Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. If youāre wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)
(EDIT: Changed ā29th Februaryā to ā1st Marchā - its not a leap year)
I like how even by ACX standards scootās posts on AI are pure brain damage
He also threatens an Anti-Stochastic-Parrot FAQ.
Hereās hoping if this happens Bender et al enthusiastically point out this is coming from a guy whose long term master plan is to fight evil AI with eugenics. Or who uses the threat of evil AI to make eugenics great again if they are feeling less charitable.
Nonsensical analogies are always improved by adding a chart with colorful boxes and arrows going between them. Of course, the burden of proof is on you, dear reader, to explain why the analogy doesnāt make sense, not on the author to provide more justification than waving his hands really really hard.
Many of these analogies are bad as, I donāt know, āDenmark and North Korea are the same because they both have governmentsā or something. Humans and LLMs both produce sequences of words, where the next word depends in some way on the previous words, so they are basically the same (and you can call this āpredictingā the next word as a rhetorical flourish). Yeah, what a revolutionary concept, knowing that both humans and LLMs follow the laws of time and causality. And as we know, evolution āoptimizesā for reproduction, and thatās why there are only bacteria around (they can reproduce every 20 minutes). He has to be careful, these types of dumbass āoptimizationā interpretations of evolution that arose in the late 1800s led to horrible ideas about race science ā¦ wait a minute ā¦
He isnāt even trying with the yellow and orange boxes. What the fuck do āhigh-D toroidal attractor manifoldsā and ā6D helical manifoldsā have to do with anything? Why are they there? And he really thinks he can get away with nobody closely reading his charts, with the ā(???, nothing)ā business. Maybe I should throw in that box in my publications and see how that goes.
I feel like his arguments rely on the Barnum effect. He makes statements like āhumans and LLMs predict the next wordā and āevolution optimizes for reproductionā that are so vague that they can be assigned whatever meaning he wants. Because of this, you canāt easily dispel them (he just comes up with some different interpretation), and he can use them as carte blanche to justify whatever he wants.
Itās from another horseshit analogy that roughly boils down to both neural net inference (specifically when generating end-of-line tokens) and aspects of specific biological components of human perception being somewhat geometrically modellable. I didnāt include the entire context or a link to the substack in the OP because I didnāt care to, but here is the analogy in full:
spoiler
re: the bolded part, I like how explicitly cherry-picking neuroscience passes for peak rationalism.
This somehow makes things even funnier. If he had any understanding of modern math, he would know that representing a set of things as points in some geometric space is one of the most common techniques in math. (A basic example: a pair of numbers can be represented by a point in 2D space.) Also, a manifold is an extremely broad geometric concept: knowing that two things are manifolds does not meant that they are the same or even remotely similar, without checking the details. There are tons of things you can model as a manifold if you try hard enough.
From what I see, Scoot read a paper modeling LLM inference with manifolds and thought āwow, cool!ā Then he fished for neuroscience papers until he found one that modeled neurons using manifolds. Both of the papers have blah blah blah something something manifolds so there must be a deep connection!
(Maybe there is a deep connection! But the burden of proof is on him, and he needs to do a little more work than noticing that both papers use the word manifold.)
Itās entirely possible he does get that itās a nothing burger but is just being his usual disingenuous self to pull people in.
Jesus fucking christ I donāt think I will ever get over how fucking dogshit the fucking rationalists are at epistemology
ITāS CALLED A FUCKING MAPPING. āMAPā. AS IN NOT THE TERRITORY. ITāS IN THE NAME.
Gwern once denied chaos theory in a way that Freeman Dyson called out in 1985, and as LessWrongers go he is a pretty clear thinker!
Thatās such a weird commentā¦ like āworried about hurricanesā - the first idea is to pour literal oil on the water??? in what world does that scale??? then it concludes with āmaybe donāt build fragile buildings in hurricane areasā - lead with that you pillock
I feel Iām stepping into some long-forgotten debate on LW on alignment or something because thereās so much that doesnāt make sense in context
what the hecky
heās so offended heās been told heās not god!
I mean the whole entire premise (not unique to this post, scootās gotten a lot of mileage out of this) is shoehorning LLMs into the predictive coding framework mostly on the grounds that they both use prediction terminology and deal with work units that they call neurons, with the added bonus that PC posits Bayesian inference is involved so itās obviously extra valid.
Queue a few thousand words of scoot wearing his science popularizer hat and just declaring the most vacuous shit imaginable with a straight face and a friendly teacherās casual authority.
Wait so it isnt true and it is true? Nice to notice your own confusion/reluctance (yeah im a broken record on the Rationalists not doing Rationalism) Also weird way to teach math. This makes me wonder if he understands math at all.
Edit sneer
So, he is a crypto Stochastic Parrot?
How the frigg does anyone in the SF Bay Area in 2026 still believe that most of what big American web service companies do is driven by the profit motive? They are more like big-talking Geniuses getting a king to give them some money and promising they will make something cool (with Googleās and Facebookās advertising and AWS and Amazon retail standing in for taxing millions of peasants). Arms like Google ads and Amazon Web Services fund billions of dollars of money-losing nonsense.