Was there ever, like, a push by Falun Gong to whitewash their articles? I seem to recall gossip from somebody (maybe in a skeptics’ group) about that, but I have no idea where in Wikipedia’s deep drama holes to look for evidence of it.

Hasn’t Falun Gong had beef with Wikipedia for a long time? I have a vague recollection of reading about that, but I do not know where.

Goertzel is a fan of Chris Langan.

But Sam can build the AGI! Sort of — OpenAI and Microsoft recently redefined “artificial general intelligence” as OpenAI making $100 billion profit. Yes, really.

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/01/06/sam-altman-ai-agents-will-totally-replace-your-employees-any-year-now-also-chatgpt-pro-is-losing-money/

I’m pretty sure that nobody has ever lain on their deathbed wishing they’d spent more time going into online communities and disagreeing with everything being said.

Emotional Exploitation As A Service™

Seems overly generous both to Christopher Hitchens and to Julia Galef.

(putting on an N95 before I enter the grocery store) dun dun DUN DUN dun dun DUN DUN deedle dee deedle dee DUN DUN

The more expertise you have, the more you can use ChatGPT as an idea collaborator, and use your own discernment on the validity of the ideas.

Good grief. Just take drugs, people.

Don’t worry; this post is not going to be cynical or demeaning to you or your AI companion.

If you’re worried that your “AI companion” can be demeaned by pointing out the basic truth about it, then you deserve to be demeaned yourself.

I like the series (I thought the second season was stronger than the first, but the first was fine). Jared Harris is a good Hari Seldon. He plays a man that you feel could be kind, but circumstances have forced him into being manipulative and just a bit vengeful, and our friend Hari is rather good at that.

The people who made the Foundation TV show faced the challenge, not just of adapting a story that repeatedly jumps forward from one generation to the next, but of adapting a series where an actual character doesn’t show up until the second book.

That link seems to have broken, but this one currently works:

https://bsky.app/profile/larkshead.bsky.social/post/3lt6ugxre6k2s

https://bsky.app/profile/chemprofcramer.bsky.social/post/3lt5h24hfnc2m

I got caught up in this mess because I was VPR at Minnesota in 2019 and the first author on the paper (Jordan Lasker) lists a Minnesota affiliation. Of course, the hot emails went to the President’s office, and she tasked me with figuring out what the hell was going on. Happily, neither Minnesota nor its IRB had “formally” been involved. I regularly sent the attached reply, which seemed to satisfy folks. But you come to realize, as VPR, just how little control you actually have if a researcher in your massive institution really wants to go rogue… 😰

Dear [redacted],

Thank you for writing to President Gabel to share your concern with respect to an article published in Psych in 2019 purporting to have an author from the University of Minnesota. The President has asked me to respond on her behalf.

In 2018, our department of Economics requested a non-employee status for Jordan Lasker while he was working with a faculty member of that department as a data consultant. Such status permitted him a working umn.edu email address. He appears to have used that email address to claim an affiliation with the University of Minnesota that was neither warranted nor known to us prior to the publication of the article in question. Upon discovery of the article in late 2019, we immediately verified that his access had been terminated and we moreover transmitted to him that we was not to falsely claim University of Minnesota affiliation in the future. We have had no contact with him since then. He has continued to publish similarly execrable articles, sadly, but he now lists himself as an “independent researcher”.

Best regards,

Chris Cramer

The 1950s and ’60s are the middle and end of the Golden Age of science fiction

Incorrect. As everyone knows, the Golden Age of science fiction is 12.

Asimov’s stories were often centered around robots, space empires, or both,

OK, this actually calls for a correction on the facts. Asimov didn’t combine his robot stories with his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but in space” stories until the 1980s. And even by the '50s, his robot stories were very unsubtly about how thoughtless use of technology leads to social and moral decay. In The Caves of Steel, sparrows are exotic animals you have to go to the zoo to see. The Earth’s petroleum supply is completely depleted, and the subway has to be greased with a bioengineered strain of yeast. There are ration books for going to the movies. Not only are robots taking human jobs, but a conspiracy is deliberately stoking fears about robots taking human jobs in order to foment unrest. In The Naked Sun, the colony world of Solaria is a eugenicist society where one of the murder suspects happily admits that they’ve used robots to reinvent the slave-owning culture of Sparta.

Noted in the Stubsack here:

https://awful.systems/comment/7907513

Today in “I wish I didn’t know who these people are”, guess who is a source for the New York Times now.

Scandinavian fathers and sons are famously not close.

Highlights from the comments: @wjpmitchell3 writes,

Actual psychology researcher: the problem with IQ is A) We don’t really know what it’s measuring, B.) We don’t really know how it’s useful, C.) We don’t really know how context-specific it is, D.) When people make arguments about IQ, it’s often couched around prejudiced ulterior motives. No one actually cares about IQ; they care about what it’s a proxy measure of and we don’t have good evidence yet to say “This is a reliable and broadly-encompassing representation of intelligence.” or whatever else, so if you are trying to use IQ differences to say that there are race differences in intelligence, you have no grounds. The best you can say is there are race differences in this proxy measure that we’re still trying to understand. It’s dangerous to use an unreliable and possibly inaccurate representation of a phenomena to make policy changes or inform decisions around race. The evidence threshold has to be extremely high because we’re entering sensitive ethical spaces, which is something that rationalist don’t do well in because their utilitarian calculus has difficulty capturing the intangibles.

@arnoldkotlyarevsky383 says,

Nothing wrong with being self educated but she comes across as being not as far along as you would want someone to be in their self-education before being given a platform.

@User123456767 observes,

You can kind of tell she grew up as a Calvinist because she still seems to think she’s part of the elect she’s just replaced an actual big G God with some sort of AI God.

@jaredsarnie3712 begins,

I feel like so much of what she says boils down to finding bizarre hypothetical situations where child sexual abuse is morally acceptable.

And from @Fruuuuuuuuuck:

Doomscroll gooner arc

“DS” in the Retraction Watch comments makes a good observation:

What scientific book only has 46 references?

A question for future work: This book is part of a “Transactions on Computer Systems and Networks” series. How many of the others in that series are also slop?