domain:gurwinder.substack.com
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
17m ago
It wouldn't, but saying "this is retarded and needs to stop" doesn't actually stop the commissar from doing his work. @anon_ is pointing out that reining in the DEI commissars requires actually controlling the university's internal levers of power (in particular, the admin section of the university).
Corvos
18m ago
Must not make jokes about sheep…
Must not make jokes about sheep…
Must not make jokes about sheep…
TitaniumButterfly
24m ago
Listening to The White Company on audible. Loving the setting and prose, even if the characters are a bit hard for me to distinguish, and the narrator is... not consistent enough in volume and some of his accents are borderline-impenetrable, which is not usually a problem for me.
Also he's incredibly slow, and while changing the speed fixed that, something about his cadence makes it difficult for me to follow along without losing attention.
But when it's good it reminds me of Pyle's Robin Hood in the best ways, except more rooted in the beauty and wildness of the setting.
All that said I went in blind and was expecting history, not historical fiction, so that was an adjustment.
Dean
Flairless
26m ago
Do we condemn Kolmogorov?
Sure. Appeals not to generally devolve into special pleading that are categorically rejected in other contexts.
Kolmogorov complicity is still complicity, and it was specifically complicity with, for, and for prestige within one of the worst authoritarian/totalitarian states of the 20th century. Komogorov is not morally absolved by being a stellar mathematician who advanced the field. He has the same sort of moral onus of gifted scientists of other totalitarian regimes, who are routinely condemned.
Botond173
28m ago
They won't understand it, because they're convinced that this doesn't count as 'politics' but as the principle of basic human dignity, or some BS like that.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
31m ago
The fear that another Trump-esque administration will come to power and do the same thing again will surely remain.
I have a US mathematician friend who is entirely apolitical, but joined the DEI committee at his department (where he helped them implement DEI measures, screen applicants etc., not to mention the implicit lending of legitimacy) a few years ago out of the simple consideration that he was coming up for tenure review and it was a no-brainer to do this simple thing that would greatly improve his chances. There are, I figure, many cases like that. If it stops being a no-brainer career booster and starts being a gamble (will get favoured by the system, but might also get targeted for reprisal in the future if the wrong administration is in power), I imagine far fewer will go for it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
33m ago
LLMs are value-neutral, it's all about how they're used.
I was just doing some RP with one, exploring a silly concept, inventing the rules along with Claude. You can tell when the LLM is actually enthusiastic about it and when it's just phoning it in. (With Claude, you know it's getting real when the cat ASCII art starts coming out unprompted).
People might say 'oh this is cringe slop'. There were indeed a heap of em dashes. But you don't actually see the em dashes if you're smiling.
Dean
Flairless
33m ago
Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.
And?
I try to avoid enemy/friend distinctions for many reasons. I am not adopting or revealing any preference here. This is a specific point about the metaphor.
But if you are going to adopt/concede an 'enemy institution' paradigm in the first place, there's no particular relevance of 'not literally everyone is your enemy' beyond the utility of those not-enemies to help target the enemies. If they aren't, or can't, then even if they better qualify as collateral rather than collaborators, neither category is enough to merit any principle against targeting the enemy institution. If their presence is used to claim the institution cannot be targeted because of the damage to the non-enemies, this is merely the use of human shields. Human shields are not protection of legitimate military targets. This is especially true if they are willing human shields, voluntary or paid or otherwise.
FtttG
34m ago
I'm now coining FtttG's Law: the longer an online organisation goes on, the probability of it becoming embroiled in a child grooming scandal approaches 1.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
45m ago
They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.
I'm fairly sure most top hard-science academics are in favour of meritocracy. The relevant belief they have is instead in blank-slatism: as a matter of faith, they do not accept heredity of merit, especially as correlated with visible social/ethnic group belonging. From this they conclude that apparent differences of outcome between groups must not be due to differences in merit, and a proper meritocracy would not generate them.
Most who choose to leave will move to Europe
Are you saying we might actually get doctors and engineers this time?
European academics doing a stint in the US could come back, sure. Could American academics come here? I'm a bit dubious on that. I'm not that plugged into the university system, but don't exactly have the impression that they're awash in cash, and kicking off a rat race between foreign and domestic academics might be just what we need to get the local libs to start seeing the issues with immigration.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
51m ago
Europe at this point has been so thoroughly captured by US propaganda that the chances of it breaking with the US geopolitical line are basically nil; ergo, an American academic who moves to Europe will just be serving the same camp in the clash of civilisations for less money.
