Over-educated social scientist, beloved shitposter and insult connoisseur, recently returned from a gruelling odyssey.
Joined June 2013
- Tweets 10,565
- Following 195
- Followers 265
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Long, but also interesting exposé of how Bitcoin Core was gradually, and in large part intentionally corrupted.
Hodlonaut’s nose for foul play, as well as his diligence in ferreting out the details of what has been going on behind the scenes and on IRC, deserves applause.
Article 1: The Network
citadel21.com/the-network
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Martin Lowe retweeted
Jun 14
All of the arguments for liberty, free trade, and individualism exist online. You literally won't find them elsewhere. The "Economics" aisle in every book shop sells communist propaganda.
In the UK, anyone under 16 now has no way to inoculate themselves against statism. It's just pure chance if you happen to have educated parents.
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Jun 12
Dear socialists:
Neither the fact that Elon Musk has a lot of money while you do not, or the fact that he doesn’t want to spend his money fulfilling your confused hippie daydreams of a good society, indicate any «failure of civilization» or some such nonsense.
Read a book.
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Jun 12
«SAI is about the speed of adaptation.
It is an intelligence that can learn to exceed humans at any specific, economically important task.»
Make an AI that is better than humans at disobeying instructions.
Jun 10
Yann Lecun published the most heretical AI paper of the year.
He opens by arguing Magnus Carlsen isn't good at chess and only gets more unhinged from there.
The Turing Award winner and his co-authors dropped a paper demanding the AI industry abandon its biggest obsession, AGI.
Right now, everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to politicians assumes AGI is the ultimate goal. A machine that can do everything a human can do.
LeCun argues that this entire concept is a biological illusion.
Humans do not possess "general" intelligence. We are highly specialized biological machines, tuned by evolution simply to survive in the physical world.
We only think our intelligence is "general" because we are completely blind to the millions of cognitive tasks we are incapable of comprehending.
Which brings us to the chess argument.
Magnus Carlsen is the greatest human chess player in history. But compared to a modern computer? He is fundamentally terrible.
Our belief that Carlsen is "good" at chess is pure human-centric bias. He isn't objectively good. He's just better than the rest of us, who are biologically awful at it.
LeCun says we need to stop building AI to mimic human generality.
Instead, he proposes a new North Star: SAI.
Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence.
Instead of trying to build a machine that mimics our flawed, biologically-limited brains, we need to embrace extreme specialization.
SAI is about the speed of adaptation.
It is an intelligence that can learn to exceed humans at any specific, economically important task.
More importantly, it is designed to fill the vast skill gaps where humans are fundamentally incapable.
Things like managing global energy grids in real-time. Or predicting complex molecular structures.
The entire AI industry is obsessed with building a digital reflection in our own image.
LeCun's paper is a brutal wake-up call.
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May 14
In the future, instead of conducting interviews with potential employees, employers will talk to an AI with full access to their IG algorithm, at the end of which they’ll be more intimately familiar with them than a spouse or best friend.
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Martin Lowe retweeted
When it comes to billionaires my take is the opposite of Leftists:
Billionaires SHOULD consume all their wealth: megayachts, English castles, mountains of cocaine, own a dozen homes and 30 cars - do it! Spend it all!
The worst thing that can happen is for a billionaire to try to ‘do good in the world’ and shovel money to NGOs for some cause they get excited about. That’s the worst thing that can happen. Charitable donations should be taxed at 500%. A billionaire’s lavish lifestyle poses no threat to me but their misguided ‘good intent’ is absolutely cancerous and potentially civilization ending.
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May 12
Seconded.
In a nutshell: In the late stage fiat economy, even human connection has been commoditized, faked and subjected to inflationary forces.
Scarcity always catches up in the end though, which is both comforting, in the long run, and scary in the short.
May 12
This is very good
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May 12
Why does both humans and LLM’s confabulate when the memory location they’re searching turns up empty?
Especially since, presumably, LLM’s are in no way programmed to do so.
