have the other IQ subtypes that allow you to figure out ground truth then you are at the mercy of those who create your language, media, books, movies, newspapers.

Jordan Peterson is an example. I think his IQ may be high across the board but I think his verbal IQ is off the charts. He's poetic,expansive,complex but he refuses to answer simple questions and sometimes gets tripped up in word games of his own creation. Plus he's chosen the bible as his foundation probably since childhood. So his extremely high verba IQ is contained by this extremely large volume of text the origins and authors and veracity of which we have been arguing about for millennia.

My point wasn't that verbal IQ is a useless or inferior subtype my point is that it has it's limits like all things do.

So it's not about whether or not Arday had high verbal tilt (I would argue its high because it was high enough to get into Cambridge with a little boost from affirmative action, sob story , white guilt and the general current society).

This type of thing is extremely unlikely to happen at MIT or Caltech or any Chinese university simply because admission is based on shutting up and multiplying.

In American schools, affirmative action isn’t a “little boost” but a massive one. It appears to be the same at Cambridge.

Cambridge undergraduate admissions is still sane (and to the extent that it isn't, class trumps race because British politics). So was hiring in the physics department last time I checked. This was about hiring in the education department, which was insane long before modern wokeness. Departments mostly control hiring in universities, and MIT and Caltech don't have insane departments.

Even for the math/logic heavy departments/universities?

Yes

Oh. That's.... Novel. Please do elaborate.

First, see the data in the Harvard discrimination case (ie there is no indication it applied for one discipline and not the other / was massive).

Second, see this paper. https://download.ssrn.com/2026/1/6/6024495.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline&X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEFgaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIQCPi3eq6hZdHEVNImNMF2hJBLmgkmE6%2FRT5ZarT9sutVAIgMbPnypMHrtORqkGyYAV1upKV5mPl6rTBVP02gArqE3EqvQUIIRAEGgwzMDg0NzUzMDEyNTciDPb0ZAG4XNnF5jHS3CqaBf2Bnm8V6Wnrp7NgXNhJ7eQAgIFNI2S3gJqpFnU5pNNX3nIA1FTeJKFG59bb%2FGejfzpylYJT4ifb0woX%2FisPJAyo2kwTEVCRICgDMjc%2FyvReLZr9uSoc5oQbCaY4iXGtBmkSPqZXGS4eAx1NvZewg7JtrUtMhCpe74N1QSEtUv9JokiDXCAZuXU5qg4LaGPWOKzRoQpgAmyVz6aCrZQxftJgOP2qDHC1OdJeu5iZzBuMOiOOYLSJZj8VXwgsuocF2uOrUjohJKW%2BbX8t%2BJPht7tiUO5fZcKKZXdJuf7S9OJrU4q6KLmbGAG3EfV%2F0%2BsndQCeWAIYe6UD0hqMUSUgKPbNvXTTGvBY6JQMrtAZkJS2vXXis6ZBWoFYDHDC9jy7jQydjOO4MnbyWPTRr8pR%2Bd6rq%2B%2BXfo14y6HQKrCRZNaVwXwR0ULPl6Wri0qzZ1hZTuA2%2FdcxKSUnz0%2BNjeRYJu%2BC2zlny60DHUFGa%2FC5ZMHRhic7hwaIpPS1VvOKXImKhgPExwbHhJ0R4cktgS59kEUWhx6v4JWlF%2B3nlXRDFsE2V128roh323yPC7Z0OkCs1ETPbUwFKV%2B35HuzELNH4JOutxjbV59X4pYd810hASAgY0AQJzX6UOZR1kPFzdj5D6d3oTuvsnsrcZQw%2B8lPj7Qa0tMtZVabwI%2B%2B09gO7J%2B4Z0LsK5aRv1OlFTpqO6%2BNyC%2FAMtUanvp1RP1EagVz2%2FzDOPbKJIxbaQgUesNu%2BS2OtKnmBlALvlbJZAkcTelglMtTNZxZIyw0Mpmqj5HvG7JgEZg%2FCgaM30i8VA9NqGnKo8z6K0Iytwqnrje1hU5O0iV6wzyvIRq0%2Bn1Qqg9f8zyGrPisc8BN9mhQ2a0m3A%2BwK0u9j1kmmO1AAjDr9oPUBjqxAT2p9Dkhh8adBpycw%2BbSC4va59yLMC3d2eiIW3J9NgFx76FhSgyR%2F8m39jbhZuPBXedLZ9ZGrACdMF4MctNXDv56l1LW4h7Rbh367cpAJ%2F%2Bs%2BwJh8Dd9GFDW2ESkmrGuO4kDjJHyx420S13GzyepdLedbgPcW3IaaQ%2Bnyo2sFeU2mUHBHhdyFybFY0gIlThrdC0%2B%2B6bW6TgRaBeTxwtqJelTGofp6dwPu3MLgN9nxETnPg%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20260816T001255Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAUPUUPRWEYRCL7CD2%2F20260816%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=a88b601adf4a5f6a83c475949877a85926853b4f09cc176dfa299d5d1a7ad2dc&abstractId=6024495

Estimates about a 12 point LSAT jump for being black in competitive schools. 12 is very large.

More comments

So it's not about whether or not Arday had high verbal tilt (I would argue its high because it was high enough to get into Cambridge with a little boost from affirmative action, sob story , white guilt and the general current society).

I haven't seen his papers yet, but if they're anything like the brief excerpts posted here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3874/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/468719?context=8#context

I can't assume his verbal IQ to be high. Even dimwits are able to pick out certain 'effective' words and terms from the zeitgeist.

Fair enough. That was a leap in logic.

