Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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. If you’re wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)

(EDIT: Changed “29th February” to “1st March” - its not a leap year)

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    He isn’t even trying with the yellow and orange boxes. What the fuck do “high-D toroidal attractor manifolds” and “6D helical manifolds” have to do with anything? Why are they there? And he really thinks he can get away with nobody closely reading his charts, with the “(???, nothing)” business. Maybe I should throw in that box in my publications and see how that goes.

    It’s from another horseshit analogy that roughly boils down to both neural net inference (specifically when generating end-of-line tokens) and aspects of specific biological components of human perception being somewhat geometrically modellable. I didn’t include the entire context or a link to the substack in the OP because I didn’t care to, but here is the analogy in full:

    spoiler

    The answer was: the AI represents various features of the line breaking process as one-dimensional helical manifolds in a six-dimensional space, then rotates the manifolds in some way that corresponds to multiplying or comparing the numbers that they’re representing. You don’t need to understand what this means, so I’ve relegated my half-hearted attempt to explain it to a footnote1. From our point of view, what’s important is that this doesn’t look like “LOL, it just sees that the last token was ree and there’s a 12.27% of a line break token following ree.” Next-token prediction created this system, but the system itself can involve arbitrary choices about how to represent and manipulate data.

    Human neuron interpretability is even harder than AI neuron interpretability, but probably your thoughts involve something at least as weird as helical manifolds in 6D spaces.I searched the literature for the closest human equivalent to Claude’s weird helical manifolds, and was able to find one team talking about how the entorhinal cells in the hippocampus, which help you track locations in 2D space, use “high-dimensional toroidal attractor manifolds”. You never think about these, and if Claude is conscious, it doesn’t think about its helices either2. These are just the sorts of strange hacks that next-token/next-sense-datum prediction algorithms discover to encode complicated concepts onto physical computational substrate.

    re: the bolded part, I like how explicitly cherry-picking neuroscience passes for peak rationalism.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      Jesus fucking christ I don’t think I will ever get over how fucking dogshit the fucking rationalists are at epistemology

      IT’S CALLED A FUCKING MAPPING. “MAP”. AS IN NOT THE TERRITORY. IT’S IN THE NAME.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          1 day ago

          That’s such a weird comment… like “worried about hurricanes” - the first idea is to pour literal oil on the water??? in what world does that scale??? then it concludes with “maybe don’t build fragile buildings in hurricane areas” - lead with that you pillock

          I feel I’m stepping into some long-forgotten debate on LW on alignment or something because there’s so much that doesn’t make sense in context

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        I mean the whole entire premise (not unique to this post, scoot’s gotten a lot of mileage out of this) is shoehorning LLMs into the predictive coding framework mostly on the grounds that they both use prediction terminology and deal with work units that they call neurons, with the added bonus that PC posits Bayesian inference is involved so it’s obviously extra valid.

        Queue a few thousand words of scoot wearing his science popularizer hat and just declaring the most vacuous shit imaginable with a straight face and a friendly teacher’s casual authority.

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      This somehow makes things even funnier. If he had any understanding of modern math, he would know that representing a set of things as points in some geometric space is one of the most common techniques in math. (A basic example: a pair of numbers can be represented by a point in 2D space.) Also, a manifold is an extremely broad geometric concept: knowing that two things are manifolds does not meant that they are the same or even remotely similar, without checking the details. There are tons of things you can model as a manifold if you try hard enough.

      From what I see, Scoot read a paper modeling LLM inference with manifolds and thought “wow, cool!” Then he fished for neuroscience papers until he found one that modeled neurons using manifolds. Both of the papers have blah blah blah something something manifolds so there must be a deep connection!

      (Maybe there is a deep connection! But the burden of proof is on him, and he needs to do a little more work than noticing that both papers use the word manifold.)

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        It’s entirely possible he does get that it’s a nothing burger but is just being his usual disingenuous self to pull people in.