#slate star codex

[derseprinceoftbd]

A friendly reminder that the joint Worm Fandom+Rationalism movement has killed over 38,615 people, exactly one of whom was a landlord. This is genuinely the most evil force in the world today. A dangerous cult movement is rapidly gaining control of both American youth culture and the U.S. government.

[liskantope]

Drat, I just realized that I let the 10-year anniversary of my first seeing Scott Alexander's writing pass unrecognized by me. It must have been, most likely, January 13th, 2014 that a distant Facebook friend (likely friended from certain philosophical-discourse-ish Facebook groups years earlier but I already couldn't remember; we've certainly never met) posted Scott's Slate Star Codex essay "A Response to Apophemi on Triggers".

Mind you, this isn't the most important 10-year anniversary for me this year, as I didn't follow up on learning who Scott Alexander was or familiarizing myself with Less Wrong or the rationalist community until my spring semester was over several months later, sometime in May 2014, and I didn't (re)adopt the handle Liskantope and start participating in any way until a couple of months later still. When I first read "a response to Apophemi" ten years ago, I'm not sure I registered the name of the author, and I distinctly remember assuming that Slate Star Codex was some sort of community blog or forum, perhaps through glancing at the archives and seeing an implausible number of posts for only one author, and more likely because most of my exposure to "the blogosphere" had been through community blogs / online magazines / something of that sort (e.g. Feministing, Jezebel, Freethought Blogs). But reading a blog post like that was an absolute revelation to me, and I still have fairly vivid memories of some of my thought processes as I went through it section by section. I recall forcefully filing it away in my mind as "I need to follow up on the source of this to see if there's more, but not until this new semester is over and I have more time."

The revelation for me came from not only the (honestly rather earthshaking) event of this being the first article I ever read (as opposed to the occasional poorly-calibrated Facebook comment from that one friend) arguing against the general SJ mentality of the time (I was introduced to the term "Social Justice" through this essay and had internally been referring to it by several other terms up until that time; "woke" wouldn't show up until several years later), and eloquently at that, and not seeming to come from a conservative or otherwise obnoxious viewpoint. It was also that I had just never encountered anyone who wrote quite like this, with so much genuine politeness and compassion for the other party whose views they were arguing against and yet so rhetorically forceful against them at the same time, with a particular combination of intellectual meticulousness, and easy-to-read, semi-informal, lightness to the writing style, through which the general good character of the writer palpably comes through.

(Well, the brief paragraph about "hoisting the black flag" is pretty sinister actually, and I prefer to think that Scott was being carelessly hyperbolic. I don't think I took any notice of it on the first or second reading during 2014, though. At the time I had no idea who the "Heartiste" was that Scott was referring to.)

It's always interesting to reread something from a full decade ago and think about how long that is in "internet years" and how ways of talking about certain things has changed. Scott used the ze/zir pronouns which were (unfortunately) still very popular at the time but, as I recall, not for much longer, and he switched to they/them within a few months of this. He seems to use transsexual interchangeably with transgender (as I remember I kind of did at the time as well) and even used cissexual, which I didn't recall was ever a word. And, of course, although he discussed racism as a name-calling word quite a bit, he basically used "SJ" and "feminism" quite interchangeably, reflecting a perception I shared throughout the first half of the 2010's of SJ being essentially equivalent to (the popular internet form of) feminism.

It's still kind of a mystery to me exactly who Apophemi was. Okay, looking back at their post that Scott was responding to, it seems they were also going by Cyrus Alexander, and were an Oberlin student at the time. But, given that once I got into rationalist community stuff a few months later, I basically never heard anything about them again, and their Wordpress blog's most recent update is from only half a year later, I have to wonder what it is about their blog or this particular essay demanded so much of Scott's attention. Apophemi's post isn't even particularly substantial or hard-hitting or well-written; why did it carry so much weight? Was it just that Apophemi was directly attacking the rationalist community and got a critical number of shares and reblogs? Was Apophemi just a temporarily famous figure in that corner of the online world, rather like the Tumblr-user Hotel Concierge was for a brief period around a year later before becoming almost forgotten? It is interesting that only two (arguably three, counting Ozy, mentioned multiple times not by name in Scott's piece) characters were involved in the first big controversial rat-community-related essay I was exposed to, and then one of them immediately and permanently disappeared from my view.

