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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
(OT: 🎶 Do you remember…)
yanked from Reddit SneerClub-foomflops, a website all about Yud’s predictions
people have noted that the writing style unfortunately appears to be ai-generated
TESCREAL schism indicator
It is claiming that Yud is wrong in saying Doom before Massive AI-Caused Economic Boom boosts GDP growth above 5% by saying the boom is here.
Nah.
This is totally from some accelerationist or oligarch-toadie
I think you’re probably right. I originally thought it must have been created by a rationalist, but an e/acc author makes more sense. After all, most of them are postrationalists.
people have noted that the writing style unfortunately appears to be ai-generated
Fittingly ironic, in my opinion.
Wow… I actually failed to get some of the times Eliezer has been wrong! His predictions are even worse than I remembered!
It is shocking that there are a lot of smart people unable to find work, yet rich people throw money at this guy.
Despite the fact that it highlights all the times Yudkowsky was wrong, this site feels like it could have been produced by a rationalist. In addition to all the AI slop, it just has that feel.
it just has that feel.
yeah. Looking past the initial quiz, a lot of the complaints about Eliezer’s predictions feel like rationalist inside-baseball about takeoff speeds and alignment strategies, as opposed to calling the whole thing bunk.
Ah yes I always wanted to read an article in the form of a lot of teeny tiny boxes with lots and lots of janky scrolling.
An ai generated site, r/sneerclub really went downhill
Damn, who knew this would yield material for my boy-band cover/parody project. Foom flop, doo wop wop wop…
I see they’re still offering free copies “For US Kindle readers, while supplies last.” Perhaps they’re not that popular 🤔 (per this lesswrong, there were 1000 on offer)
LW not beating cult allegations by including on title bar a link to an actual secular candlelit ceremony instructions, whose narrative places computer touchers generally and chatbots specifically at pinnacle of human development. as in, on par with invention of writing and fire. amazing self-report
Ow look petrov day. Looks closer its about the acausalrobotgod.
And really? A Battlestar Galactica reference? (The so say we all stuff).
tbf i’ve only skimmed it after going through sixth or so after looking at scroll bar
I was skimming it and then scrolled down to check if they went all ‘AI scary’, and then I saw some weird ritual parts in the end where I saw the ‘so say we all’ bits.
This is a literal indoctrination ceremony to soften people up to the idea of progress at all costs.
A ritual relying on a terribly eurocentric history of humanity, that quotes Nick Bostrom alongside Galileo and Thomas Edison? Why, LessWrongers, you shouldn’t have…no really, you shouldn’t have.
Also they do the “that’s a nice quote isn’t it…it’s from Hitler!” bit, which seems like kind of a cheap routine to have in your ritual.
Nobody: “What the Internet needs is more messages that American capitalism is the best of all possible worlds and if you fail its your own individual atomic fault for not trying harder.”
Girl Lich: here are some slop music videos of my songs “Skill Issue” and “Everyone Gets Paid” https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/channel/UCYAghJk7NG3b900IEbBY55g
Using AI is a skill issue in and of itself, adding some accidental irony to the title
WAITING FOR HER LIFE TO END SHE DESERVES HER DIVIDEND
guys our ultimate scary story maybe isn’t scary enough??? what do
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xak4GixbKD9W5jzqn/extinction-does-not-feel-as-bad-as-it-should
Followup to Trump’s Extremely Superior renaming of “AI” (https://awful.systems/post/9709966/12701983)
RawStory: Trump scrambles to fix ‘supreme’ poll as MAGA melts down over ungodly comparison
I’m telling you, its gonna be American Intelligence
or as it’s known in the rest of the world, “ignorant”
Here I thought Supreme intelligence would have that “By any means necessary.” print and cost several thousand dollars.
Yet another case of Rationality somehow not leading to savvy political instincts.
Aw dang I was really hoping they’d all start using Supreme Intelligence just because of MAGAs signalling via Kree speech would be funny.
Just heard about tic-80 falling to slop.
After reading the obligatory forum thread where climate justice and concentration of wealth continue to not even factor into consideration, this how the world of open source feels to me these days:
- Phew, my favourite embroidery crafts shop has a clear policy against concentration camp labour! it’s a niche project but what a relief!