Ironically, though, European academia is actually less captured by US-style DEI; we can broadly still fail students for being bad with no regard to disparate impact or whatever, and I haven't seen explicit political allegiance tests in hiring. The truest of true believers in the US might therefore find Europe unsatisfactory, and get concentrated further in the US by evaporative cooling.
Nobody is firing professors yet. And no, they'll go to industry, not China. Might actually help with productivity.
but even if they remain aligned it's risky to outsource your brainpower and key industries, TSMC being the most obvious example.
At the end of the day this is all a massive, embarrassing bluff, a shit test. A bunch of true believer wokesters in the humanities, with lukewarm STEM intellectuals in tow, are pretending to be the irreplaceable brain of the United States, basically holding the nation hostage. Well, as Lenin said, «intelligentsia is not the brain of the nation, it's its shit», and for all the evils of the Soviet Union it did go to space, and failed through its retarded economic theory (endorsed by many among this very American intelligentsia, surprisingly), not Lenin's anti-meritocratic views.
This movement has, through manipulating procedural outcomes, appropriated funds for (garbage) research that gave their mediocre allies jobs and their commissars more institutional power, delegitimized (potentially very useful) research they didn't like, canceled White and "White-adjacent" academics they didn't like, created a hostile atmosphere and demoralized who knows how many people whose views or ethnicity they didn't like, and now they are supposed to have infinite immunity for their exploitation of the norms of academic freedom and selective enforcement of regulations, because they might throw a hissy fit. And they aren't even delivering! US universities have been rapidly losing their dominance for over a decade! Of top 10 academic institutions, 8 are Chinese already! (Here's a more rigorous, in my view, ranking from CWTS Leiden).
Come to think of it – as a distant echo of these folks' institutional dominance, even I've been permabanned from /r/slatestarcodex of all places, because I've been too discourteous commenting on Kevin Bird's successful cancellation of the "eugenicist" Stephen Hsu (Trace was there too, hah; gave me a stern talking to, shortly before the ban). Now Stephen Hsu is doomposting 24/7 that the US will get brutally folded by China on science, industry and technology. At worst, you might accelerate this by a few months.
It is known I don't like Trump. I don't respect Trump and Trumpism. But his enemies are also undeserving of respect, they are institutionalized terrorists (and many trace their political lineage to literal terrorists), and I can see where Americans are coming from when they say "no negotiation with terrorists". And even then, this is still a kind of negotiation. It's just the first time this academic cabal is facing anything more than a toothless reprimand. Let's see if they change their response in the face of this novel stimulus.
If anything, it is disappointing to me that this pendulum swing is not actually motivated by interest in truth or even by some self-respect among White Americans, it's a power grab by Trump's clique plus panic of Zionists like Bill Ackman who used to support and fund those very institutions with all their excesses and screeds about white supremacy – before they, like the proverbial golem, turned on Israel in the wake of 10/7. But if two wrongs don't make a right, the second wrong doesn't make the original one right either. I have no sympathy for the political culture of American academia, and I endorse calling their bluff.
theincompetencetheorist
59m ago
If you start with the assumption that the well has run dry and LLMs are never (not any time soon, at least) going be much better or much different than they are now, then yeah, very little about the market makes sense. Everyone willing to put substantial money into the project disagrees.
I'm actually assuming that the dumb money is pumping up a bubble with a significant gaps knowledge on what they are actually investing in and don't have any realistic way of getting a return. Much like other investment bubbles in the past.
Lets reverse the responses
Who wants to blow piles and piles of money on custom silicon that might eventually reduce their inference costs by a bit (though, since they were working with RISC-V, I kind of doubt it'd have ended up being better per-watt; cheaper only after licensing costs are factored in, probably) when a new architecture might render it obsolete at any moment?
Didn't Google already do it with TPU:s although not based on RISC-V?
Inference costs are exaggerated (and the environmental costs of inference are vastly exaggerated). It's certainly a big number in aggregate, but a single large query (30k tokens in, 5k out) for Google's top model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, costs about $0.09 via the API. And further queries on substantially the same material are cheaper due to caching. If it saves your average $50,000 a year office drone 30 seconds, it's more than worth it.