I'm quite dreamy and high empathy and I want everyone to flourish and I'm the perfect demographic for the CRT stuff in theory. But I'm way more a shape rotator than I am verbally titled and so when I read the CRT stuff it has little/no effect because I can't even grasp the underlying structure. It's like looking at a foreign language. I don't think it's good or bad I literally, physically, actually can't understand it.

The way to write CRT is to assume ACAB- Assigned Cain At Birth.

You now imagine yourself on trial for the murder of Abel. CRT writings are the evidence of mitigating factors your team of defense attorneys brings to defend you in a modern court of law.

Not guilty because of mental deficiency or undiagnosed psych condition relative to Abel, especially one you can blame Abel or his father for intentionally causing (PTSD being the most popular; you have a right to never be under any stress whatsoever, just as Abel is never under stress). Not guilty because mens rea isn't there- why would you go and kill him, you can make sacrifices just as pleasing in your own alternate way relative to your own cultural and racial circumstances, no reason to kill him over this one. (And you do have conventional achievements, but they were not recognized as a scheme of Abel- even if you had killed him, he would have deserved it. Basically, his entire existence is an expression that reality itself hates you, and why should you ever accept that?)

It doesn't matter whether the arguments presented are even coherent, or if they're just filibusters- the judge is bound by his own laws to consider every single thing you say. You're playing to the gallery; if you are found guilty, they too will be convicted. Better to act now assuming you're right before case law can be established, right or wrong.

I have a weird brain with verbal things. I believe it shows up here as I am atrocious with grammar. Other places I’ve been accused of English as a foreign language a few times. In college I took a business writing course as an elective to try to improve a weakness and received my lowest grade all 4 years a C+. I still remember the professor marking up a paper saying I wrote it 60 minutes before class when in fact I probably spent 8 hours on it. I can make people laugh in person with word play probably in a Jewish way. But I struggle a lot with grammar and structuring longer thoughts. I had a 720 verbal SAT which I think test more reading comprehension and vocabulary. Not a great score but not the complete retard I believe I am with grammar.

When people talk of shape shifters I am not sure where I fit in.

In normal life I am also a very disorganized person. Feels like that fits in with having bad grammar as an ability. An issue with being able to create structure.

IMO taking courses in college to improve weaknesses I’ve heard is not a smart thing to do. It’s one thing I would agree with people on getting rid of grades as you should take things geared towards strengths and things where you’re a novice. But allowing few P/F courses while still getting credit solves most of that issue.

I would be curious if anyone else believes they have this type of brain? In college I noticed math professors often had completely disorganized offices (maybe philosophy too).

You should type in what you just said into any ai app with the sentence " Please do an IQ subtype analysis on the above paragraph."

You have a spiky cognition profile

It seems like your working memory and processing speed might be a little off. Could be ADHD heavily compensated by the rest of your powerful brain.

Apparently your profile would be good as a comedian, a trial lawyer, sales person or academic.

You can read his papers. They're full of basic typoes and solecisms. No wordcel academic would have passed him if he was a first-year PhD student, except for the specific circumstances of the case.

It's hard to know how smart Arday was, because he obfuscated so much: claims of autism and developmental delay, claims of non-verbal, claims of illiteracy, claims of epilepsy after an assault, testicular cancer in his proposal for the memoir peddled to Simon and Schuster which then morphed into brain tumour(s), etc.

I think he was clever, but not outstanding, and lazy/dishonest enough that he saw how society was holding out claims of disability and racism to him as a shortcut to getting where he wanted to be, rather than relying on native intelligence and hard work, so he took the easy path. And this worked for him, so he kept looking for short cuts even when that involved increasingly baroque levels of confabulation. Eventually he would have been found out, and he was, and this is the end result.

Arday's lying was pathological, in the sense that he told far more lies than was professionally optimal. I suspect the same underlying mental illness/neurodivergence (if this is a meaningful distinction at all) caused both the pathological lying and the suicidality - particularly given Simon Baron Cohen's comments. (Baron Cohen knew Arday well enough to predict this, and was doing the groundwork to place blame long before Arday resigned his position). Given what we know now, it wasn't classic autism, and Simon Baron Cohen has blown up his own credibility far more effectively than his brother Sacha could have done with a Borat interview.

We need to have an honest conversation about IQ and IQ subtypes and figure out a way to make it palatable to the masses.

"The masses" like DEI in the same way they like all good things that seemingly don't have tradeoffs. But, in this case, they aren't the biggest problem: people in the academy apparently love this shit. The average person would likely have laughed off Arday's claims, the academy and media swallowed them uncritically.

Everyone seems to assume suicide but, given the context, unintentional overdose seems like a viable alternative scenario. Am I missing something?

Are those not synonyms in this case? I guess you could call something “unintentional” if they did fentanyl for 5 years and OD once, but if you do OD on drugs like 2 weeks into a social media storm against you then you probably did try to OD.

The initial police report is "unexpected but not suspicious" so that would seem to mean "not treated as suicide". He might have been genuinely ill despite all the fakery, or it could have been an accident. We won't know for sure until more information is released.

They would say that even if it was obvious suicide. Given the stigma around suicide, SOP is to insist it wasn't suicide up until they find the suicide note. Without a note, obvious suicides get ruled as accidents.

A "death of despair" in either case.

On what? Potentially he was a drug user but didn't seem to be using anything that's particularly easy to overdose on, and whilst his marathon achievements were overblown to be 0.001th percentile he seemed in good enough shape I'd be skeptical he was using.

Many will now claim that trollish insults and ridiculing memes are responsible for this, rather than the truth about his lies stated plainly and reasonably, even though the latter was by far the more devastating. Presuming he killed himself, it was likely because his sins were so egregious that even his own tribe could not overlook or excuse them. Nasty and vicious jeers from the outgroup are merely badges of honor, but the disappointed glances from the ingroup hit like a freight train. People like Arday don't kill themselves when they are exposed to the outgroup; they kill themselves when they are exposed to the ingroup. He lost status hard and fast. The only injustice here is that many of his colleagues should also be brought down a few pegs.