EDITED TO ADD: I also forgot to mention that Scott's "response to Apophemi" explicitly describes the cancellation attempt against him when he was editor of his college newspaper, and as far as I know, this is the earliest time Scott explicitly talked about this traumatic life event (except that he probably talked about it in his LiveJournal at the time it happened, but as he had locked the pre-college-graduation period of his LJ right before I came across it -- likely primarily because of this incident! -- I and most others have never seen it). He (understandably!) pretty much never mentioned it so explicitly again in the next decade, so my very first introduction to Scott included knowing this about him while I don't think that many among his bulk of later fans did. But it's an interesting (probable) coincidence that, as of several days ago, he first described the event again in his January 24th post on trauma/politics, ten years later to the month.

[mitigatedchaos]

Speaking of Scott, people have been making an argument that Astral Codex Ten is a lot weaker than Slate Star Codex.

I'll admit to it right now, I haven't been reading it! Since it's come up, I decided to have a peek.

I had a good laugh at a few parts of this recent post.

We can use this more serious post for calibration. There are a few things going on here.

1: Scott is writing for a more general audience, about a more common mistake, rather than a highly-selected audience of high-IQ nerds with a similar cultural background.

2: There is a pattern where someone is intelligent and relatively self-reflective and encounters some problem within society. Then they undergo rising awareness as they pour immense intellectual effort into figuring out what the fuck is going on. During this phase, they will tend to attack problems where there is high potential information gain.

3: Combining 1 & 2, we can see that Scott is taking on an officer role for a broader share of the blues than before, attempting to guide them away from a purely tribalistic pursuit-of-power approach. (We see something similar in the blog of another famous substacker - Matt Yglesias, despite (or perhaps because of) his partisanship attempting to reduce the epistemic debt load of the Democratic coalition.)

4: Scott is posting something almost daily (with new written posts every 2-3 days); this is less time to develop a topic.

5: Slate Star Codex apparently launched in 2013. The readers of the original blog are now ten years older, which means they've had ten more years to undergo ideological development.

Some time in the past couple of years, I reread Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel. It's well-written and a fun read, with a nice twist.

As a test, I decided to guess Asimov's age when he wrote it. I was correct. While many of us in the 2014-2022 encouraged people to look beyond the background of the author, the era and the author leak in. This just isn't a reason to throw out every book written before 2008.

[fipindustries]

This is such a funny answer. Scott threw a quick joke about how some people become addicted to obsessing over gender and trans people and a bunch of terfs got their knickers in a bunch over it. So your man says "you know what? You probably ARE addicted to getting angry at transpeople, get over it"

[cadyrocks]

Some discourse passed my dashboard today, and I want to comment on it.

It's a little weird to see people talking about "what Scott Siskind (of Slatestarcodex and Astral Codex Ten fame) believes" based on his writing. Like, sure, you can glean certain things from it (like his obsession with IQ tests), but... well...

Have we forgotten about this email?

Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but here's a pull quote:

1. HBD* is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct. [Links to blog posts by racists] This then spreads into a vast variety of interesting but less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses which should probably be more strongly investigated if we accept some of the bigger ones are correct. See eg [another link to a blog post by racists] (I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by "appreciate", I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)

*note: "HBD" or "Human biodiversity", as used by these folks, was just the latest euphemism for "scientific racism"; an attempt to back up hereditary racism and eugenics with a patina of (bad) science.

I think this is probably the most important thing to know about Scott Siskind (other than maybe his disgusting but entirely expected and typical response to Kathy Forth's sexual abuse and suicide). He was knowingly lying about how racist he was, and he likely still is.

Once you admit to "hiding your power level" on your beliefs in the scientific validity of racism, anything you write will necessarily need to be filtered through that lens. Things that might seem innocuous if written by most people might come off very differently given this context. The consistent tolerance of racist bigots (including very famous racist bigots like Steve Sailer!) in his comments sections starts to feel less like a genuine principled defense of free speech and more like he's just generally fine with platforming racist bigots. Things that might vaguely sound a little bit "eugenics-y" start to sound really fucking bad when the person saying them has been shown to have racist sympathies that he knows would get him in trouble and was hiding on purpose. Racist sympathies he supports by linking to a famous white supremacist.

So what does Scott Siskind believe about dysgenics? Why should anyone care? He's a racist who believes in hereditary explanations for gaps in racial performance (as opposed to, y'know, the long and ongoing history of systemic racism, colonialism, and exploitation). Whatever his beliefs on eugenics or dysgenics are, odds are good that he's not being cogent about how he really feels, and that his beliefs based on those arguments would be interpreted differently (and more correctly!) by people who know that this dude drank the scientific racism kool-aid.