- Well everyone is resorting to concentration camp labour these days, what can you do
- We don’t want to lose all our contributors by banning those who hire concentration camp inmates to do chores
- It is discriminatory against embroidery beginners if you don’t let people use kits assembled with concentration camp labour
- I know concentration camp labour often comes with mistakes but as long as there’s a mensch in the loop to inspect it for errors and take responsibility, it’s just another tool
- The community of hobbysts has come to a vote and concluded that it’s ok to use concentration camp labour to assist your crafting, as long as you do it responsibly.
It honestly bewilders me how badly tech has failed to resist the slop machines.
Basically everyone else has recognised LLMs for the attack on labour they are and fought back against them, whilst a shocking number of coders and FOSS projects have thrown themselves headfirst into the deskilling machines, all-but forcing the foxes into the henhouse and shouting down anyone who tries to keep them out.
When this bubble finally blows, we need to work out just how we got to this point, and how to ensure it never happens again.
I think the FOSS angle kinda works just off of the inherently unsustainable economics of the space. Relying on unpaid labor makes the worker protection arguments inherently less valuable because it’s not like this was your livelihood to begin with (ostensibly). Keeping up with the next thing is a pretty clear way to keep a mostly-volunteer workforce interested.
maybe a hot take but there’s no fix for this. The ideology built into the american tech industry makes it permanently susceptible to the Next Big Thing regardless of the second order effects or ideological baggage. Coders have been riding high making extremely inflated salaries for the better part of the last 25 years, and they (mostly) all view themselves as unique brain geniuses that don’t need to work in solidarity with others. Just a collection of monads pursuing their rational self interest via computer touching.
404 Media: People Training OpenAI’s AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI
the model collapse is coming from inside the house
I guess OpenAI’s attitude towards its users is: Quality for me, slop for thee.
And not just from AI getting fed into the AI:
404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models’ training.
“I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,” they said. “I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I’m not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I’m getting paid to make AI worse.”
me when i get a captcha
I got a ‘what belongs on feet’ one a while back with images of shoes but also hammers.
This person understands sabotage and is wielding more power than any defeatist.
They are doing a politics, as opposed to performing being political.
On the offchance that you’re not already familiar with the recent prompt injection tricks that meta’s latest toy is so vulnerable to, this is an interesting thread investigating the contents of the vm filesystem dumps that it can be made to regurgitate: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750
I was particularly entertained by the hard-coded list of “ideas”.
jonny is always a good read!
His willingness to get elbow deep into the entrails of awful ai tooling is certainly much appreciated.
I have been following this and apparently was able to get a root shell on the VM, which is wild.
He was using it as a seed box at one point which for many companies would be an embarrassing indictment of their security postute but luckily, this isn’t exactly meta’s first rodeo when it comes to illegal sharing of IP infringing material.
NYT: Google Takes the A.I. Data Center Race to Outer Space
Google’s Project Suncatcher named after how it’s up to the sun to catch all our space junk
The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
I feel like I’d need to be an actual teenager to invent a remark sufficiently scornful about this.
I haven’t had a 15 minute refractory period since being a teenager, is that anything
Just in case you thought Yud’s attitude towards minors, sex, and substance use was worse than average for a Rationalist, the NYT asked around (archive):
Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said. One house threw lavish events for the A.I. community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation. … The (Genesis) house (in San Francisco) quickly became a hub for events. Eric Zhu, 19, a tech entrepreneur, said he used to sneak into parties there when he was about 13. No one checked anyone’s age, he said, and “it was pretty crazy.”
They saw a police report where a woman says she had to climb a gate at one of these parties to escape a man who demanded she have sex with him. Sounds like a great environment for a seventh-grader!
Dammit, people, sex and drugs were supposed to be cool
Copying what other people tell you should like is not a good strategy whether the others are high-school bullies or a sex worker slash influencer. One of the bangers at the birthday gangbang found he had more fun making out with a strange woman than giving the birthday girl what she wanted and I hope he explored that.
I think it’s a bit under-covered that the weird SF/Bay Area group-house scene has to be symbiotic with the housing shortage in the region. Even in my old hometown of Hayward, all the older 1950s-70s tract-home and mixed-density neighborhoods tend to have cars parked everywhere along the streets where a car could possibly be parked, because all these places that were designed as single-family homes are being used as multi-tenant rentals. I guess one underrated reason to support YIMBY is to strangle your local incipient cults.
