gattsuru
1hr ago
Because the scoring is arbitrary and the score-keepers are readily politically captured. A transman who wins a sprint either has the time or doesn't. A transwoman who beats wins the Miss America pageant could have impressed judges with interviews, swimsuit, and evening dress... or have had judges feeling they could Prove The Chuds Wrong. Hell, even if she genuinely does win with the judges, it's quite possible or even likely, that none of the things that won the race will appeal to a social conservative audience, even if you could somehow force them to be honest with a magical spell.
((uh, most sports. A transman might have a biological advantage over cis guys in some gunnie-related sports, though the data is controversial.))
Meanwhile, the philosophy that this is just some distraction that doesn't matter runs headfirst into the 'fine, then let me win' problem. It probably does have some strategic value, and I'd argue that social conservatives should actually try to investigate what (though I don't like them on this topic well enough to do their work for them), but social conservatives can tell it does from progressive actions, without having to delve into whether it's the scholarships, ability to claim what's attractive to men at young women, ammo for the 'this is how things really are' arguments in courts and to regulatory agencies, or just a new avenue to claim anti-trans people aren't 'really' straight.
I don't think it matters, but if you want to persuade people who do, you need to at least attempt the basics of understanding what motivates them.
gattsuru
9hr ago
Yeah, there's similar drives behind surrogacy debates, and toward the gay mentor/'uncle' stuff comes from similar sources for men who can't have kids by blood.
It's... not a great situation. Even the best-case scenario for a 'down low' gay guy in a het marriage -- a wife that's aware and accepting, the guy being able to hit her needs, and a limited number of external partners that aren't Catching Feelings -- there's a tendency for them to kinda detonate as often as they work out. And most don't really achieve that level of openness, either out of fear or cowardice about coming clean to the wife, or inability to think with their bigger head if they try to button it up.
gattsuru
9hr ago
I will caution that what's tasty to humans and what's tasty to dogs (or, worse, cats) are very separate fields. There's an ongoing joke/bet/trial thing in the furry fandom where people will try to eat dog treats, there's some that are 'just not great' and there's others that are 'I hope you have a barf bag nearby'. No idea where this would fall.
gattsuru
9hr ago
It's definitely not a job title, but I'm reminded of ACLU Legal Observers, where the point is to observe and document the legal interactions at a protest, either between protesters and police, or protesters and counter-protesters. In theory, they're supposed to specifically be separate from the protest even if they're associated with the protestors, though sometimes they get very hands-on.
That said, I can't find good or trustworthy information on the status here.
gattsuru
12hr ago
They'll probably have a better idea than I do, given what it sounds like they're up for from the last talk, but from my understanding:
It varies from person to person, and some people just can't manage to plan a more discreet approach, without the ability to set up something like a hourly motel room (eg, if a wife can access his credit card statements) or bath house (eg, if you don't want to be seen in a bath house). There's a lot of drama around 'can host' as a result, here, in grindr sphere spaces. Possibly including this guy, given the whole 'I'm Tots Straight In Monogamous Het Relationship' bit.
... but for those with it as a kink, it seems pretty overtly about the risk of potentially getting caught, the violation of norms, and the degradation. So the stuff that's a problem for you (or me!) is part of the point in the fantasy.
direct link to the MTPS report. On one hand:
In his police statement Mr A said that when he had received a message from Dr Stefan asking him to meet in the woods and a photo of an erect penis, he had replied that he did not randomly meet with strangers and liked to get to know people first, nor did he do things in public. When Dr Stefan suggested meeting places, Mr A said that he had replied that they could have a chat and get to know each other. Mr A said to Dr Stefan that it was a good thing that they were not looking to do anything private as he was quite loud. Mr A said that this had been a joke.
Mr A's claims might just be a 'the lady doth protest too much' and the board had to pretend to believe it. My gut check is that Mr A probably wanted to actually get a name and more conversation than is typically allowed in men's restrooms, rather than being entirely against screwing in toilets, and that's a kinda arbitrary dividing line, but the direct summary is a lot more candid than I'd expect from a group trying to paper over anonymous sex between professionals. The 'just bros washing hands' defense is hilariously threadbare, but someone being down for action and yet not wanting to have a fully-stripped man trying to get them into a stall with nothing more than a handwave, even if just because they would have rathered move to a supply closet or something.
If so, it's a weird rule, but honestly, I've seen weirder.