The degree to which this man is still considered a public intellectual after the leak of those emails is a good sign of how tolerant we are of lying, cowardly racists pretending to be Very Serious People.

[epistemebabu]

Cars, dogs, children; they're all instruments, right?

The social context of using a car makes it difficult for people to tell you to turn your music down, and so if you want to do a social dominance display by being annoyingly loud you can do so more safely. (Notice also how people reflexively lower these people, if they're interrupting; I've never heard so many descriptions of a cock's smallness).

Children and dogs are allowed to bite you, drool on you, shit on the floor. It's unfair. A child or a pet is a secondary to some adult, usually.

Children and pets (sometimes something dead, though less so) are also places for people to put emotional and social content. They aren't real people, and cannot resist. "It's your dog that's racist, sure. Perhaps you don't endorse it, but..." Or anything anyone makes a baby wear, or social-calendar child mutilation events, like ear-piercing and circumcision.

[beleester]

The people who generated the art for the contest said that they only did prompting and choosing which results to use, not inpainting or other ways to control the composition manually. So the AI was left to its own devices on composition, aside from whatever cropping Scott did to disguise the aspect ratio.

Like, it is true that the tools are getting better and humans have more ability to control what the result is (which is a good thing for making it actually useful to artists!), but the base models are also getting better. The common tells are getting harder to spot, the "house style" is only noticeable in certain art styles, and compositionality is not something that's easy or obvious to everyone.

(I certainly wouldn't look at the astronaut image and think "no human would put the astronaut's feet out of frame," for example.)

Okay, guys, after reading a post by @centrally-unplanned I just took that ACX "AI Turing Test" that Scott Alexander did, and I am screaming, as the kids used to say.

You guys are way, way overthinking this.

I thought I would do better than average, and I guess I did; excluding three pictures I had seen before, I got 31/46 correct.

Not great if you're taking the SAT, but I feel like if I could call a roulette spin correctly 2 times out of 3 I could clean up in Vegas.

So, what is the secret of my amazing, D+ performance?

You have to look at the use of color and composition as tools to draw the eye to points of interest.

AI is really bad at this, when left to its own devices.

For example, here:

Part of the reason to suspect that this is AI is the "AI house style" and the bad hands that I literally only noticed right this exact second as I was typing this sentence. Even if the hands were rendered correctly, I would still clock this as AI.

The focal point of this piece ought to be the face of the woman and the little dragon she is looking at (Just noticed the dragon's wings don't match up either), but take off your glasses or squint at this for a second:

Your eye is being drawn by the bright gold sparkles on the lower right side of the piece. That particular bright gold is only in that spot on the image, but there's no reason to look there, it's just an upper arm and an elbow. The bright light source highlighting the woman's horn separates it out as a point of interest.

Meanwhile, the weird aurora streaming out of the woman's face on the left side means that it is blending in with the background.

In other words, the way the image is composed, and the subject matter suggest that your eye should be drawn here:

But the use of color suggests that you should look here:

That's a senseless place to draw the eye towards! It would be a really weird mistake for a human to make! In fact, I think there's a strong argument that the really close cropped picture of the face of the character is a strong improvement. It's still not a particularly good composition, but at least the color contrast now draws the eye to the proper points.

In fact, I would say that a good reason for my performance not being even better was this alarming statement at the start of the test:

I've tried to crop some pictures of both types into unusual shapes, so it won't be as easy as "everything that's in DALL-E's default aspect ratio is AI".

Uh...

So how about this one:

This is a lot better anatomically and in terms of the use of color and light to draw the eye towards sensible parts of the painting. The lighting makes pretty good sense in terms of coming from a particular direction and it also draws the eye to effectively to the face and the outstretched hand of the figure.

It's also a really flat and meaningless composition and subject matter that no renaissance artist would have chosen. What is this angel doing, exactly? Our eye is drawn to the face and hand, and the figure is looking off towards the left side, at, uh, what exactly?

But then I thought, "Well, maybe Scott chopped out a giant chunk of the picture, and this is just a detail from, like, the lower right eighth of some giant painting with three other figures that makes total sense"

This makes sense as a piece of a larger human made artwork, but if you tell me, "Nope, that's the whole thing and this is the original, un-cropped picture" I'd go, "Oh, AI, obviously.