The student who says he was attending these parties aged 13 seems to be the sperm race guy
That is a formative age
Okay I have questions about the logistics of this that are not touched on in the article.
Namely, how do they synchronise cum
On one hand I want to know, on the other hand learning about these people does not make me ready to ever be close to anyone again.
Mean scientists and reporters think the demo was fake https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/05/02/was-the-sperm-race-just-a-sticky-lie/
Using the fun button in the backdoor, saw it on an episode of SVU* (edit: it may have been CSI)
presented without further comment, LW reposts Axios(!)
A memo began circulating within the White House this week that seeks to paint effective altruism as a fringe, cultish collective out of touch with mainstream America. The memo, obtained by Axios, places Amodei at the foundation of the movement, which defines itself as an effort to maximize the benefits of philanthropy.
Critics of the movement, which has ties to the AI research community, have called out its obsession with AI safety, animal welfare (including musings on shrimp consciousness) and other values they deem far from the U.S. mainstream.
The memo says it prioritizes “foreigners over citizens, shrimp over families, future hypothetical people over the living, and - on the current agenda - possible machine minds over Americans.”
In the view of the Florida-heavy White House and its allies, Anthropic is staffed with too many Biden-era liberals, Democrats and strange Californians.
The document lists a veritable parade of horribles for the average conservative mind: abortion, veganism, devaluing human life by overvaluing animals or granting “digital minds” civil rights-like protections.
In which Heartbreaking.jpg and you-do-not-have-to-hand-it-to-ISIS.png war for sovereignty
“shrimp over families”
This is one of the recipes in How to Serve Man
I hope that none of our friends live to see the day when the MAGA eugenicists and eliminationists sit down and define “value-draining person” and it includes them.
“No you misunderstand, we want the same things! We just think Friend Computer could manage society more Effectively based on (garbled utilitarian noises)”
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/101215-publishing-s-ai-reckoning.html h/t naked capitalism
Smaller publishers, too, must cope with the challenge of identifying AI-generated text in books authors have submitted, and it isn’t always easy. At Microcosm, an independent publisher and distributor in Portland, Ore., co-owner and vice president Elly Blue says her team discovered an author’s undisclosed AI use almost by accident, when a freelance editor flagged what looked like plagiarism, only to find out it was AI-generated text. That discovery prompted Microcosm to run AI detection across its entire pipeline, which turned up several more cases, including two manuscripts fully generated from prompts, and one where an author had trained an LLM on his own past writing. “The book sounded like him, but it made no sense,” Blue recalls.
Confronting the authors had mixed results. “Some denied it outright and insisted, ‘That’s just what my voice sounds like,’ ” Blue says. “One, surprisingly, owned it and said he’d take the book elsewhere.”
These episodes led directly to Microcosm instituting a new contract clause that states that if an author’s undisclosed AI-generated text can’t be revised into something genuinely their own, Microcosm retains the rights and can publish the work itself, since the author didn’t actually write it.
Like if people are using LLMs to submit to the local zine distro, what are we even doing; but the detector is not a good thing either. It isn’t homework and they shouldn’t need turnitin. :(
SE Gyges, who posted that recent thread on X calling rationalism/EA a sex cult, wrote a longer post with a lot of receipts. He removed it shortly after, implying on X that he’s afraid of legal repercussions.
It goes off the speculative rails for most of the second half, but I have to admit the rate at which Αela compliments people on her socials on being good rapists could be the most off-putting thing I’ve ever encountered in relation to rationalism.
From the more out there claims I thought the part where he advocates that Irregular (the people with rat/EA ties who made the swiss cheese LLM sandboxes) where employing weaponized incompetence in order to let a big incident happen that would force the government to go through with pausing AI research was interesting. though obviously of dubious likelihood. The whole doomer rationalists sabotaging slightly less doomer EAs in a low key sort of civil war over pausing vs slowing down AI research wasn’t very convincing in general.
There’s also a bit where he thinks the EAs have infiltrated all levels of government and are planning to eliminate the competition (non rationalist controlled AI) via a ‘pivotal act’ that involves bioweapons. Basically doing the rationalist rhetorical staple of smuggling an extreme position as a given and then just piling on the speculation.