That said, I'd point to something else:
When Mr A entered the toilets that day, he said that one of the three cubicles was occupied. Therefore, he waited a couple of minutes, and no one emerged. Mr A stated that he approached the door and opened the door to see a man who was quite tanned and around the age of 36 to 38. In his interview with the Trust Mr A had stated that Dr Stefan had opened the door and his statement to the police, he maintained that he had heard a toilet door unlock, he waited around 2-3 minutes, the toilet door had then opened, and Mr A had seen a hand come and gesture towards him. Mr A had maintained this in his statement to the GMC, in that he had seen a hand come around the cubicle door. In his oral evidence, Mr A further clarified that after he had been in the toilet for a minute or two, Dr Stefan had put his hand out of the cubicle and gestured for him to enter the occupied cubicle. Mr A said that when he went over to the cubicle and peered inside, he could see that Dr Stefan was naked and playing with his penis in an attempt to make it erect. Mr A said that he could see Dr Stefan’s scrubs hanging on the cubicle door.
Ms H recalled that Mr A said that the incident had taken place in the toilets near the north entrance of C Level of the Hospital, which is the second floor of the Hospital. She said that Mr A told her that while in the toilets, the man had walked out of the toilet cubicle and was naked. Ms H said that she and her colleague were shell shocked at this.
[Mrs J] said that Mr A had told her that he had arranged to meet this doctor in the toilets in the Hospital, and although Mr A may have told her which toilets, she could not recall. Ms J said that when they met, Mr A and the doctor may have spoken, and then the doctor acted inappropriately, however she could not recall the details. She said it may have been that the doctor dropped his trousers and told Mr A to get on his knees. Ms J recalled that Mr A had said that he was frightened and ran out of the toilets.
Ms K said that Mr A told her and her colleague that a doctor dragged him into a toilet and assaulted him. She said that Mr A did not explain what he meant by being dragged or assaulted and thought that he felt embarrassed that it happened, ashamed, and scared that he could not say anything because no one would believe him because he was young
There's some discrepancies, here. I'd expect as much of them are Mr. A giving more palatable explanations for the sequence of events to his interlocutors or reinterpretations by the listeners (especially given the gender he was reporting to!), as are the more conventional hearsay problem where recollections change over translation and time. In particular, the bits where Mr. A can't seem to remember who opened the stall door... well, I'm gonna guess that Mr. A did, and he wasn't doing it to ask if anyone wanted to hear the good word.
But even the scenario that looks best for Dr. Stefan, he's coming across as... more than porn-level aggressive, even by the low standards of cottaging. I mean that quite literally; even in pornography (or drawn porn) where the pragmatic concerns can be left fully ignored, you're pretty likely to see people pretty deep in coitus with more clothes on than that. I'm sure there's people who sign up for it, don't get me wrong! But I don't think it's even necessarily what someone who gave a thumbs-up to "want sum fuk" grindr message would involve.
This seems common to one of the other allegations: Mr B's allegations seem to be reported as just 'groping', but the full summary has what started out as some consensual kisses and turning into:
Mr B confirmed that no words were used but it was inferred in the form of eye contact and holding out his penis. Mr B said that he tried to ignore Dr Stefan and at that point, he was encouraged further to do so with the words ‘go on’. Mr B said that Dr Stefan tried to persuade him to suck his penis. Mr B said these were the only words used. Mr B said that Dr Stefan pulled down his trousers slightly and began moaning whilst masturbating himself next to Mr B.
That's not in a restroom, but in what looks to be some sort of examination or procedure room. So basically what we're proposing that the MTPS doesn't want to admit happens.
It's the action scene from a porn flick, but without the setup or reciprocity of Lemon-Stealing Whores. I can't tell from the report where the review board was using a very loose definition of consensual for the earlier kisses, if Dr. Stefan was just cranking his hog at random guys and only the gay ones were willing to testify or complain, or if there was more backstory behind the kiss, but optimistically it's a guy pushing a relationship as hard as he can.
Which is probably the bigger driver. I dunno exactly what the UK's exact rules are, but in the United States, the rules-as-written are usually some variants of prohibiting on-the-clock sex period and off-the-clock relationships within a chain of command, and the rules-as-practiced are "don't make me go over there" and "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". That's not necessarily an unreasonable thing for an organization to do: as annoying (and potentially gross) as employees shagging might get, the actual meat-and-potatoes of enforcing a ban on such things is just impractical if they aren't actually interfering with work or leaving suspicious stains.
