blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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Sometimes, checking the Talk page of a Wikipedia article can be entertaining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Markov_chain#Proposal_to_reintroduce_peer-reviewed_source_(Wiley,_2017)

In short: There has been a conspiracy to insert citations to a book by a certain P. Gagniuc into Wikipedia. This resulted in said book gaining about 900 citations on Google Scholar from people who threw in a footnote for the definition of a Markov chain. The book, Markov Chains: From Theory to Implementation and Experimentation (2017), is actually really bad. Some of the comments advocating for its inclusion read like chatbot (bland, generic, lots of bullet points). Another said that it should be included because it's "the most reliable book on the subject, and the one that is part of ChatGPT training set".

This has been argued out over at least five different discussion pages.

I'd say that Scott Adams posting under a pseudonym on Metafilter about how Scott Adams was a certified genius was the most entertaining he's ever been.

...a trip to an alternate universe, a road not taken, a vision of a different life where you get up and start the day in dialogue with Agnes Callard

Who? Oh, right, her:

In 2011, Callard divorced her husband, fellow University of Chicago professor Ben Callard, who she had married in 2003.[20] She began a relationship with Arnold Brooks, who was a graduate student at the time.

Dear fellow academics: Live so that the "Personal life" section of your Wikipedia article is empty.

I think I speak for everyone here when I say, "Ew."

And I also think that long-term, the historiography of this stuff will lean more heavily on Kurzweil as a source than Yudkowsky, because Kurzweil is better-organized and professionally published.

That is interesting to think about. (Something feels almost defiant about imagining a future that has history books and PhD theses.) My own feeling is that Yudkowsky brought something much more overtly and directly culty. Kurzweil's vibe in The Age of Spiritual Machines and such was, as I recall, "This is what the scientists say, and this is why that implies the Singularity." By contrast, Yudkowsky was saying, "The scientists are insufficiently Rational to accept the truth, so listen to me instead. Academia bad, blog posts good." He brought a more toxic variation, something that emotionally resonated with burnout-trending Gifted Kids in a way that Kurzweil's silly little graphs did not. There was no Rationality as self-help angle in Kurzweil, no mass of text whose sheer bulk helped to establish an elect group of the saved.

Autocorrect-ism for "metaverse", perhaps?

Sheesh. Everyone knows you keep the phenethylamines inside the fridge proper, not on the door, where the temperature is less stable. (Source: the Shulgins' Kitchen Procedures I Have Known And Loved.)

(Ozymandias voice) "I fully commit to acausal theory twenty-five minutes from now."

"First, he started his blog with the deliberate goal of giving a veneer of respectability to racist pseudoscience. Second, everything else...."

The report received feedback from ~100 AI experts (myself included)

"It's Shake and Bake — and I helped!"

I'm trying to imagine how a John Oliver sketch would introduce them. "The kind of nerds who make you think the jocks in '80s movies had a reasonable point got together and sold 'science' and 'rational thinking' as self-help, without truly understanding either, and it got very culty."

Charts 5 and 7 in particular are giving Pyramid Power and/or Flat Earth.

"Drink deep, or taste not the fanfiction spring"

That image needs a content warning for YouTube Face. Jesus H. Fuck.

8 thousand words of Daria/Hellraiser crossover fic has not been enough to get me invited anywhere.

Laudatory quote number 3 is from Cremieux....

... the EAristocrats!

The NYT also ran this little story about Bloomberg having "to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this year".

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/business/media/bloomberg-ai-summaries.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k4.rrgt.pt3AGFekgpT3

By "better", he means "more fuckable".

There's just something so ... basic about HPMOR. Oh, so you wrote a Harry Potter story? Targeted at emotionally vulnerable neurodivergent young people? That's playing fanfiction on easy mode. Meanwhile, people are out there inventing a whole sui generis fandom about humanity being force-femmed by communist space plants. I don't understand it, but (stirring brass band) by Gad, I respect it.