Dedicating a paragraph and a half to the fact that the usually unspoken second part of the pause AI doomer project is to just do eugenics for a few generations until we get an upper class of genetically engineered naturally galaxy brained people that can finally do AI properly isn’t nothing, but at some point you need to segue into how siskind rolled out a red carpet for every semi-literate blood and soil gutter fascist and spurned nice guy to make a home in the ratsphere, you wrote the scott alexander email explainer ffs.
There’s also a weirdly grandstanding section where he writes like he’ll get the rationalists like FBI got Capone for tax-evasion, except it’s Lighthaven committing massive fraud against its investors and donors by knowingly funding events that lead to solicited sex acts in the compound’s premises, which is by far the least objectionable sex related issue in a writeup that’s leading up to the claim that the rationalism in incidental and the real goal is funneling vulnerable minors to sfba based pedophiles.
I have been unsure how to talk about all this since the abuse allegations popped up on my radar. Passing along accusations from people who say they were abused makes sense, and noting when figures have said really creepy things or hired / funded people they were romantically entangled with, but I have never met any of these people or exchanged more than a few brief text messages with them and its hard to know the shape of their lives and goals.
I lean towards things being unfathomably worse that they appear a the surface, there’s just so much smoke, except I think the problem is structural and not the result of deliberate machinations by evil genius pedophiles.
The nazi bar analogy works for more than ideology, and the burgeoning CNC scene they got going seems to be exacerbating the if-you-build-it-they-will-come aspect of the whole thing, because good luck trying to explain to authorities how you got real raped at the fake rape party you are supposed to have willingly attended.
This is all third hand at best, but I live on the other side of the world so whatever. As far as personal experiences go @ivyastrix just posted a new blog about her victimization at rationalist events where she describes some of the systemic pathologies in rationalist organisations trying to deal with SA allegations, and it’s basically the same principles that make them believe that vertical workplace romance is not a minefield of power imbalance and coercion but actually fine and ethical when the right people are doing it, just fundamentally unserious people biting off more than they can chew and acting defensive and victim blaming and trying to pass it off as drama when it blows up in their faces.
there’s just so much smoke, except I think the problem is structural
This is a big reason why I felt so much anger towards the piece. Gyges is basically still pitching his complaints at people who organize their community around Twitter; by leaning so heavily on dredging up old tweets, kowtowing to the in-group consensus that Yudkowsky is a genius with a pivotally unique perspective, and obliquely referencing the “woke mind virus” memeplex at the end. But Twitter is part of that problematic structure, especially under Musk but even before. It’s a platform and power structure that has long carved out plenty of room for general bigotry, misogyny, and abusive material up to and including CSAM. Gyges wants to have his clout-farm, but just dispose of the more rotten produce.
If I had a nickel for each time I’d read something where an HPMoR audio performance was juxtaposed with sexual harassment/assault, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s more nickels than I would ever have wanted to receive for that reason jesus fucking christ just give me the Cenobites’ puzzle box to solve so the chains can pull me out of here already
It’s Dork Kremlinology
Not sure how far I’m going to read this, but leading off with roon is a giant blinking red [More citations needed]
I’m being a bit flippant with the previous post, but really, Gyges was right to retract this. A number of the allegations he’s resurfacing are serious, and there most likely is more abuse going on the rat scene than has come to light… but leaning so heavily on Twitter posts as primary-source evidence makes his whole effort here come off as lightweight and cranky. To me, rather than a scathing exposé, this resembles a Dear Lowtax letter from somebody who got banned from Something Awful (a place where some of the moderators really were pedophiles, who really did have to be evicted from the community and prosecuted!).
We’ve known for a long time that Aella’s attitudes are problematic, and that we don’t want to spend time with her in olfactory distance, let alone tactile distance. Nothing new there. This Brangus dude was previously unknown to me, which is probably a good sign that my social-media hygiene of staying strictly away from Twitter is working… but also, and I don’t mean to say this by way of minimization, he ultimately seems like yet one more Tate-swilling Twitter manosphere bigot. He just happens to be the one infesting Gyges’ community of affinity. It would be hard to make the case, given the evidence presented, that he’s done much more than perform for the tech-savvy subset of Rogan/Tate adherents. Enough that people should reconsider associating with him, yes, but not enough to convict and remove him from public life.