He should never have resigned.

You know it's over when you're a black autistic sociology professor who writes about intersectional issues, and not even the Guardian will go to bat for you.

He pushed his luck too far, that's why. His conduct was so egregious that nobody could defend him without also losing all credibility themself. It's quite impressive to be such a bad liar to that extent.

Presuming he killed himself, it was likely because his sins were so egregious that even his own tribe could not overlook or excuse them. Nasty and vicious jeers from the outgroup are merely badges of honor, but the disappointed glances from the ingroup hit like a freight train

Yes, I think this is a good point. I'm speculating a bit, but my guess is that his university had one or two high level people who served as his "advisors" or "mentors" or whatever you want to call them. Any time he had a problem, he just had to call them up and they would use their considerable power to help fix the problem. (Kind of like the parent of a spoiled child.) I would guess that his mentors told him they couldn't help him and it would be best if he resigned.

I agree that he probably had been relying on fixers all during his career, and this time the heat was too much so they advised him to step back and lie low until it blew over. But his vanity and ego couldn't take it that for once, the magic get-out-of-jail-free card didn't work.

If it was suicide, I am leaning towards "not really intentional", he would have hoped to be found in time and then recover in hospital so then the story would have been "brave black academic hounded towards suicide by racists" and he could have spun that into getting the accusations softened or dropped. Unhappily for him, it worked.

I'm skeptical he wasn't going to be able to land on his feet within a year or two, anyways. Sooner or later the prevailing narrative would become 'this young black man was cancelled by racist conservatives' regardless of what he did to achieve that. His book was likely going to do incredible sales for that kind of ridiculous hagiography, and it's not like he doesn't get paid for the sales.

Failing that, he could also have written a tell-all book about how he lied his way to the top. People love that sort of thing. He could have been a modern-day Frank Abagnale.

And then he could go on Fox News every other week and talk about he made himself the caricature of liberal fantasies for money and they all fell for it.

It would have been a very easy pivot to do the podcast circuit with a 'Here's why I felt I needed to do it. Once I started I felt trapped and had to continue' angle.

Reminder that even Hunter Biden is currently laundering his reputation in a 'redemption arc' right now.

Hunter Biden is funny and personable and well spoken. Arday was none of the three. Hunter did crack in the white house while hooking up with Obama's daughter. Arday copy-pasted papers no one read into papers no one would read, and then claimed credit for it. One of those is a better tabloid story than the other.

Snopes has a FACT CHECK: FALSE!!1! page on that. Photo seems to be just of a Malia Obama's credit card, post cutting drug lines; neither Malia nor Hunter pictured. Much more likely to be coke than crack, and the provenance of the photo is unclear, or if it's even real/the same Malia Obama (Snope's argument is that it's likely a different Malia Obama).

However, we're skeptical that this card actually belongs to Barack Obama's daughter, and not another person perhaps named Malia Obama, as this picture appears to show that whoever owned the card had been a "member since 2011." First daughter Malia Obama was 13 years old in 2011. While some credit card companies allow minors to become authorized users under an adult's account, we don't know if that was the case here, and the minimum age to open a personal credit card is 18.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hunter-biden-malia-obama-cocaine/

(I'm highly skeptical of the story, but that seems almost engineered to be the most tendentious possible objection to it.)

Hunter did crack in the white house while hooking up with Obama's daughter.

If anyone could please deliver the receipts for this I would be very appreciative.

If it helps at all, I've seen the receipts in the data dump, in there with the pictures of his penis with skittles on it for scale.

He texted them; no evidence of a hookup. The alleged hookup - other than his dead brother's wife, which is confirmed - was with his neice, also allegedly nonconsensual.

There's photos of them doing drugs together in various stages of undress released as part of his laptop, IIRC.

Hunter did crack in the white house while hooking up with Obama's daughter.

Excuse me?!

Why go to TMZ when QuokkaNews has the juiciest gossip?

At the end of the day the only person who can kill themselves is obviously, themselves. We can talk about how hard it is to weather harassment and controversies and whatever, and how much anyone in particular "deserves" to have mean stuff said to them, but I have always been against the idea of blaming others for someone else's choice, regardless of how grim it is. Just turn off the computer/leave the room/whatever if people are being mean and you don't like it, they have free speech to say awful stuff and tough shit deal with it. Tons of other people live with seeing awful stuff about them all day, just check the comments of any controversial minority group content creator like outspoken jews or trans people to see evidence of that. There is no shortage of meanness on the internet and if that existing means no one else can speak then why even have the internet to begin with?

The only place I can think of at the top of my head where there is a meaningful exception is with school bullies, and that's only because the government mandates attendence for anyone who isn't being home schooled (which isn't possible for many families) thus making "just leave" not an option.

It sucks that Arday died, but no one is at fault for a suicide except for himself. We can't give up our freedoms to criticize and mock just because someone else might do something bad (whether that be suicide or murder or whatever).

At the end of the day the only person who can kill themselves is obviously, themselves. We can talk about how hard it is to weather harassment and controversies and whatever, and how much anyone in particular "deserves" to have mean stuff said to them, but I have always been against the idea of blaming others for someone else's choice, regardless of how grim it is.

You don't seem to have studied the subject of suicide at all. It's not really a choice in many cases. But the result of burdens utterly overwhelming coping resources. Someone with major depression can't make (or not make) the same choices you can make.