But then there's a problem, and both the assailant and the victims are in violation of the rules-as-written, if you ask too hard or too loud. One answer is to let justice ride, and to hell with the consequences, and that's died with modern social media if it survived the 90s; another is to just bask in the inconsistency, and sometimes that works if it's convenient enough.
The easier answer is to not ask stupid questions, and not hear stupid answers, at least in any way that requires writing them down. Any question about how many times Mr A has used the mysterious XXX App while on the clock would be off-topic, and slut-shaming besides. The inquiry isn't about him, and had it not been necessary to support Mr A's written documentation I doubt we'd have seen even the few references here.
It's... not a good compromise, like anywhere else where the contradiction between the rules and the policies are in high tension, not least of all because no one, probably not even the MTPS board here, can really spell out what the actual rules-as-practiced are. But it's a compromise that beats most BATNA, and takes no real negotiation itself.
gattsuru
15hr ago
Eh... in the sense that if a sizable minority of a population does something, you probably will end up with a (recognized) word for it, maybe? But then it's 'standard' for men to get fucked by other men, because we have the word 'gay'. Even for definitions of standard where that's not wrong, it's not really clear.
((And there's a lot of things we have words for that are pretty uncommon, but I don't think we need to dive down the vore hole now.))
gattsuru
15hr ago
That's fair, and why I put it as a quibble more than any real disagreement. I have had people who assumed it was so common as to be a rite of passage, so it's something I prefer to have more specifics about.
gattsuru
16hr ago
I'd quibble a bit about 'perfectly normal'. Even for Grindrites, cottaging isn't a standard behavior, and I'd bet a sizable amount of money that >50% of gay guys haven't cottaged ever, and a smaller bet that around 80% either haven't or have only done so rarely and in non-central examples (eg, screwing in the restrooms of a gay club after you've danced with the guy for ten minutes). In addition to the safety and privacy concerns, or the various problems of preparation, it's also just a hilariously uncomfortable kink, and there's ways to execute on the kink side without busting your knees to hell and back.
But I could believe it's a 10-20% thing, and it's a slang that most gay guys either know or know under a different name, so it is a quibble. And there's a lot of other less-immediately-squicky stuff that's still definitely very far from the Hallmark-style "love is love" gay life-as-greeting card. I think there's ways to make these things compatible -- there's more than a few self-identified 'sluts' with lower body counts than the average straight guy and saccharine-level relationships with their husband, who enjoys orgies or partner swaps a couple times a year with the same close friends -- but that's not all of the sluts, and not even interesting to many of them.
gattsuru
1d ago
gattsuru
1d ago
Some contemporaneous discussion here and here and here, from the first few days after the shooting.
The videos were available, and that's how Grosskruetz got the nickname Byeceps; most people just didn't (and, to be fair, I'm not a big fan of watching people die myself). It's easy today to think everyone's getting the full explanatory video, but I'd be surprised if that's the retrospective the normies think in a week.
[cw: pretty gay]
To be fair, you do get some gay shows (and even gay porn) by men that's about The Relationships. They just look different.
Take this comic by TooMuchDynamite (cw: furry, clean). Sappy lovey-dovey feminine-energy take on self-sacrifice as a (somewhat literal) sin eater, gotta be a chick thing, right? Nah, he's a he, he's gay, really really into bara (cw: furry, guys in relatively subtle underwear); the same comic opens up with a well-formed gay goat demon I'm not gonna link to because the focus character straddles the line between 'that's an unrealistic bulge for a jock strap' to 'that's just a dick'.
To go back to written form erotica, I've recommended both Kyell Gold and Rukis Croax as expert writers of gay furry smut, but one of them is a gay guy with a husband, and one of them isn't (and probably won't turn out to be a trans guy, if I had to guess), and you don't need a massive amount of familiarity with the fandom or the conventions of yaoi to know which is which. Out of Position is pretty much the football equivalent to Heated Rivalry, complete with sports-themed public coming out arc, and a lot of trials and tribulations about the relationships and how people interact and what's motivating them, and the furry conventions are the least of the differences in either the smut or the social framing.
((And there are even some straight-porn-for-straight-guys writings that go into that level of "caring about the people involved" stuff. For furry writers, I'd point to the Tempe O'kun's straight works, or EddieW for a writer who is fully straight, for examples where the relationship tribulations take such center place that the smut often becomes nearly-forgotten.))