All of the ones I had trouble with were AI art with good composition and use of color, and human ones with bad composition and use of color. For example, this one:

This has three solid points of interest arranged in an interesting relationship with different colors to block them out. I'd say the biggest tells are that the astronauts' feet are out of frame, which is a weird choice, and looking closely now, the landscape and smoke immediately to the right of the ship don't really make sense.

But again; I had to think, "Maybe Scott just cropped it weird and they had feet in the original picture."

Here's another problem:

StableDiffusion being bad at composition is such a known problem that there are a variety of tools which a person can use to manually block out the composition. In fact, let me try something.

I popped open Krita (Which now has a StableDiffusion plugin) and after literally dozens of generations and a couple of different models I landed on ZavyChromaXL with the following prompt:

concept art of two astronauts walking towards a spaceship on an alien planet, with a giant moon in th background, artstation, classic scifi, book cover

And this was the best I could do:

Not great, but Krita has a tool that lets you break an image into regions which each have different prompts, so I quickly blocked something out:

Each of those color blobs has a different part of the prompt, so the green region has "futuristic astronauts" the blue is the spaceship, the orange is the moon, grey is the ground and pink is the sky, which gives us:

Still way too much, so we can use Krita's adaptive patch tool and AI object removal to get:

I'm not saying it's high art, or even any good, but it's better than the stuff I was getting from a pure prompt, because a human did the composition.

But it's still so dominated by AI processes that it's fair to call it "AI Art".

Which makes me wonder how many of the AI pictures I called out as human made because one of the traits I was looking for, good composition, was in fact, actually made by a human.

[dostoyevsky-official]

all tech people are fascists until proven otherwise. stop quoting them, stop linking to the postrat blogs, stop posting screenshots for earnest discussion, they are morons

[st-just]

Honestly I rarely see such a virulent cocktail of hatred/resentment/contempt for whole demographics and swathes of society as from people who blame 'tribalism' and 'conflict theory' for societies ills.

[fipindustries]

oh fuck its christmass, its fucking christmass here i was waiting so long for this, i was seeing this coming for a year now, fuck yeah, i cant wait

[centrally-unplanned]

Very much enjoyed Tracing Woodgrain's foray into the internet life of jilted ex-rationalist and Wikipedia editor David Gerard. It is of course "on brand" for me - the social history of the internet, as a place of communities and individual lives lived, is one of my own passion projects, and this slots neatly into that domain in more ways than one. At the object-level it is of course about one such specific community & person; but more broadly it is an entry into the "death of the internet-as-alternate-reality" genre; the 1990's & 2000's internet as a place separate from and perhaps superior to the analog world, that died away in the face of the internet's normalization and the cruel hand of the real.

Here that broad story is made specific; early Wikipedia very much was "better than the real", the ethos of the early rationalist community did seem to a lot of people like "Yeah, this is a new way of thinking! We are gonna become better people this way!" - and it wasn't total bullshit, logical fallacies are real enough. And the decline is equally specific: the Rationalist project was never going to Escape Politics because it was composed of human beings, Wikipedia was low-hanging fruit that became a job of grubby maintenance, the suicide of hackivist Aaron Swartz was a wake-up call that the internet was not, in any way, exempt from the reach of the powers-that-be. TW's allusion to Gamergate was particularly amusing for me, as while it wasn't prominent in Gerard's life it was truly the death knell for the illusion of the internet as a unified culture.

But anyway, the meat of the essay is also just extremely amusing; someone spending over a decade on a hate crusade using rules-lawyering spoiling tactics for the most petty stakes (unflattering wikipedia articles & other press). The internet is built by weirdos, and that is going to be a mixed bag! It is beautiful to see someone's soul laid bare like this.

It can be tempting to get involved in the object-level topics - how important was Lesswrong in the growth of Neoreaction, one of the topics of Gerard's fixations? It was certainly, obviously not born there, never had any numbers on the site, and soon left it to grow elsewhere. But on the flip side, for a few crucial years Lesswrong was one of the biggest sites that hosted any level of discussion around it, and exposed other people to it as a concept. This is common for user-generated content platforms; they aggregate people who find commonalities and then splinter off. Lesswrong's vaunted "politics is the mindkiller" masked a strong aversion to a lot of what would become left social justice, and it was a place for those people to meet. I don't think neoreaction deserves any mention on Lesswrong's wikipedia page, beyond maybe a footnote. But Lesswrong deserves a place on Neoreaction's wikipedia page. There are very interesting arguments to explore here.