  • -13

Yes, a person can be sick enough that the disease kills them. It's not the case for Arday though - he was definitely healthy enough to function as a lauded professor in a prominent university, and none of the glowing profiles that were done on him had any hint of him being terminally ill. The only sickness he had is him being a pathological liar, and his woke peers enabling him and pushing him deeper and deeper in the bizarro world he invented, which he could never sustain. When it all came crashing down, he chose violence, and turned the violence onto the reason of all his troubles - himself. It wasn't a disease, at least not any medically curable one, and to advance your point of view you'd need more than "I read some books that you didn't" - it's much less convincing argument than you think, especially when you don't even point out what those books say and how they are relevant to the topic.

We would not accept that as a justification for other acts of violence. If a very unfortunate man all in the same day got diagnosed with cancer, was fired from his job, crashed his car, got robbed walking home, and found his wife in bed with the yoga instructor - we would understand if he was in extraordinary distress to the point of howling insanity, but it wouldn't excuse him going on a killing spree. Suicide is not 'less bad' than other kinds of violence because it targets the self. It bereaves your family, it devastates those who loved you most.

We allow an insanity defence for crimes committed under the influence of certain mental illnesses.

You don't seem to have studied the subject of suicide at all.

No but I do understand basic logic and know that "someone killing themselves" necessarily means "someone killing themselves". It is the suiciders very own action.

Someone with major depression can't make (or not make) the same choices you can make.

I'm all for suicide prevention and trying to help people out, but there is no world in which it's not their choice. If it wasn't their own actions then it wouldn't be suicide it would be murder. If you're arguing for some expansive definition of the phrase where it involves other people then go ahead I suppose, but under the general meaning that I was using suicide is necessarily their own choice, even if we agree it's an illogical one.

If not, who do you propose we should charge for Arday's death, if someone else is responsible? Maybe the writers at the Guardian or the Telegraph.

No but

No "buts". This is where you should have stopped typing, and started reading the literature if you are to opine on the subject at all

You have been warned to stop this sort of complaining. One day ban this time. Given your rather disappointing record in the past, expect that to go up quickly if you keep acting like you own the place.

If not, who do you propose we should charge for Arday's death, if someone else is responsible? Maybe the writers at the Guardian or the Telegraph.

Who's proposing to charge anybody for Arday's suicide?

It's good to distinguish between what's good and what's legal with the understanding that law can never completely account for the complexity of moral judgement. There are bad behaviors that perhaps should never be made illegal, but that doesn't mean we can't still consider them bad.

Who's proposing to charge anybody for Arday's suicide?

I don't know how we can say "X is responsible for Y's death" and "X should not be punished" at the same time. Causing another person's death is one of the worst things that someone can do, and should be disincentived!

There are bad behaviors that perhaps should never be made illegal, but that doesn't mean we can't still consider them bad.

I'm one of the most libertarian small government people here and completely agree, and have argued this about drugs and children transitioning and all sorts of other controversial topics. But causing the death of another person is not something I would ever make an exception for, it's literally harmful to others. That is like the one thing law is for.

The thing here isn't that causing death should be legal, it's that mean words != causing death.

I don't know how we can say "X is responsible for Y's death" and "X should not be punished" at the same time.

I don't know why you think this is some kind of dilemma that you can't figure out. In order to punish someone, not only do they have to have done a bad thing, but you need to be able to prove they did a bad thing in such a way that you are not also going to punish or disincentivise a lot of innocent people. That may not be possible.

It is in England.

The only place I can think of at the top of my head

I'd add criminal harassment campaigns, i.e. "I go to your house, smash in all the windows with thrown rocks, graffiti it with horrible insults, and repeat this every time you fix it", which are likewise not something you can just choose to walk away from (they will likely follow). I don't think many people argue that people should have the right to do that, though, aside from the same utterly-mindkilled people who claim that [TARGET GROUP] are an exception to normal rules of civilisation and should be murdered in the streets, and it doesn't bear on the free speech issue (beyond the "people don't generally have the right to graffiti other people's property" exception which even libertines like me generally accept).

I'd add criminal harassment campaigns, i.e. "I go to your house, smash in all the windows with thrown rocks, graffiti it with horrible insults, and repeat this every time you fix it",

Those are not speech and wouldn't be an exception as they are completely different things to begin with.

It speaks to the inordinate amount of social and political capital that black people have today. There wouldn't be a shred of sympathy from either aisle if Arday was Israeli or Indian. I don't have a strong opinion on whether the dogpiling was deserved or not (okay, maybe I'm leaning towards not).

Academic misconduct is a serious issue, and this was a grown man who knew what he was doing, mental illness or not. His fate was sealed by his own choices, his widow and children will bear the brunt of his actions now.

It speaks to the inordinate amount of social and political capital that black people have today. There wouldn't be a shred of sympathy from either aisle if Arday was Israeli or Indian

Is it their social and political capital? Or is it that people subconsciously see them as lacking agency? With Arday, it's hard not to see him as a child who was in way over his head, being used as a pawn in someone's status game.

Is it their social and political capital? Or is it that people subconsciously see them as lacking agency?

I'm not sure how "people subconsciously see you as lacking agency [(in a way that makes it morally obligatory for them to appease you)]" isn't basically definitionally "having social and political capital."

I'm not sure how "people subconsciously see you as lacking agency [(in a way that makes it morally obligatory for them to appease you)]" isn't basically definitionally "having social and political capital."

Elsewhere in this thread I gave a few examples of individuals whom I believe (1) have a great deal of social/political capital; (2) were involved in activities which could have subject them to a great deal of criticism; and (3) weathered the (potential) storm, but not by being perceived as lacking in agency.

Those 3 individuals (all white men) were Alan Dershowitz; Richard Posner; and Bernie Sanders.

