ulyssessword
No bio...
User ID: 308
ulyssessword
6d ago
The hoax is also pushed with a degree of nuance. The journalists always cite their sources and never claim it to be true themselves:
From NYT (I bypass the paywall by F12 to inspect the source, and delete < head > ):
The remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, have been discovered on the grounds of three former residential schools in two Canadian provinces since May.
No "according to" or anything for that statement, and it was last updated on March 28, 2022, compared to the clarification the First Nation put out in July 2021 (and another in May 2024).
ulyssessword
6d ago
Now that it's obvious that there are no bodies, I'm confident that not a single recent article from a reputable source has tried to claim or suggest that the bodies exist anymore.
The Law Society of British Columbia isn't a journalistic organization, but that's exactly what they were claiming. The Left (i.e. all of the media except the countercultural ones) has run away from the story so hard that the only coverage is coming from the Right.
ulyssessword
6d ago
I'm going to guess without strong evidence that the vast majority of the views on the toronto article are of the corrected version.
I couldn't find the precise time to correction for the Toronto Star, but Global News was 5.5 hours. This paper (pdf) classifies news articles based on the speed of their spread, and found that most articles peak within the first four-ish hours (some much faster).
Regarding the bodies, I would hazard to guess that the articles themselves are not technically "wrong" and therefore do not warrant correction.
That would be incorrect. There are no reputable claims of bodies being there, and none have been unearthed or "confirmed". The Law Society of British Columbia (at a minimum, among other groups) is going against the findings of the First Nation in question, who are in charge of the site. The bodies were hallucinated into being four years ago, and they're still around now.
ulyssessword
6d ago
You're talking about Doug Saunders? And not the Canadian Press, Toronto Star, Global News, Globe and Mail, or Duane Bratt?
I don't put much stock in corrections, even ignoring the speed and prevalence. If you depend on corrections to fix errors, then you've committed to either ignoring every headline you see in favor of a delayed summary, or else tracking each news story and following up after the appropriate amount of time to check for any changes.
How long am I supposed to wait before a non-breaking news story becomes reliable? If you choose to give them four years, then you might still be disappointed.
ulyssessword
6d ago
Building off of yesterday's discussion of AI hallucinations, there's a new story about journalist hallucinations. Of course they don't call it that: the journalists "got them wrong" and gave a "false impression" in their articles/tweets instead. They're talking about Alberta's new book ban (pdf of bill) which restricts sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In short, it:
- fully bans explicit sexual content (essentially porn, must be detailed)
- restricts non-explicit sexual content (like above, but not detailed) to grade 10 and up and only if "developmentally appropriate"
- does not restrict non-sexual content (medical, biological, romantic, or by implication)
The journalists were saying that non-sexual content (e.g. handholding) would be restricted like non-explicit sexual content, and therefore be unavailable until grade 10. One even went so far as to hallucinate get something wrong and give people the false impression that he was right and the government edited its releases to fix their mistake, which is why you can't find it now.
Yes, AIs hallucinate, but buddy, have you seen humans? (see also: the "unmarked graves" story (paywalled), where ground penetrating radar anomalies somehow became child remains with no investigation having taken place.) When I set my standards low, it's not because I believe falsehoods are safe, it's because the alternatives aren't great either.
ulyssessword
7d ago
I have a few friends that use https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3146835 with good results.
Thanks for being lenient.
I checked a couple more of his hard science articles, and they have a similar level of rigor. Solar Flares confuses cause and effect with mere association, and has a couple other oddities:
According to NASA, solar flares are defined as intense bursts of radiation that occur as a result of the magnetic energy found in sunspots. Solar flares can also happen when particles like electrons and protons unexpectedly accelerate.
The electrons and protons accelerate because of the magnetic field. That causes a release of radiation, which is the solar flare.
No matter what the composition, solar flares release large amounts of solar, gamma, and electromagnetic radiation into space. They can last anywhere from several minutes to several hours.
Very strange phrasing. Rephrasing it, it is: electromagnetic or particle radiation from the sun, electromagnetic radiation below 10 picometers, and electromagnetic radiation in general.
They can last anywhere from several minutes to several hours.
What do solar flares look like?
Despite the fact that some of them can last for a rather long time, solar flares generally happen too quickly to be seen by the naked eye.