Some of that's biology -- you're telling me the sex that's slower to warm up and has a faster recuperation time favors written stories with a longer buildup and more repetition? -- and some of it's mode of attraction, but I'm... skeptical that's the full story. There's mechanical reasons straight women are a lot less likely to be size queens or be fascinating by a guy firing off like a fire hydrant. There's no such convenient physical explanation for the differences between gay and yaoi exhibitionism, and there's some pretty obvious social ones.
gattsuru
1d ago
To be fair, some of that reflects people who 'can't' read third-person in the performative 'just can't even' sense; they're capable of it, they just don't like to do so, or don't find it as entertaining. There's a pretty sizable BookTok force that has a similar reaction to first-person perspective books or fanfic, as well, generally seeing it as schlocky and prone to confusing action-state errors. The third-person diehards aren't necessarily any freer of messy fanfic behavior (eg, y/n fics are pretty common in both first-person, second-person, and third-person), but it's a lot less of a clear dividing line than you'd expect.
((Though, yes, the people who literally-literally can't read third person works exist, too.))
I tend err toward third-person than not, but I do have some sympathies, here. From a writing perspective, first-person lets you get away with a lot of scenes that would devolve into endless pronoun problems or feel bizarrely clinical, and there's a lot of mystery or action gimmicks that either don't work or come across as author fiat in a third-person work (even one where the pov is highly restricted to one person).
gattsuru
1d ago
[caveat: Doctorow didn't coin the term, so much as popularize it.]
Physical-work side, I got to do some siding repairs. That's been a !!fun!! way to spend the holiday break.
Software-side, trying to look into the state of modern sorting-assist tools. You'd think, will all of the advances in AI tech, classifying files and sorting them would be a solved or near-solved problem. Microsoft's "agentic AI" concept drives me up the wall for a wide variety of reasons, but this seems like one of the main killer use cases. If you've ever worked tech support for either Gen Y/Z or Boomers, seeing a Downloads or Documents folder with so many loose files that it causes an SSD to slow to a crawl is a pretty common experience, and they can't find shit (or, worse, can find ImportantDocument_final_last_(1)autorecover\current.docx, for now).
So I've been trying to come up with and evaluating possible solutions to this sorta thing.
- Zero-shot classifiers like CLIP are well-established and everyone's favorite option (eg Immich, the Bellingcat sorter if you trust them, which I don't). Trivially easy to implement in python... badly. You're effectively trying to compare one caption against another in embedding space, and there's no guarantee (and a lot of anti-guarantees) that just because two words close to each other in meaning will have any proximity. And they're pretty limited in domain; many can't compare between pptx and a png period, and those that can do so with basically zero accuracy.
- Few- and many-shot classifiers CNNs are also well-established and trivially easy to code for a single domain... but only if you know the categories you want before hand, and have somewhere between five and five hundred examples. Even outside of the training cost, that's another thing that's a great tool for a tiny number of uses. Vision transformers have the same problem except more so; I needed close to fifteen hundred pre-classified input files. And really messy to go from one domain to another.
- Text-only LLMs operating based on file names already have fully-developed solutions. If anyone has a use case where people name their files but don't put them in folders, I guess that'd work for all three of them on the planet?
- Multimodal LLMs are kinda there. You can just load up GLM4.6V (-flash), throw a supported file on the input, and ask it to put the file into one of several categories. It'll burn a stupid amount of tokens if the interaction between those categories is particularly weird, or if none of the categorizes make sense for a given input, but it's not too hard to handle a decently wide subset of image-or-document files on the input side, and natural human language for categorization. Problem's that you get LLM text as the output. You can try to force the LLM to keep the answer as concise and as limited to a category as you want, but there's nothing stopping it from spitting out parts or all of your categories when describing the one matching one, even in well-constrained environments.
That's on top of other issues specific to implementations: a lot of ViTs and multimodal LLMs depend heavily on breaking, while a lot of classifiers get really stupid if you have wildly different resolution inputs, multimodal LLMs can't distinguish between prompt and content, yada yada.
On the flip side, closely related topics are nearly >98% solved off the shelf, even ones that I'd consider a lot harder.