So I think it's not quite the same thing.

That's fair; "definitionally" is wrong in my previous comment. But I do think that people subconsciously seeing you as lacking agency is sufficient for having social and political capital, just not necessary. There are other ways to accrue social and political capital such as by being a charismatic politician with a popular message, but in this case, going towards people who bought into a popular ideology that mandated to them that they perceive people like Arday as lacking agency seems to have been the method.

That's fair; "definitionally" is wrong in my previous comment. But I do think that people subconsciously seeing you as lacking agency is sufficient for having social and political capital, just not necessary.

Well, let's flip things around. Looking at the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (to the extent they are still around), would you say that FLDS women, as a group, possess a great deal of social and political capital? Would you say that they are seen as lacking in agency?

I'm not super familiar with the FLDS, but I would guess that for the most part FLDS women are seen as lacking in agency, at least compared to men. As far as social and political capital goes, I suppose it depends on how you define the term. Certainly FLDS women are highly valued, notwithstanding the fact that they are expected to play a subservient role.

This is why I included a parenthetical in a bracket in the other comment, to clarify the type of perception of lack of agency is involved. Eg slaves in USA in 1850 were known to lack agency, but that didn't confer any particular social or political capital. But that has only a little in common with how Arday was perceived or treated.

More comments

Is it their social and political capital? Or is it that people subconsciously see them as lacking agency?

Maybe those two things are related. The Women are Wonderful Effect seems to relate to regarding women as less agentic too.

Maybe those two things are related.

Well here are a few scenarios I thought of:

Alan Dershowitz, a well respected attorney and law professor who (1) was caught up with Jeffrey Epstein to some extent and accused of having relations with Virginia Giuffre (probably a false accusation, but still potentially damaging); and (2) was accused of plagiarizing parts of a book (as I recall, he blamed his research assistant);

Bernie Sanders, well respected among progressives, socialists, etc. despite having a substantial personal fortune;

Richard Posner, a well respected judge whose writings arguably contain a lot of political incorrectness.

My sense is that the social and political capital possessed by these men helped protect them. But what's interesting to me is that for the most part, people didn't take the position that the problems these men got into were the result of them being victims of circumstance, being innocent pawns who were manipulated by larger forces, etc. It seems they were all treated as having agency.

By contrast, it seems that this Jason Arday is thought of as lacking agency by both his supporters and his detractors.

My sense is that the social and political capital possessed by these men helped protect them.

I note there's another thing your 3 examples have in common. I don't think that's what protected them, but it's curious that a commonality like that exists among the 3 scenarios that came to your mind.

I note there's another thing your 3 examples have in common. I don't think that's what protected them, but it's curious that a commonality like that exists among the 3 scenarios that came to your mind.

I would ask that you speak plainly and not cryptically. I suspect you are trying to imply that there is some dark Jewish Conspiracy which, for reasons best known to the conspirators, goes out of its way to cover for Bernie Sanders (who has led the effort in the Senate to end US military aid to Israel) but persecutes Zionists such as Harvey Weinstein.

But I am not inclined to try to guess what your point is. So . . . what exactly are you trying to say here?

Edit: Oops, I misread your post. You said that the commonality did NOT protect them. So now I have absolutely no idea what your point is. I thought of 3 outspoken Americans, two of whom are attorneys, and they all happen to be of Jewish descent? Or maybe it's not the Jewish angle? Is it that they are all white men? (That's kind of the point.)

Seriously, what are you trying to say here?

This is not speaking plainly.

It also helps that at least two of them are incredibly competent.

Yeah. Not to 'imagine if this situation was reversed' this but if this entire arc was playing out along the lines of 'Conservative Professor gets #metooed on soft allegations, University publicly supports him for a week then concedes under weight of obviousness and then professor self-terminates a week later' then there'd be zero of this sympathy

In fact, we don’t even have to imagine: this exact situation happened in 2020 (Mike Adams, see links downthread)

Yeah and Mike Adams didn't violate any particular codes of conduct besides being a social media chud, from what I can see?

Perhaps relevant: https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/2088378259427803352/photo/1

In 2020, Mike Adams committed suicide after being canceled and losing his job as a professor.

Adams was never dishonest. All he did was say things like "rioters are thugs" and "women's studies aren't essential".

Even in death, the media ran awful headlines like this.

"Professor who announced retirement after racist and sexist tweets died by suicide"

Related article: https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/professor-mike-adams-suicide-will-always-haunt-me

Getting sacked and piled-on publicly is pretty tough. Ideally it should only be done to people who actually deserve it, I think everyone agrees on that. That 'actually deserving it part' is however contested. What's worse: racist and sexist tweets or making up random stories, plagiarism and total lack of academic merit? That's the open question, the contested ground.

I feel bad for the dude

I don't. Short hair don't care. Base your livelihood upon a mountain of lies and perhaps that mountain will erode one day to expose your lies.

Especially when your livelihood is dependent upon denigrating the very population that gives you and people like you a hard carry. Obligatory Norm Macdonald: That's what upsets me most about a black man lying and grifting his way to a career denigrating white people, while supported by a country built by white people—that one day some pesky Noticers might call him out for his lies and grifts.

He and his allies would not give the slightest of fucks if a wrongthinker were murdered, much less suicided. If anything, they'd celebrate it, given how the murder of someone as milquetoast as Charlie Kirk was celebrated.

Arday killing himself now merely gives his supporters "Republicans POUNCE!"-type motivation to lionize him as a martyr, that a bunch of online racists harassed and bullied an innocent Stunning and Brave black man into suicide. Well played, Jason.

Base your livelihood upon a mountain of lies and perhaps that mountain will erode one day to expose your lies.