You must, however, ignore that temptation, because Gerard explored fucking none of that. No curiosity, no context, just endless appeals to "Reliable Source!" and other wikipedia rules to freeze the wikipedia entries into maximally unflattering shapes. Any individual edit is perhaps defensible; in their totality they are damning. My "favourite" is that on the Slate Star Codex wikipedia page, he inserted and fought a half-dozen times to include a link to an academic publication Scott Alexander wrote, that no one ever read and was never discussed on SSC beyond a passing mention, solely because it had his real name on it. He was just doxxing him because he knew it would piss Scott off, and anyone pointing that out was told "Springer Press is RS, read the rules please :)". It is levels of petty I can't imagine motivating me for a decade, it is honestly impressive!

He was eventually banned from editing the page as some other just-as-senior wikipedia editor finally noticed and realized, no, the guy who openly calls Scott a neo-nazi is not an "unbiased source" for editing this page wtf is wrong with you all. I think you could come away from this article thinking Wikipedia is ~broken~ or w/e, but you shouldn't - how hard Gerard had to work to do something as small as he did is a testament to the strength of the platform. No one thinks it is perfect of course, but nothing ever will be - and in particular getting motivated contributors now that the sex appeal has faded is a very hard problem. The best solution sometimes is just noticing the abusers over time.

Though wikipedia should loosen up its sourcing standards a bit. I get why it is the way it is, but still, come on.

[drdemonprince]

anyone else following this Zizian shit? i wish so badly that kontextmaschine were still alive to weigh in, he must have known half this crew via slate star codex and being in portland and crazy

[epistemebabu]

I'm drunk. I have an excuse, being that it's Friday Night.

Anyway! I have realised that I've been being nice about this, and that some greater portion of my scorn cries out to be expressed.

It is ABSOLUTELY FUCKING INCREDIBLE to me that (local) people continue to pour negative evaluation on their political enemies. Esp. with TRUMP and ELON. Like, surely you have read Toxoplasma? "If I just keep bouncing on this trampoline, eventually I'll cancel the waves exactly and achieve stillness!" type of shit.

[liskantope]

And ten years later, this whole tumbleblogging thing is going strong! Even if part of me deep down still feels like some sort of "Tumblr newbie", I think that's mainly because I'm still somehow culturally "less online" than a lot of people on here. And increasingly over the last couple of years, I've come to feel like a bit of a local dissident regarding Tumblr culture even while I continue to deeply enjoy being on here. It's very revealing to look at the above, my first-ever Tumblr post, and see how the way I see myself on here has evolved from being an offshoot of my involvement in Slate Star Codex comments sections and intended commitment and engagement with the online rationalist community, to this Tumblr blog being its own stand-alone thing and my primary online presence (at least under the handle Liskantope).

Technically, this blog turned 10 two and a half months ago, but today is this blog's true 10th birthday. Here's to another ten years!

Awkward Introduction

So it’s a new year, and I made a resolution (not specifically for the new year, just a general notion that’s been coming on for a while) to venture out of my comfortable meatspace into the vast world of the internet.  Or, more specifically, to become more involved with a particular online community that I became aware of through the incredible blog Slate Star Codex.  Ironically, although I’ve never had the greatest impression of tumblr, and a lot of the folks over at SSC don’t seem at all shy of affirming that tumblr culture can be pretty terrible at times, I’ve come to feel that becoming active on here is actually the most immediately effective course of action to get to know people.

Of course, I don’t really understand much about how tumblr works, so I apologize in advance for my clumsy use of it.  Not that I have any followers to be reading this at the moment…

Prior to my small participation in SSC comments sections in recent months, my use of the internet was pretty much exclusively an extension of my real-life social life (mainly Facebook).  This tumblr account is totally unconnected with it.  I feel that, for the moment, it’s enough to introduce myself here as a male, American, late-20’s graduate student soon to complete his PhD in (theoretical) math.  One of the enticing aspects of online culture is the freedom that comes with complete anonymity, and I intend to continue enjoying that at least for a while.

I look forward to posting more on here, but for now I think I’ll just close out this one by asking for suggestions from my as-of-yet zero followers as to what kind of hashtags to attach to it and to posts in general.  (I warned you I really don’t know anything about how this works…)

[nonevahed]

fun fact: J. D. Vance has apparently read at least one Slate Star Codex article