Google ends up losing a lot of money on inference not because it's unaffordable, but because they insist providing inference not only for free, but to search users who didn't even request it. (With a smaller, cheaper model than 2.5 Pro, I'm sure, and I'm sure they do cache output.) Because they think real world feedback and metrics are worth more than their inference spend, because they think that the better models that data will let them build will make it all back and more.
How much of the inference run on Google TPU:s and how much on GPU:s?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
astrolabia
1hr ago
Probably Aella
Ioper
1hr ago
I have some books that i read when I'm trying to sleep that I've read more times than I can count. The reason is that i find them to be cosy and get me in the right headspace to sleep. That I've read them before and know everything that happens is a plus not a minus in this case because what I'm trying to do is relax, not have novel experiences. I enjoy the characters, description and the language used itself.
Let me ask you this, do you ever relisten to music or do you just experience each piece the one time?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
If you want to be a social climber act like a normal sociopath and become a politician or a corporate executive.
Are you saying the government should punish one of the greatest mathematicians alive because he expressed his political opinions on things and the current leader doesn't like it?
Not should. Must.
No peaceful government is possible if the power of censorship and control over truth is only available to one side.
When the left picked that sword up, they were warned endlessly that this would have consequences once they would inevitably lose power. There you go.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Only temporarily.
That's already a few years of personell changes and shifting the balance of power within the university system. It can be rolled back, but can't be undone at the snap of the fingers, and is therefore superior the solution you are proposing, that doesn't change anything except for the packaging.
"But I'm not interested in politics."
Too bad. Politics is interested it you. Keep it at bay or perish.
Scientists lost the right to the world's indifference the day Francis Bacon published The New Atlantis.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
If one is saying "just add this line of text to your grants" and the other is saying "we will destroy you and your ability to do science and math", I'm not sure why they'd start siding with the second.
If you think the demands of the left stop at parroting some line about equality and everything else is unchanged, you must have missed the last half century of academia.
If you don't want to fall prey to politics, don't let your institution get stacked by political actors.
Most long lived institutions have to learn this. Universities used to understand it. And then they didn't. Here's the outcome.
It doesn't matter that Tao's smart, it doesn't even matter that his work is useful to humanity. Universities aligned themselves with one side of the friend-enemy distinction, that side lost, therefore they must suffer. There is no other way that this can go. This isn't me saying that it is good that this happens, merely that it is a law of nature.
Next time, fight the militants that are trying to use your university for political ends and win. Defeat has consequences.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Perhaps 99/100 alien civilizations succumb to silly governance. But if they're capable of reaching us then we should assume they're actually competent.
An actually competent civilization is nothing like ours. Actually competent civilizations would go all in on eugenics the moment they came up with it, cloning too. Actually competent civilizations would spend surplus wealth not on subsidizing boomers or makework jobs but on building out infrastructure, investment, R&D. They'd do things we wouldn't even think of but would make sense in retrospect, they take all the low-hanging fruit and the high-hanging fruit too.
A popular sci-fi writer doesn't actually hold universal deep wisdom, he just produces fiction we find interesting. 'Nobody can figure out how to program common sense' is a fun, self-congratulatory fictional idea. But it's not actually true. It was based on an old paradigm and has been disproven recently, irregardless of how much people might want it to be true.
There are all these potential objections like 'what if optimizing for IQ results in a nation of 'gifted' child prodigies who burn out in adulthood'? Sounds like a clever objection but there's no actual truth behind it in and of itself. You could adjust your education strategy for this, test, iterate, improve...
'Maybe all this AI stuff is just a great big bubble' is another tale people want to be true. Maybe it is true, perhaps there's some hard wall that scaling, algorithmic improvements, synthetic data and so on just can't surpass. I wouldn't bet on it.
No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies.
Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.
A powerful alien civilization has no need for us as contributors. A few billion low IQ humans are quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to whatever they could cook up with local resources. They would be rightly wary of disrupting their hyperefficient status quo with foreign blood.
If aliens are here, they're doing research to better understand social dynamics because if there's even marginal gains in better understanding the universe, they'll take that cost.
I believe I said that.
But @JTarrou made a very specific claim that the others on team "burn it all down" have not made in this thread:
This is why I responded to him and not to the others on that team, because that claim is false; not all professors are, in fact, "bastards". I claim the right to, as politely as I can, correct those on this board who say false things (NB: I have no strong opinions about whether JTarrou is lying vs. hyperbolising vs. ignorant), even when those false things are not especially relevant.
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