Blogofex Maximus

I think sociology and psychology largely belong in a conflict theory rather than a mistake theory context: people who want to tell a particular narrative construct some unrigorous set of anecdotes (in the case of this article) or perhaps pretend to conduct a few low power research studies whose results wouldn't generalize (in the case of published research studies). largely this is an exercise at arriving at a conclusion that was decided prior and is independent of observation.

But you and the other people talking about the article seem to be going much further than that. It's one thing to say "I refuse to believe anyone can make an honest assessment of whether X is happening" (which is defensible in isolation, although I think even that is a kind of epistemological nihilism that IME is only ever selectively deployed against hypotheses one doesn't like. "isolated demands for rigor" etc.). But it's another thing entirely to slide from that into "therefore X isn't happening, and the worrying about it is caused by old fogeyism instead of any real trend".

The central claim of the article— that more and more students are arriving at college unable to complete reading tasks that many decades of prior incoming freshmen could do— is a concrete one. It may be hard to measure and subject to rose-tinted nostalgia bias, but it's not ineffable or unfalsifiable. It's a claim for which the first wave of evidence will necessarily be anecdotal, from the professors who have been doing this for a while, and only later might show up in something more quantitative and peer-reviewable. Saying that we should ignore the anecdotal data entirely (which, in the world where the trend was real, would be the only data we had for a while) and make no updates about the state of the world or an attempt to investigate more rigorously to find the truth of the matter, is a nutty way to form a world-model. It's also one that's weirdly STEM-brained ("only that which can be rigorously measured is real"), which is why I'm sort of weirded out that I'm the one arguing against it and instead insisting on the classically humanities-coded claim that we should also incorporate fuzzy, historically-informed information when deciding what to do.

Re: “the first wave of evidence will necessarily be anecdotal” from the above post.

Some of the evidence for the drop in literacy is thin. One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.

When Tumblr started talking about the Bleak House study, usually to disagree with it, I bit my tongue. I was thinking, "well, maybe it's mostly just Tumblr teenagers saying this". But when the New Yorker is dismissing it, I'm sorry, there's a serious problem.

No it is fucking not like "assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses"! What is wrong with you?!? These are incoming English literature majors being asked to read and understand a small amount of English literature.

The standard excuses getting trotted our here are maddening. You can't wave it off as "well, current readers can't be expected to know what the Lincoln's Inn Hall is like contemporary ones could"— the study specifically says the students were allowed to use any reference material they wanted for unfamiliar terms, and they still bombed.

Nor is the "well, this is a bad choice of book, it's too hard". This isn't Finnegans fucking Wake! Dickens had mass-market appeal and was a best-seller among commoners in his own time.

Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

The usa is going back to básica in the govt propaganda.

Remember kids, this movie is GOVERNMENT STATE PROPAGANDA. the usa came in LAST in the war, and dday was an essential part of OPERATION PAPERCLIP!!!!!

Op paperclip, if you don’t know, is when the usa joined the war in order to RESCUE THE NAZIS FROM THE SOVIETS!!

But I think I need to be a little braver on challenging other leftists on part of this - or maybe, people explicitly on the left who have a little more domain knowledge of AI sort of need to force themselves to be. Perhaps part of the problem is how few there are who haven't been scared off, booed from the stage egged by their peers. It's certaintly why I quit serious academic study or career pursuit around AI, why I'm generally afraid to talk openly about the subject with people who know me personally except a very few very close friends. I know that I'll lose those friends before I can delve deep enough to be heard in any real explanative way, that getting there will involve challenging too many received wisdoms. Which is stupid, because I'm generally open to what should be the most important part of their politics on the matter, in that I am absolutely not convinced that AI as it's currently being deployed is going to be a prosocial force - although I believe it still might be, especially if so many leftists stopped spurning the technology.

But my problem is that they believe it's bad for - aside for perhaps a fairly skewed if righthearted version of automation threat - the wrong reasons, which are all predicated on this idea of the technology as an impotent, resource sink; the bejeweled sockpuppet inflated by the bloated dick of a corporation. Nonsensical mantras about data centers and energy use and water, which are absolutely nonsensical when you actually look at the numbers involved in the context of the energy, data and water use of any number of digital infrastructure technologies we take for granted. The cost of a cup of coffee, of locally grown vegan produce, of playing Mario Kart for half an hour, of posting on tumblr and reading your friends reply.

But perhaps the reason for this disconnect is the same sense that AI can only ever be a useless deception or party trick, so to get to my actual salient point. Your average leftist, marinated in a stew of posts about hallucination or counting letters in "strawberry", who recalls 2022 Dall-e outputs with too many hands, who still calls LLMs "spicy autocomplete", is catastrophically underaware of the consequence of the generalized abstract reasoning capability codified in the world models of these systems. The most critical mistake being made here is not in thinking that AI "is bad" (perhaps it is!) but by assuming that it's not powerful.

The right wing AI superintelligence truthers are far more close to being correct on this axis than the average leftist.

And because there's such a strong culture war imperative to stay in lane here, said leftists are almost to a man unwilling to learn more or be corrected. Which means that they're all entirely unequipped to address the actual problems with AI. Intrinsic to any analysis of AI risk should be the assumption that it at least has the potential to be powerful in the way that it's being imagined as being, and the best information we have on the topic is that it will be, perhaps sometimes already is.

Like, there is a whole field of study here. All the leading experts are convinced of it and those guys aren't partisan stooges or idiots. A ML researcher with a doctorate does genuinely have a more informed opinion than a tumblr fandom blogger, and all those fuckers seem sort of terrified at the moment. And we have metrics! Evaluations, benchmarks, cold hard numbers that show yes AI is good, this is how good it is, here's a percentage accuracy. Yes the failure mode of AI is hallucination, but at a certain point that can be minimised to an extent that the model can self-correct and we're getting close to the point of closing the gap. We likely already have in certain contexts!

On my phone so hard to fetch links and examples. I'll maybe edit those in later.

I feel like part of the issue is it's very easy to scratch the surface of an LLM and expose the artifice of the persona, of the output text-stream as pretended speech or thought. But this is missing the trees for the forest; yes what the AI shows its users is the model playing pretend for the sake of the text interface, but the actual AI is the internal world model that allows it to play pretend competently, and that is what is powerful. So many anti-AI people refuse to comprehend this fairly basic insight and it is maddening.

So yeah, essentially; if your critique of AI refuses to account for the possibility that the technology can be genuinely powerful, you don't know what you're talking about and you're unequipped to fight for your cause.