There's a broader point here that I don't believe some of the forces behind ideological suppression understand how much emotional pressure is created when they gaslight their opponents. The gaslit know that something is going on, but they are continually shouted down with denials, accused of motivated reasoning, deplatformed and worse.

Then when the obfuscation fails, the gaslit will lash out in rage fueled by all of the injustice shamelessly piled upon them.

In this case its not just about Arday, but the widespread discrimination in favour of those like Arday. Another example might be the now deposed president of the Oxford Union George Abaraonye; who while ostensibly championing free speech and debate was publicly celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk after losing a debate to him several months prior.

Yeah, the emotional first response people get is that of sympathy, but that just serves to highlight how warped and disconnected people are from reality.

It's this odd dynamic of white people being seemingly incapable of internalizing the amount of hate that's directed against them. Which should put people like Jason Arday in a 'The Witch is Dead!' category, at the very least. But instead folks just feel sorry for him. Including many of his alleged political enemies.

One really needs to ask oneself why. Because the most immediate plausible explanation is that everyone knows this is all a sham. No one believes that black people like him are actually academics. There's an emotive/sub-conscious understanding that they are always in over their heads. Playing a prop in an elaborate theater. They are given a lot of power and prestige, but everyone also knows that they have to color inside the set lines. And even that is usually too great an ask.

In a sense Arday did his cause the ultimate favor. He exists as a refutation of every apology and vindication of every critique of western academia and modern western culture as a whole. A stupid serial liar can become a professor at what should be one of the worlds most prestigious academic institutions because he repeated vacuous mantras about race, and happened to be of the right race. Now he is beyond reproach and the rotten system is safe from criticism. Because it relies on manipulation above all else, to keep itself afloat.

People point out that it's not his fault, 'We all killed Jason Arday'. Modern academia has a demand for soft spoken brown people who can verbalize extreme hatred for white people within a certain linguistic framework. But it's just a stupid cope to get away from facing the reality of the situation. That this is modern academia in the west. This is a product, an outcome, of what has been advocated for in the past decades.

Both the 'left' and 'right' will make use of this cope. Since the existence of Jason Arday isn't just a refutation of the 'left' and their academic theater, but also the respectable 'right' and it's inability to deal with the reality of immigration and multiracialism.

It's hard for his parents, who have lost a child, and his children, who have lost a father. That's as much sympathy as I can extend to Arday and his choices. His family will suffer through no fault of their own.

Arday isn't in "The Witch is Dead!" category for me, but only because he lacked the reach. He had basically no influence in the US, he didn't even write (or rather plagiarize) papers read by local wokescolds. Other than that... well, Arday went so far as to report his critics to the police. He was not some tragic, innocent victim, not in the least.

Presumably there would have been no sympathy if the person he reported to the police had killed thesmelves. Instead, it would have been seen as vindication that Arday was in the right, and that the person he reported could not live with his own lies and malice.

You're correct. Sympathy for suicide victims only works for people of a particular political valence. When Alec Holowka killed himself in part due to Zoe Quinn, the people who pushed theories of harassment=suicide suddenly stopped applying that standard. Or an even better example, Mike Adams.

I'll say it. Jason Arday did the only truly honorable thing he could do in this situation. Western truthseeking institutions can only benefit if the socialy-expected response to being exposed as a complete academic fraud becomes to seek Canadian healthcare.

Hard disagree. The honourable thing would have been for Arday to retire into obscurity, work on his character flaws, make amends where possible, give back to the society he wronged, and live with decency going forward. Seppuku might be honourable in some times and places where it improved the lot of surviving family who would otherwise suffer from stigma or ostracism or material deprivation. But here and now, in 21st century west, Arday has widowed his wife and orphaned his children for absolutely no purpose at all.

I can respect a person for playing the game to get ahead. Now that he losts I would respect him more if he just got a job as a waiter and grinded out life after he lost his prestige job.

The thing that would truly scare me is if I had kids and had a professional meltdown.

Not to mention that even after all the controversy, Simon & Schuster were still publishing his memoir. If there's no such thing as bad publicity, he could well have lived very comfortably on the royalties until he found a job as a diversity consultant or something.

He had kids. Not only a fraud, but a coward. And if I had to choose one I’d choose to be a fraud over a coward.

Wake up babe, new euphemism just dropped.

Canadian healthcare been around for a while now

Obviously unfortunate.

Morbid thought but it's a surprise this doesn't happen more often.

There's been multiple waves of cancellations now since the Justine Sacco situation. You'd assume quite a few suicides from people who just couldn't or refused to pick up the pieces. Maybe embarrassing cases aren't publicized.

some that come to mind.

  1. Nautica Malone. case from 2025. he exposed himself to a barista at a "bikini cafe" (like a hooters but a coffee shop) while going through the drive-through, she recorded him and put it online. he was immediately doxxed after the video went viral and it turned out he had a wife and kids. he killed himself within 24 hours of the video being posted. a TMZ article on the case claims he left a note which reads, "I apologize. I love you queen. I made a mistake and I don't think I'll be able to face you and the babies. I don't know why I drove though like that. My mental has been fucked up. I am not a monster. I apologize and I love you forever. If I am in critical condition please pull the plug."
  2. Ed Piskor. case from 2024. comic book artist killed himself after being MeToo'd. he left a suicide note which expresses quite a bit of resentment towards the cancel mob.
  3. Lee Sun-kyun. case from 2023. a famous korean actor killed himself after a media storm about him going to hostess bars and using drugs. apparently being caught having an affair or doing drugs is a way bigger deal for a korean celebrity than it would be for an american one.
  4. Kim Sae-ron. korean actress who had a DUI incident in 2022 and killed herself in 2025. I don't follow korean stuff enough to know the details, but I think the korean tv/film industry blacklisted her. one article said it was hard for her to find work even outside of acting since her reputation was so bad that no one wanted to be seen associating with her.
  5. Kimura Hana. case from 2020. a japanese wrestler was mobbed on social media because people didn't like how she behaved on a reality tv show ("Terrace House: Tokyo"). according to this nyt article, she tweeted "Every day, I receive nearly 100 honest opinions and I cannot deny that I get hurt." hours before killing herself.

this bbc article on Kim Sae-ron also mentions two more korean celebrities who died by suicide -- apparently due to being unable to cope with how much hate they were getting on social media -- Sulli and Goo Hara.

there was also that actor from glee, Mark Salling, who killed himself after getting caught with child porn in 2018. he was facing 4-7 years according to his wiki page.