- GLM4.6V can convert a short comic from visual medium into prose, with all the complexity that implies. Doesn't matter if a character's name is introduced several pages after they first show up, or they have aliases, or if two characters look similar but only show up in different contexts, or if you've got stuff that's clearly outside of the likely training data. I can give examples that confuse it, but they're problems like 'did it read where speech bubbles were pointing correctly' or 'can it read these abstract shapes'? And that's something with so useless a business case that I can't believe they made much synthetic data for it.
- Give me code corresponding to a given layout (or pencil sketch of a layout)? That's trivial to build synthetic data and has a clear business case, but XAML sucks, and GLM4.6V-flash is just fine with basic use cases.
- It's hard to overstate exactly how far categorization has gotten in single clear domains; if you only need to handle images, or only text, you're in great situations. I built a YOLO-based model from scratch for ten categories, it took less than six hours to train on a graphics card from 2018, 1k input images, >85% accuracy. Twelve years ago, that's a pipe dream for a doctoral program; today, it's a sign that I fucked up somewhere, and I need to consider between more epochs and switching some parameters around.
gattsuru
2d ago
It's not surprising that porn-for-(non-autogynophilic)-men avoids seeing what the inside of a woman's head feels like. It is kinda weird from a bi guy perspective how much straight-for-guy's-eyes porn focuses on the man or men, and how little is focused on something really prioritizing women qua woman. I would expect places like I Feel Myself to be a genre, but they really don't look like it.
I doubt it would help a lot even if it existed -- there's a lot of variation from one person to another, as a lot of same-sex couples have found out for better or worse -- but still strange.
gattsuru
2d ago
For current-gen games, you're looking at protonDB. Yes, it's officially meant for Steam, but if you don't want to run it and add them as a non-Steam game, you can easily access the underlying tools using Lutris or Heroic Game Launcher. Lutris tends to be better, in my experience, for legally-owned-backups. Compatibility is good-but-not-perfect -- almost anything mainstream enough to sell through Steam in the last ten years is getting looked at, but marginal games under that bar might not, and a lot of the very popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat have trouble or just won't work.
Older stuff and more marginal games can be rougher. DOSBox works and exists, and there are linux-friendly ports (or native builds) of almost every past-gen console, though quality and performance varies on the PS3+ era. Go really far into the indies and it can be a mess, with some games having Linux-native builds despite being built around an ecosystem that absolutely loathes it, and others only coming up to functionality after a decade of attempted ports and then some random fix in photon-ge solved it.
gattsuru
2d ago
Yeah, there's a lot of romance in the idea of so carefully reading your partner's microexpressions that you can tell exactly how they want things or how things are working at a given time, but in the real world it's something you actually have to use your words to get done properly.
gattsuru
2d ago
Perhaps. There's a really awkward question about whether he knew, or suspected, or just was in a sufficiently target-rich environment that any finger-pointing would hit a fraudster.
... kinda?
You have to go pretty far before any woman is going to use 'beanflicker novel' or even 'it's erotica', but Reddit's /r/romancebook has a first page with Kink and Sex Acts Megathread - Knotting, FMC and MMC has something erotic happen in front of them and it makes them both “snap”, and Mmc fucks fmc thinking she is his girlfriend. I'm not an absolute expert in the field, but even the M/M stuff is written for and often by women's consumption, and about the point where the protagonist secretly begins taking contraceptives so the fuckening can continue, there's not a lot of fig leaf.
(To be clear, I'm not judging, here! ... well, except in the giving some of the books individual ratings, and considering if I want to drop some furry names in the megathread.)
Yes, there's still some stigma about this stuff: a woman reading Morning Glory Milking Farm (cw: not-great romance art, incredibly heavy-handed innuendo in picture, the book is bizarrely vanilla) on the train is going to get similar looks as a guy leafing through the original edition Savant and Sorcerer (cw: woman in swimsuit-level-nudity). But you're not going to see a Fifty Shades of Gray For Men make the front pages, nor will some random male-focused shipper fanfic smutty fanfic get a full film. Even the for-gay-guys equivalents are a lot more heavily policed: there's no Magic Mike-but-actually-gay.
Most people talk about it through euphemism in wildly public spaces; spice, heat, the citrus scale, so on. But they're still pretty overt about it, with over half of this book list having explicit smutty sex scenes (3 'pepper' or higher). Maybe that's less of a deal because it's a mostly written environment. But it's not something that's hard to spot.