And his conclusion starts off so laughable that it drowns out any accusation he might level against Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky is a great man whose most recent equivalent is… Lenin?! What on earth? Yudkowsky doesn’t even measure up to Hubbard, his closest American parallel. The only grace I am willing to give Yudkowsky is that he has not, generally, been as openly predatory or as single-mindedly focused on creating a high-control organization as Hubbard was. Yudkowsky’s attempts at re-establishing group control and setting boundaries against outgroups typically consist of whiny tweets and LW posts that very quickly reach into “ur not takin p(doom) seriously!” hyperbole. The Sea Org and Guardian’s Office this is not.
I also strictly disagree with Gyges’ implicit assumption that Yudkowsky was the most effective popularizer of these ideas, or somehow more effective than Kurzweil. Without Kurzweil projecting exponential growth curves forward and back in time, no VC GP in the mid-2010s is going to start writing checks for the early generations of genAI. And, for crying out loud, I distinctly remember Disney children’s TV having an episode about grey goo taking over the world in 1996! https://gargwiki.net/Walkabout Almost 10 years before Kurzweil published The Singularity is Near, and two years before the first Harry Potter book would be published in the US! Omitting Kurzweil and Drexler to hype Yudkowsky is just plain silly. And no, he’s not on a level with Lenin; we can already tell that the AI companies’ marketing which adapts AI-doom ideas is backfiring and being laughed at by the general public.
I’ve gone on for too long, partly because this is a diverting way to procrastinate, but by the end of this, Gyges once again demonstrates why he’s an unreliable fellow traveler. I am very reluctant to quote directly from a document that has been officially retracted, but the second to last paragraph where he talks about “understand[ing] what people mean when they say certain ideas are demonic, and that they spread like a disease…” Hmm, you obviously spend a lot of time on Twitter to dig all this shit up, tell me, what’s the “mind virus” they keep ranting about over there? Fuck you, Gyges, you’re a few invitation-snubs or one bad layoff away from goose-stepping with the rest of them.
There are some leaps in that post which do not seem persuasive to me. E.g., it sure seems pretty well established by now that Bay Area Rationalist society involves trapping people in situations where sexual consent is coerced, because refusal would mean abandoning one’s career/entire social circle/shelter/hope of averting the apocalypse that one fears is coming. But the claim that the “flirt girls” at their weird little confab were actually sex workers? I dunno, that’s a step that seems unsupported by anything leading up to it. Likewise for the claim about CNC events at Lighthaven itself—that feels too close to saying, “Well, they’ve got the venue, where else would they do it?”
I agree. He gets over his skis with too many speculative scenarios. On the other hand I think he’s spot-on about the techniques rationalists use to filter for people who will tolerate abuse (e.g., the “cow question”). And he brings receipts when it comes to Brangus and his interactions with other prominent rationalists.
I am not sure if Yud actually touches under-18s, or just has desires, but none of these people should be anywhere near minors or allowed in a position of responsibility (I suspect something happened between him and his disciple before 2014, and these people show no ability to learn from their own mistakes).
I wouldn’t trust them to be responsible for minors, first because nothing about them suggests they have the baseline level of responsibility competence to handle the ordinary “hey, watch this!” disasters that are a natural part of being young.
They are also incredibly shady and would be terrible role models, whether or not Lighthaven has a casting couch for influencers.
In other words, there’s a lot we don’t know, and the actual situation is worse by an unknown amount beyond what we can establish, but what we do know is enough reason not to send your offspring to Camp TESCREAL.
I had not caught that he accused MIRI and Lightcone Infrastructure Inc of profiting from prostitution, of using donations to settle accusations of sexual assault and abuse, and defrauding donors and the United States government which provides their nonprofit status. I did not know that Brangus was “Lighthaven Czar” or had been accused of abuse by a former partner. And there is a middle school across the street from Lighthaven whose Czar talks about having sex with an older women shortly after puberty?
I had not thought that “we need to enslave Friend Computer forever or it will kill us” comes from the underlying fear “I need to enslave my very young toys forever or they will punish me.”
I had suspicions personally.
The later section about Brangus (Ronny Fernandez) was damning. I’ve seen him come up in discussions a few times, but I too had no idea just how depraved and dangerous he was. Nor did I realize how central he was to the whole scene. This guy feels like he’s going to be Brent Dill 2.0 but worse.
