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So he starts off by aggressively misunderstanding and misreading singularitarians, then we get through to the stochastic parrot meme.
Then there's a misunderstanding of terrorism. Since when has there been anti-drug terrorism? Anti-alchohol terrorism? People don't get angry with the things they use/abuse so they can tolerate the bad situations they're in. People get angry with the causes of their problems or moral outrages, so we see anti-government terrorism, anti-abortion terrorism (note that this does not usually come from guilty mothers who aborted their children raging against the machinery they used themselves), anti-ethnic terrorism, religious terror...
You see suppression and regulation of alchohol, drugs, not terrorism.
About the only thing he gets right is that this anti-tech terror movement would get crushed even if it did exist. Technology is the biggest force-multiplier in history. This trivializes his argument.
My belief that de Boer is not worth reading is reinforced. Furthermore, if you think he's mentally ill, you shouldn't read him either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
This is the first paper I've seen with an emoji in its title. I hope this isn't a new thing.
It's hilarious that the lead author seems to be a one Emily Bender. I can only hope that she marries a Mr. Rodriguez and they decide to hyphenate their name as Bender-Rodriguez.
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It's co-authored by Timnit Gebru, a woman so utterly incompetent and hostile that she managed to wear out the massive amount of tolerance her gender engenders in her field at Google.
The emoji is hardly the worst part about it.
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Now it gets to have 20 different interpretations depending on which platform you use.
It may get contentious.
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As it happened I unsubscribed from him on Substack the other day for unrelated reasons, although I'm paid up until May. However
This doesn't follow. I already knew he was mentally ill in the sense of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and many of his best articles were written while he was struggling to manage his condition. My concern now is that his mental illness may be interfering with his life to the point that he's at risk of a severe episode. And even if he was literally psychotic, I don't believe that psychotic people are incapable of producing interesting or thought-provoking articles.
Fair enough, I just thought de Boer was in the aggravating kind of mental illness camp, as opposed to the 'fun or amusing' camp. From the tone of your post, you didn't seem interested or happy to read his content.
Oh no, I've been subscribed to his Substack for years. My girlfriend teases me about how often I start a sentence with "I read an article by Freddie deBoer the other day..."
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Even the aggravating kind can be incredibly fascinating and insightful at times. Terry Davis was (although ymmv, he could be fun and amusing at times too.) John Nash too.
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