It's not the speed that's the problem ("several minutes to several hours", from the previous paragraph, or minimum four minutes due to the measurement criteria here), but the brightness in the visible spectrum. This might actually be a hallucination, and could've come from the mismatch between human and astronomical time (where a million years can be "fast" and ten minutes can be described as "a flash").
Those circumstances emit X-rays and magnetic fields that travel across the cosmos, bombarding the Earth with geomagnetic storms that can interrupt long-range communication and the like.
The field itself isn't reaching the Earth (any more than normal, at least), but charged particles are, and they can affect us.
Solar flares do ramp up into something called a solar maximum every 11-year solar cycle, but even at their maximum strength, no recorded flares have ever been large enough to reach the planet.
A bit of a nitpick, but the solar flares are the light. All(?) recorded solar flares have reached the Earth, because that's how we recorded them. Solar prominences and flare sprays have never been large enough to reach Earth.
According to NASA, CMEs are similar to solar flares in that they are bursts of solar material that result in the release of particles and radiation.
CMEs and solar flares are somewhat like thunder and lightning. They happen at the same time from the same event, but they are distinct phenomena.
This was a good challenge, and kudos for putting your money where your mouth is. I saw the generation attempt upthread, but I'm still wondering if o3, Opus 4, or another model could outperform him, if given a good bit of scaffolding. The bar is higher than I thought.
I'll direct the prize money to https://deltawaterfowl.org/join-us/donate/ instead. Thanks.
Re: Edit:
"Exothermic reactions" can also apply to physical processes like phase changes, but now I'm the one that's nitpicking and asking for a nonstandard definition. I don't think his statements about nucleation sites are clear enough to be "wrong", so I'll withdraw my claim.
ulyssessword
7d ago
Find a single hallucination in an article written by this author between 2021 and today. There are quite a few, so this should be easy if human writing is unreliable. For the purposes of this, a hallucination is a statement that is both provably false at the time of writing and not supported by a linked source.
First article I checked (first published March 2021, updated Jan 2023): Sodium acetate crystallization is not a chemical reaction, phase changes are physical. The linked source does not make that claim.
ulyssessword
9d ago
Bystanders desperately tried to assist the injured man as emergency services raced to the scene.
Mr Baitson was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery.
However, he died four days later.
Stranger things have happened, but dying four days after a leg wound is certainly up there IMO. I'd think you would either die in a few minutes or get enough help to recover, but maybe there's a middle ground.
ulyssessword
10d ago
You did not say "no"
Why would anyone answer a thought experiment with a direct factual analysis? I wouldn't use the trick calculator because I would use a normal one, or possibly specialized software that has error-checking that goes beyond faithfully calculating my button presses. Wow, I'm so insightful.
I notice that you haven't answered the question either: Have you seen humans? I personally see dozens of humans on an average day, but I wouldn't want to assume anything about your answer.
I know its long but seriously watch the video essay on Badness = 0 I posted up thread. It is highly relevant to this conversation.
Where's the relevance? Was it "Using an LLM to answer your questions will cut your workload by 99% but not 99.99% because you have to follow one link to confirm its response"?
0-6:00 Detail orientation!
6:00 - 9:00 Instead of watching >100 videos each about 10-30 minutes long and assessing them himself (or using any other research strategy), the author used a (now) old model with 5% the parameters of GPT4, and it confused a video about error correction algorithms with a video about admitting to and correcting your errors. He got his answer within minutes.
9:00-12:00 Intro to LLMs and his toy example.
12:00-19:00 BoVeX, which is a typesetting software he made that rewrites text to eliminate "bad" breaks in text (e.g. hyphens, overspacing).
19:00-22:00 Conclusion/credits.
ulyssessword
11d ago
Let's try a concrete example. Excerpted from here:
The o1 model identified the exact or very close diagnosis (Bond scores of 4-5) in 65.8% of cases during the initial ER Triage, 69.6% during the ER physician encounter, and 79.7% at the ICU
65.8% accuracy isn't that great, but buddy, have you seen humans?
—surpassing the two physicians (54.4%, 60.8%, 75.9% for Physician 1; 48.1%, 50.6%, 68.4% for Physician 2) at each stage.
The state of the art for generating accurate medical diagnoses doesn't involve gathering the brightest highschoolers, giving them another decade(-ish) of formal education, then more clinical experience before asking for their opinions. It involves training an LLM.