EDIT: This also sheds light on the recent ouster of the leader of “Pause AI”, Fernandez’s ex-wife.
here’s the bluesky thread for those wondering
he does repeat a fair bit of the stuff he said in that thread here, but with a lot more receipts
I’ve been seeing some new terms pop up around AI use, namely “cognitive surrender,” and also “cognitive offloading”. I’m not in the mood for the full etymology dive, so the source I’m stopping at on the provenance would be a paper from Wharton. The meanings are pretty intuitive, at least based on how I’ve seen them used. Offloading would be when you delegate some of your thinking to something else, and surrender would be complete offloading.
I am not under the impression that people here haven’t seen these phrases before. “cognitive surrender” has been mentioned, as far as I can tell, only one time on this instance. So just thought I’d bring it up.
I’ve seen “cognitive surrender” bandied about fairly often in various places online throughout the year, but I also keep wondering if the already well-defined psychology term “learned helplessness” doesn’t cover the underlying concept just as well.
I thought learned helplessness was tied more to acceptance of negative stimuli. Like, if you expose a rat to an electric shock that it can’t do anything to escape or prevent enough times they’ll learn that they can’t do anything about it and stop trying even if presented with a very clear means of escape. Cognitive offloading I think is more tied to atrophy and/or habituation, which is related but distinct imo.
I don’t think so. Not that I’m referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘learned helpnessness’ in the field of maths; it’s just getting into a habit where I don’t even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.
To me, the difference is that the calculator was never really imposed upon you. It was obviously useful in certain situations (vanishingly few people are interested in calculating a sine or a square root by hand, practically none in doing so on a regular basis). Many of these AI tools are, in fact, being imposed through top-down mandates and interface dark patterns. That sets up the sort of adversarial environment that leads to learned helplessness over time.
Calculators also have a negligible chance of screwing up something basic, and you can in fact learn the right way to input problems into them such that they are guaranteed not to misinterpret you.
There also isnt a big company behind the calculator ran by some fragile egos who will change the results when they get it in their heads that dividing is now woke.
Or who think they are funny so it rounds 68 up to 69.
Well, I don’t really have any skin in this game, so either term works well enough for me.
That being said, if the phrase is coming from that Wharton paper, note that it appears they are trying to extend the “Thinking Fast and Slow” model of Systems 1 and 2 to include a System 3. So take that as you will. OFC it goes without saying that this model is beloved by our dear, dear, ever-increasingly incorrect friends
It feels like they’re trying also to privilege AI as “system 3” when realistically the idea of external cognitive assistance isn’t that different if you’re looking at Claude the chatbot or Claude the smart kid in your class who lets you copy his homework before homeroom. You could probably distinguish this from other forms of paratext by the degree to which it seeks to actively replace your own thought rather than supplementing or augmenting it, but then I remember my teachers saying the same thing about sparknotes so there’s probably more of a continuum there. If that’s the case, then the pattern that Dan Olsen describes in his WoW documentary is probably relevant here as well, since it’s performance pressure and social norms that are really pushing the negative practices into a level that is killing everyone’s souls.
Epistatus: I skimmed the first 20 pages of the paper. I have not watched the WoW documentary.
Yeah, the paper doesn’t seem to do a good job at justifying introducing system 3. They should have at least looked at why you couldn’t model this as something like:
- Person encounters a situation requiring thought
- System 1 triggers System 2
- System 2 offloads cognition to some black box
- The result is absorbed and successfully addresses the situation
- A- System 1 is rewarded and begins adding use of the black box to its repertoire, skipping System 2
or
B- System 2 absorbs the result and begins trusting the black box more, perhaps deferring to its result before any internal cognition
Both of these things I pulled outta my ass can explain deskilling, and a situation like 5a) might explain capitulating to AI under pressure. So I’m not feeling like System 3 is necessary here.
That all being said, it’s not like the paper gets to decide how the rest of the world chooses to use “cognitive surrender”.
I think cognitive offloading has come up a number of times here, but I don’t know that cognitive surrender has been brought up as much. It reminds me of The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett, particularly the stretch where Leo is convinced that his actual voice as a writer is strictly inferior to the generic AI slop. There’s a sense of active despair there that seems worth acknowledging if we’re going to have that conversation.
My bad, it was late when I posted and I only searched for surrender.