I'm more skeptical that this is bad. I've made and will continue to make the argument that even pretty kinky or genre-focused smutty or smut-adjacent works can have broader meaning or allow deeper insight, and that even works that are just read for gratification are fine whether they're smut or milsci-fi (even if gustibus non disputandum meets some discomfort with WH40k books). But it's a thing, and the difference in expectations by gender is a thing.
gattsuru
3d ago
[contemporaneous discussion, more recent]
Caveat: I'm pretty confident that Gino is either guilty as sin or so negligent as to be guilty, and probably both given that she'd signed onto other fraudy-as-fuck research without a care before. A good many of her deflections are not just naked, but often wrong, and those that aren't wrong are meaningless. The lawsuit is, in particular, an indictment of both Gino and her lawyers -- and that the DataColada crew couldn't get legal fees after succeeding an indictment of the courts. Much of her defenders embody of the adage about "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table." and that's a part of it.
So, to be blunt, I'm not a fan.
... but I do notice that she's also unusual, and not in the way I wish she was unusual. Dan Ariely, noted co-author and co-fraud, got a television show, and his sketchy academic behavior is only slightly less obvious. Sam Yoon isn't up a creek until the investigation turns in; it's not hard to list piles of academic misconduct that's just everyday charlatanism, much of which isn't even worth a retraction nevermind direct real punishment. There are other fraudsters that get the hammer, but even there, academia tends to keep the wheel of justice slow, fine, and prone to false negatives: Stapel got got and literally none of his students did, Wansink lost his job and we never even got an answer for what fakes were direct lies rather than p-hacking, yada yada.
It's not enough to say that her fraud is unusual. There are so many rules, and so many ways to do academic misconduct, and so many ways to slice academic misconduct, that it's always possible to explain why one case was vital without lending any predictive power, nor explain why one case was important and the others weren't. And bureaucracies inventing and applying a thicket of rules only to enforce them when desired is absolutely a thing that happens, and something that people like Ackman has seen.
What's relevant is whether these policies are good here, or not. Even if Gino were tots correct about selective prosecution and scapegoating and other bad actors, ultimately, that'd just be an argument in favor of Harvard (or, imo, academia) needing to clean out the rest of the stables.
... which gets rough for 2rafa's take. There's a world where the education and test-taking makes for better decisions, better responses, better actions, and better systems, where elites mean extreme focus in specialized capabilities. There's a world where it's status-farming, or Goodharting, or some very precise games-of-thronesing, where elites are just a class identity for a class that doesn't even pretend to try for its claimed focuses. These worlds aren't even incompatible!
But then you have to run into this world. We're in one where Gino got into, and succeeded at, Harvard for nearly two decades. Dias made it into Harvard and the Time 100 Next before spinning his wheels as one of a dozen lab leaders doing this sort of research on the planet, absolutely wasting it, and another one of those lab leads pretending to replicate part of his tots-real data.
I dunno. I don't want to put words in 2rafa's mouth. If the argument is on whether everything must or should be a status game, I'd agree with you, and find that's not a healthy sort of nihilism to take, and not a healthy reason to want to ignore it all. I don't think that's the position, but if it is, or even if it's a decent read, it's not a good thing.
If the argument is on whether everything is or has become a status game... I'd be stuck having to quibble on the 'everything', and doing so would be a faint defense, or defenders of these approaches to education and academia might feel they have to argue that their output is just better than nothing and I'd have to do the work to believe that. I might be wrong in that pessimism! But I have my reasons, and, thankfully, it's an argument we can have based on facts.
gattsuru
3d ago
I think it's far more likely that someone (maybe Rov_Scam?) talks at length about how Gerstein and Politico's actions here are totally just neutral reporting and critical commentary on a policy Gerstein doesn't agree with, done entirely in his personal capability in ways that tots shouldn't say anything about Politico, and by the way here's something Trump did that was a Real Threat That Counts. That Grok link above gives a pretty good preview of the Least Common Denominator options; I'd expect writers here could be a little more original unless Darwin comes out of the woodwork again, but I don't expect anything more _compelling_.
And that's in the case that anyone here that's left-leaning thinks it's worth comment at all.
To be fair to Rov_Scam, "He's an obvious charlatan" did exceed expectations.
gattsuru
4d ago
Given that they've caused less damage than a single particularly retarded-as-in-dropped-on-his-head arsonist, I'm not convinced that they've been optimizing for damage, whatever thought they've put in. I'm... actually a little unconvinced that they've even optimized well for disruption, but there's a lot of reasons I don't want to talk about that publicly.