May 9
I think this phenomenon is almost entirely metaphorical availability. LLMs have given us a way to describe behaviors that have been observed for a long time--essentially that most people don't really do much actual thinking most of the time
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May 8
When you confuse the abstract institution of science (eg. «purposeful knowledge creation», or something like that) with its concrete instatiation in a particular era (eg. universities).
Universities were certainly involved in a lot of purposeful knowledge creation these past centuries, but the jury’s still out on whether they were necessary or even a net positive.
The collapse of trust in science is going to go down in history as one of the most sad, bizarre, and destructive social contagions of modern times.
We fed billions, cured diseases and powered nations - yet people ran toward conspiracies instead.
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May 8
All critiques of homeschooling end up as a description of status quo
Cc @michaelmalice
I've been a public school teacher for 15 years.
You are smart enough to homeschool your kids.
Every critique of homeschooling is already happening every day in every public school
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May 8
If you find this depressing, it should be a very clear sign that you’re not thinking clearly about education.
If technology renders your preferred testing method useless, it means that your preferred testing method was always useless.
It means you were testing for something that didn’t require intelligence.
(Btw. It was always possible for students to get a person to write assignments for them, so nothing’s really changed - except that the access to outside help has become accessible to those who don’t have the cash/connections to outsource the work)
May 7
I'm not even in the mood to joke about this, it's so depressing. You can't assign take-home essays anymore; it's completely pointless. Writing and reasoning abilities are very noticeably plummeting. Very discouraging to think where this is all going.
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May 8
The obvious solution to this is for professors to have closer contact with their students. Talk to each of them, learn of their thinking style, get to fucking know them.
Oh, is that too much? You have 150 students in your class? It would mean the end of industralized mass education?
Yes. Yes it does.
And that’s a very good thing. Universities used to be a highly exclusive nerd club, and we’re now at the tail end of an experiment in which they play the role of universal certification agencies for white collar jobs instead.
It has been an unmitigated disaster. In @bryan_caplan’s words: «a system whose primary effect is to transfer vast sums of money from the young and poor to the old and rich».
Let’s all hope that it’s over now.
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Apr 23
And here’s the problem with modern statistical science in education.
I bet half the replies go «yeah but how representative is that sample?». Good point! Probably higher SES than the other group, probably by quite a lot. Confounders everywhere.
Better question though, is «how can we find the true numbers?», and the answer is you can’t.
I mean you could, but then you’d have to get past the ethics board with a random cohort of kids not going to school. Good luck with that.
There will never be good research on this until people warm up to the idea that school isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, and if we do get there, we probably won’t need numbers?
In other words, the idea that schools are great is shielded from criticism.
Only teachers are smart enough to educate children.
Education majors, training to become certified teachers, score an average of 1029 on the SAT. While homeschooled students (taught by parents with no formal teaching credentials) score 1190.
ALT Bar chart showing 2024 average SAT scores: Education Majors score 1029 while Homeschooled Students score 1190. Demonstrates homeschooled students outperforming future teachers by 161 points on average.
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Martin Lowe retweeted
Why determinism is compatible with free will:
No one can predict your decisions without creating a perfect simulation of you that would itself exercise the free will required to make those decisions.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @maria__violaris
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Martin Lowe retweeted
Apr 21
"Guys, we just need more time to think! Clearly we're very smart and we can save the world but first we must stop the global economy until I've done my very special thinking in a corner" -Doomers
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Apr 22
All of this talk of being on the verge of a momentous shifting of gears in terms of productivity (because of AI) reminds me of the talk in natural science a hundred years ago, where everyone thought they were just about to solve everything once and for all.
I have a vague expectation that someone will come along soon to pop the current bubble as well.
And, as with Gödel and Turing, the popping of the bubble will ironically turn out to be a major shift, just in a direction no one foresaw.
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Martin Lowe retweeted
Apr 21
Why aren't AI doomsters going into massive debt, so they can enjoy life before the world ends (and before the debt comes due)?
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Too sad to spend money
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Too busy saving world
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Self-aware exaggeration
18%
They ARE in massive debt!
286 votes • Final results
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