Author | Lightnews

Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

ground foliage contact as a method for epistemic annealing

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

anecdote but apparently kimi k2 hallucinates real bad at least sometimes

Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

kimi k2 just described in great detail an obviously hallucinated study

methodology results vomit without running web search

so i asked for the citation

it ran web search and of course failed to find the study

so it said that the numbers it quoted were for an internal slide deck it made last year

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

kimi k2 just described in great detail an obviously hallucinated study

methodology results vomit without running web search

so i asked for the citation

it ran web search and of course failed to find the study

so it said that the numbers it quoted were for an internal slide deck it made last year

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

lmao

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

interesting tension:
- furries in cybersecurity stereotype
- heavy telegram use by furries
- dubiousness of telegram data security model

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

government section on wikipedia article for liechtenstein opens with:
"Liechtenstein has a somewhat enigmatic political system,"

Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

Prose and Khans @temujin9.t9productions.com · Aug 28

Some well-cultivated ignorance is a privilege, a right, and a damn good idea.

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

i think we should draw a distinction here between rationalism as in the instrumental rationality techniques described in the sequences and rationalism as in the set of beliefs held in common by the people who call themselves rationalists because of lesswrong

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

yes im on the same boat as you here

though i also subscribe to the provision of a public good justification for epistemic rationality, since (as my bio says) i think that clarity is a public good

ai liker @avengingfemme.bsky.social · Sep 25

not me i'll admit it freely. i'm an epistemic rationalist. it's kind of annoying sometimes but either i didn't pick this, or i picked it so long ago i can't remember, either way i have never succeeded in changing that aspect of myself so i make the best of it.

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

sorry if it read that way i didn't mean to question your path

the early age onset of my doomerism (i was still a minor at the time) makes the epistemic process kosherness of my beliefs just as questionable if not more than yours

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

i agree a lot more with amodei than with yud

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

im vibing here but then rationality feels kind of like r strategy reproduction

which at a societal level eh maybe but probably a bit too pessimistic on the prognosis for individual rationalists

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

but also doing rationality wrong is more dangerous than deferring to authority

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

strongly agree

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

caveat: i use it almost entirely for AI safety stuff

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

that is somewhat of a warning that negative polarization may have worked on you

but let's be real it is always working on all of us who engage in discourse

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

maybe? i still use lesswrong, though admittedly i spend more time here than there

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

there are always nuances within nuances

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

yes but consider early pandemic official messaging about face masking

A screenshot of a tweet from the official U.S. Surgeon General Twitter account, dated February 29, 2020. The tweet reads:
“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

so it does feel a bit weird to say "the rationalists"
the infamous "-adjacent" suffix may be of use here

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

as my vocabulary may have betrayed, yes i did read a lot of lesswrong

in fact i learned formal university level english mostly by reading lesswrong and lesswrong-adjacent stuff

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

sadly instrumental and epistemic rationality are quite decoupled in real life

rationalists have an understandably hard time swallowing this fact

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

(irrational as in instrumental rationality)

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

what the rationalists don't often say is that they hold "rationality" (as in epistemic correctness) to be either a terminal value or a public good to which they are altruistically contributing to against their own interests

because saying so is admitting that their "rationality" is irrational

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Milan Weibel 🔷 @weibac.bsky.social · Sep 25

yes you *can* get reasonably close to the frontier of most-likely-correct knowledge in a subject if you put in a lot of effort and exercise excellent epistemic hygiene

but are you willing to pay the opportunity cost?

one should choose a subject carefully before becoming a pro bono expert on it

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