People have suicided due to cancellation before, e.g. Mike Adams.

Not many relative to the number of people cancelled, because mentally healthy people in anti-suicide cultures (like the west) don't commit suicide just because something bad happens. A sufficiently awful event can trigger a mental illness like clinical depression or PTSD in a susceptible person, but that leads to a suicide months to years down the line. And being cancelled generally isn't awful enough unless it causes you to lose a home or spouse.

What gets me mad is the institutions.

The guilty parties are probably brainstorming how to blame Whiteness, and the whistleblowers, for this death.

They're already doing it:

The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason

This is completely false. There is no evidence that “misinformation” contributed to Arday's death. The accusations of misconduct that lead to Arday's firing were true: he plagiarized his PhD thesis, the book he supposedly authored wasn't published at all, and in addition to that he made many extraordinary claims that were not corroborated by any evidence, while defying any logic, like his claim to run 6 marathons in a week and donating 5 million pounds to charity.

So what “misinformation” existed about Arday? It seems to me that the criticism he faced was based on true facts and reasonable doubts. To frame this as a “campaign of misinformation” is absolutely diabolical. Ironically, Ardays family are the ones spreading misinformation (it runs in the family I guess) when they claim that disinformation campaigns caused his downfall, and the BBC are accomplices when they copy these quotes uncritically and without commentary.

I'm not going to bother to take down the article sentence-by-sentence but it seems full of the usual bullshit that aims to disinform the reader in every way. But take for example:

self-defined "race realist" Nathan Cofnas, who was sacked from his Cambridge role in 2024

Interesting how important it is to the BBC to discredit the person who correctly called out a habitual liar as a “race realist” who was “sacked”. If Cofnas was wrong about Arday, why not mention that? And if he was right, why does it matter why he was sacked? Of course, the entire point is to convince the reader that Cofnas was a bad bad person who should not be believed, while denying the fact that he was actually correct when he accused Arday of plagiarism.

Compare this with:

The book tells the story of [Arday's] life from being non-verbal until the age of 11 and unable to read or write until 18

Given that we now know Arday was a habitual liar, and there are no other sources to back up these claims, why should we assume these claims were actually true? Why doesn't the BBC provide any caveats here, like they did for Cofnas? Of course the answer is that the BBC is fine with misinformation when they're the ones spreading it as part of their progressive propaganda campaign.

To make a long story short, for me this article is nothing but a reminder that I still don't hate journalists enough.

Tragic, and @faceh's sign needs a lot more tapping. The demand for diversity exceeds its supply, with awful consequence.

I'm reminded of the casting of Domino in Deadpool 2 (2018). In the comics, an image search shows her on covers in a variety of pale tones ranging from Caucasian-white to body-paint-white. The movie cast a woman with mixed German/African-American ancestry and gave her a big Afro. Then, they had to find a stunt double and tried to match the actress's sex and ethnicity. They went with Joi Harris, a motorcycle racer with no previous stunt experience. Domino's Afro meant Joi was performing stunts without a helmet, and during a take she lost control of the bike, was thrown through a plate glass window, and died.

I was especially amused by this doubling down:

“If the movie’s producers had to go outside of the normal stunt community to find someone who was both qualified and resembles the actress, that speaks to a problem of lack of diversity of stunt performers,” says Darnell Hunt, the dean of Social Sciences at UCLA who helps produce the annual “Hollywood Diversity Report,” which comes out before the Oscars every year.

Uh, Domino was well-cast, that actress has good physical presence and doesn't, to my knowledge, race-bait.

Uh, Domino was well-cast, that actress has good physical presence and doesn't, to my knowledge, race-bait.

To an extent I agree, but it doesn't change the fact that almost certainly she was cast because of her race. It reminds me of when Billy Dee Williams was cast in "The Empire Strikes Back" back in 1980 in response to criticism that the Star Wars universe was too white. Unlike a lot of DEI movie characters, Lando Calrissian had a lot going for him: He was an interesting character, he wasn't a race-swap; he didn't follow the usual tropes of being wiser and/or more brilliant than any of the white characters around him. But the problem is that these sorts of casting choices normalize and legitimize diversity casting. And suddenly producers are inserting so-called "magical negro" characters everywhere, even in productions which are set in medieval Europe type settings.

In my view, accepting a race swap of this Domino character is accepting the camel's nose a little bit into the tent.

Williams was good in the part, he pulled off Calrissian's character who was from the same dodgy background as Han, was caught between a rock and a hard place, and was charming but slightly unreliable, while not being a one-note villain. You understood why he did what he did, while still condemning it, and then he does the right thing in the end.

I liked the Vitiligo forming the domino mark on her face, and I'm just not attached to the canonical race of marvel E-listers. I'll save my ire for Black Aragorn.

First they came for Marvel E-listers, and I did not speak out—because I'm just not attached to the canonical race of Marvel E-listers.

Then they came for Ariel, and I did not speak out—because I'm just not attached to the canonical race of Disney characters.