If I ask an LLM about anything, I need to do the research that I would have done even if I had not asked the LLM.
I'm almost with you there. I need to do some of the research I would've had to do without the LLM, but it adds enough to displace a Google search or two while being faster and easier.
ulyssessword
12d ago
When you find something via Google, do you immediately and unconditionally trust it? I don't, because Google's results are full of nonsense. In response, I've developed google-fu to both refine my queries and judge the results. The same goes for every other source there is, from physical libraries to subject-specific Discord servers.
Do I compare LLM output to Google results? Sure, but that's nothing special. Comparing what you find in different sources is a pretty basic tactic.
LLMs are part of a complete breakfast research strategy, and a pretty good one at that.
ulyssessword
12d ago
...as anything other than nonsense generators.
As opposed to the other sources you can go to, which are...?
I am grading on a curve, an LLMs look pretty good when you compare them to traditional sources. It's even better if you restrict yourself to free+fast sources like Google search, (pseudo-)social media like Reddit/StackOverflow, or specific websites.
ulyssessword
14d ago
has to be subsidized by the state government because it’s just not profitable anymore.
AKA: charging what it costs would be unacceptable. I'm sure there's some price where it makes sense to offer flood insurance in a floodplain, but the government decided that people should pay less than that.
At least it isn't a price control forcing the insurance companies take an (expected) loss on every policy.
ulyssessword
16d ago
What is the definition of an "enemy of the United States" though?
Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization. If that isn't sufficient to meet the definition, then I'm not sure what is.
ulyssessword
17d ago
I always treated the 1-10 pain scale as logarithmic, like earthquakes or sound. 7% of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake ("Near total destruction – severe damage or collapse to all buildings.") is 7.8 ("Causes damage to most buildings, some to partially or completely collapse or receive severe damage."), not 0.63 (the scale only goes to 1.0, which are not felt).
Or going the other way, stubbing a toe might be a 3. Stubbing three toes is definitely not a 9. It might not even reach a 4.
ulyssessword
18d ago
Where are you finding that?
ulyssessword
18d ago
I've also seen arguments that a particular distribution of values for IQ, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, etc (including many factors that psychologists don't measure) is the best for a nation, and the only way to get spread is to select based on race.
Even though the "good" numbers might be higher on other people, naive number-maxxing would lead to a failure mode of some kind. It's often unspecified, but the ones I can remember involve out-of-touch highly [good trait] people making norms that are legible and achievable to them, but disastrous to everyone else. Liberalization of sex and drugs are the main culprits.
By extension wether a man is black or white must matter more than whether they are an aged Supreme Court Judge or a Twenty-something meth head.
Maybe. I saw some stats on the Trump 2016 election, and the survey showed that being Black was a better predictor of presidential vote than being
ulyssessword
18d ago
Nice strawman. But even the most hardcore HBD believers would accept that the worst whites are likely worse in some aspects than the best non-whites.
Ethnonationalists are (often) also HBD believers, and they say that the important aspect of a person is their race, full stop. You could point to higher intelligence, longer life, better health, or lower criminality among other ethnic groups, but that still wouldn't convince them that someone from another race is better in the ways that matter because that's not what they're judging people on.
ulyssessword
20d ago
I think it's pretty clear they reduce overdoses...
They may reduce overdoses, but I think that's far from clear.
As a (sort of) counterexample, "...B.C. has implemented every harm-reduction program that has been proposed, from safe-injection sites to safe supply and effectively making all drugs legal. As each new measure has been introduced, drug overdose deaths have increased, except for a brief drop in 2019."
The toy model is that they would otherwise stop (often from from death), but instead they continue for longer before stopping (slightly less often from death), and the time they spend doing drugs is higher and therefore the social cost is higher as well.
ulyssessword
22d ago
That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.
I suspect that it's some amount of selection bias as well. Specifically, being multi-racial is higher class than being single-race, so people with X% of their genes from one race and Y% from another would answer differently on the survey based on their class.
Let's be very generous and say $0.07 per kilowatt hour (approximately retail prices). 1 gigawatt year is therefore $613.7M, while 5000 kg of gold (at $150k/kg, which is slightly high) is $750M.
So it's not even a powerplant that produces gold as a coproduct, it's a gold plant that also produces power.
More options
Context Copy link