Which is one half of the problem in talking about this stuff. If there are red team exercises that can up the high score from the known alternatives, it's... not a very good idea to start talking about them at length in public. The other half's that if you have reasons why a given attack shouldn't work, it's not a very good idea to talk about that at length in public, either.
He's... hard to talk about.
The critique has long echoed the old Samuel Johnson quote about being "both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good" -- and the man has had a hatedom before 2012, so it's been echoing for a while. Most of the man's more accessible scientific writing is 'just' presenting well-established popsci into a more accessible form (sometimes without sufficient citations), while a lot of his predictive or even cutting-edge scientific analysis has to get suffixed with 'from a certain point of view' at best and 'ah yes but' at worst. If anything, that's only become more true over time: both The Golden Age Sequences and HPMoR have long relied on some of the sociology research that's be found the most wanting under the replication crisis.
Yudkowsky's been moderately open about some of this stuff, and his pro-AI, AI-is-easy, AI-is-hard, anti-AI changes have been a part of his whole story. I like that more than the people insisting they've always been right. It's still not something everyone likes, or that he can do consistently. There's never been a good retrospective on how MIRI's output was so absolutely bad on both the academic paper and popular-reader sides for so long, or the time they had an employee embezzle (tbf, not an unusual thing for new non-profits to have hit them), or yada yada.
But that's a bit of a victim of own success thing. Yudkowsky can't claim the whole replication movement anymore than he can claim the whole effective altruism one. He's at least been in the general vicinity too early to have jumped in front of the parade post-hoc, though. "Map is not the territory" and "fake answers" might have been well-known and obvious before 2008, but it wasn't until after that anyone put them together to actually poke at the core tools we thought we were using to find deep truths about reality. And these movements have been a large part of why so many of the older posts have aged so poorly, though not the only part.
((Although he's also a weird writer to have as big an impact as it seems he's had? The Sequences, fine, if good blog should change people's minds, it's a good enough blog. Why is HpMoR a more effective AI Safety program than Friendship is Optimal? Why is the Sword of Good so much more effective than a lot of more recent attempts at its take?))
... but all that's kinda side stories, at this point. Today, if you care about him, it's the AI safety stuff, not whether he guessed correctly on Kahneman vs Elisabeth Bik, or even on neural networks versus agentic AI research.
Which gets messy, because like Reading Philosophy Backwards, today, all of his demonstrated successful predictions are incredibly obvious, his failed ones ludicrous-sounding, and only the ones we can't evaluate yet relevant. Why would anyone care about the AI Box experiment when corporations or even complete randos are giving LLMs a credit card and saying have fun? (Because some extremely well-credentialed people were sure that these sort of AI would be perfectly harmless if not allowed access to the outside world, even months after the LLMs were given credit card info.) Why would anyone be surprised that an AI might disclose private or dangerous information, if not told otherwise, when we now know LLMs can and do readily do those things? (Because 'the machine will only do what we program it to do' was a serious claim for over a decade.) Who could possibly believe that an LLM couldn't improve code performance? (Uh, except all the people talking about stochaistic parrots today, and convinced that it was philosophically impossible for years before then.)
And the big unsolved questions are very important.
But in turn, that doesn't make his proposed answers better or useful. Say what you will for the ethos of singularitarity races, but at least they have something more credible than the 'you can't just tell people not to do something' guy telling people not to do something, and ultimately that's all that policies like an AI pause boil down to. The various attempts to solve morality have made some progress, despite my own expectations. It might seem like the difference between timeless decision theory and functional decision theory is just huffing fumes, but it does have some genuine benefits... and we have no way to implement them, and no way to validate or even seriously consider whether we're even looking at the most important measures. We don't know what the system they'd need to be implemented on looks like, and it's speculative (though increasingly likely) there will even be a system, and it's not clear the people building that system will be interested or even aware of the general AI safety issues.
So there's big unsolved questions that have been largely left unasked.
Mr. B doing some administrative task while in the same room as a Dr codes as young intern to me (and his included writing, like 'not very slay' codes as very young), but you'd know far better than I how the UK medical norms on that go. Doesn't necessarily mean Dr. Stefan was looking especially young as chickenhawks go, but could be part of it.
Agreed that it's a hilariously bad as an excuse, even assuming Mr. A was genuinely derpy enough to have bought Grindr's 'it's a social meeting app' spiel.
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