Then they came for the Velaryons, and I did not speak out—because I'm just not attached to the canonical race of some characters in a spinoff show of an unfinished book series.

Then they came for Rings of Power, and I did not speak out—because I'm just not attached to the canonical race of populations in a non-canon TV series that takes place thousands of years before the main novel.

Then they came for Aragorn—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Yeah she did a good job in the film, I agree. Unfortunately, the casting choice or the desire to diversify limited the pool of qualified stunt performers, with fatal results.

What does an action movie character not wearing a helmet (quite common) have to do with their haircut?

I have a feeling you meant to say "the stunt double was a DEI hire" but then the Afro remark doesn't seem to fit.

What does an action movie character not wearing a helmet (quite common) have to do with their haircut?

I'm assuming the Afro doesn't fit into a helmet/the point of casting the woman was more for the hairstyle than her stunt ability and experience

I'm assuming being a superhero movie character had more to do with not wearing a helmet than having an Afro (it's hair, it can fit into a helmet if you want one), and that casting a stunt double had more to do with her ethnicity than hairstyle.

He probably died from exhaustion after running 1,000 miles in a few days

When society indulges someone's insane fantasies and privileges them beyond what reality can bear, tragic things happen.

It’s their fault! Every step of the way someone, anyone, could have stepped in and stopped folly.

The sign is getting dented, but I'll keep tapping it.

Someone(s) must pay a price, and be removed from having any decisionmaking authority for there to be any meaningful 'learning' at an institutional or social level.

A tragic and pointless loss of life.

In a proper world, he would still be alive, and every person who participated in elevating him into a position he was clearly unqualified for would be experiencing the things that made him want to commit suicide.

He lived the life of an ardent political extremist and killed himself on his last mission to prevent greater damage to his cause. In a way, that’s actually admirable. It’s like Mishima’s seppuku, or the Croat Praljak drinking cyanide immediately after his conviction for war crimes. But I don’t have any compassion for people who write things like —

”The challenging of normative Whiteness is paramount in dismantling the cycle of inequality that permeates society. The persistent and operant nature of Whiteness within the Academy is enduring and depicts faculty of colour as deficient or incapable. The articulation of racialised experiences has become an instrument of empowerment for faculty of colour in an attempt to reclaim power and disrupt the operant tools of Whiteness.”

“Global resistances to racism and the Whiteness that sustains it must now consider the unrelenting labour, suffering and burden of this plight on Black communities continually tasked with the responsibility of extrapolating themselves from the inequitable stranglehold of White supremacy.”

Arday knows that he can’t destroy the West directly, but can do so indirectly by targeting their bleeding heart, their Achilles’ Heel. He’s a very smart enemy combatant. If he got his way he would cause more damage than almost anyone else. He was found out and did a 21st century hybrid warfare version of, like, sinking the flagship with himself on board so it doesn’t get in the hands of the French. Commendable in the sense of respecting an enemy, but definitely not worthy of any pity.

I know nothing about the Croat officer, but I'd argue that Mishima’s case was radically different from this one.

Yeah but he probably could have done more 'damage' if he'd just laid low for a year or two, waited for the wind to change on wokeness and then managed to find some new sinecure as an example of somebody who got 'cancelled by icky racists'. I don't think his career and/or ability to extract money from racism enthusiasts was even over.

Kamikaze attacking the viral story of “youngest black Cambridge professor, lauded by university, was actually a manipulative liar” was the optimal choice for a culture warrior intent on destroying the enemy tribe. His enemy has lost the ability to use him as an example over the next couple decades because the left can now shut it down with [you’re apeaking ill of the dead] and [this kind of bullying Literally Kills People]. There’s nothing he could have done with his life to forward his cause more than this; any plausible alternative would only compensate for 1% of the damage whereas his final act mitigates perhaps 70% of the damage.

Since when has 'this kind of bullying kills people' messaging every worked? It's not working on trans issues.

It worked well enough for Kiwi Farms to lose its domain registrar circa 2021, DreamHost.

It works for a ton of people. There are still a lot of people who believe👏all👏trans👏women and consider misgendering a grave and harmful sin.

Not really- it's an 80-20 issue.

I mean sure he's done the maximally good thing for his 'tribe' in the sense that the Simon Baron Cohens of the world did the whole 'you shouldn't give him any censure in case he commits suicide' messaging, and I'm sure that he's previously threatened it to mild pushback (having run into similar characters) and knows it's a trump card to any argument. Insofar as him, personally, I just don't think he was in the position that somebody who was cancelled for conservative views with no actual skills would be in. If the Central Park Five can be rehabilitated, so can he.

It just shows how little grit younger generations have. An experienced boomer, gen-x or even elder millennial grifter would have white knuckled it through, and just reinvented themselves in a new grift a few years later.

Terribly sad. Of course it was good to see him exposed for cheating and lying, and he made the right move by resigning his post, but I certainly didn't wish ill upon him. He may have lied and cheated, but to the best of my knowledge he never really hurt anybody.

Not directly, but someone with actual academic ability could have held that professorship, and several classes of students were given substandard education so that activists within the institutions could feel good about themselves. If you mapped it all out, you could probably argue for a fair amount of diffuse damage, and a lot of diffused responsibility. But since our systems aren't very good at reckoning that sort of thing (and are currently uninterested in even trying), the scrutiny fell mostly on Arday. I would not want to find myself in a position like that, watching my entire world crumble because I'd been promoted far beyond my competence and had been found out.

Whilst I'm sure Arday's competition would probably be slightly less prone to lying, it's hard to imagine anybody taking a job that he was applying to actually contributing to the aggregate knowledge of humanity. It's not like he was competing against hard Mathematics professors to fill in his diversity of diversity diversity positions


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