MarkusQ

And this doesn't even touch on the fact that a significant fraction of the published, peer-reviewed, authoritative sources ultimately turn out to be wrong[1]. Science is hard. Data collection and cleaning is hard. Mistakes are easy to make.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

This whole issue seems to hinge on a fundamental disagreement about what science (or mathematics) is. Papers aren't science, they're the receipts. But too many people apparently can't tell the difference, so we have the present blizzard of forged receipts (first from paper mills, now with new lemon scented AI++).

Mathematics and science represent two systems for sorting truth from BS. An exponentially increasing supply of BS makes that even more necessary.

As long as we're introspecting, and being on the watch for influence campaigns, it may be instructive to scan the article for the use of `/(center[ -])?(left|right)([ -](wing|leaning))?/` designations.

I think you just answered your own question.

Nicely, it also filters out humans that lack a certain ability to reflect.

This is not my field, but I'm...socialy adjacent? and my understanding is that we grow big crystals of silicon because that's the mature technology, but then there are multiple cutting & polishing steps that add to the cost.

We want small pieces of thin wafers, but we grow huge crystals and then slice them into wafers that we then have to cut up. With vapor deposition diamond you can remove a lot of those steps by growing what you need, say a grid of chips of the desired dimensions directly on a carrier substrate.

As I understand it.

Space. They are more resilient to radiation, faster, don't generate as much heat and are more tolerant of heat. That pretty much tells you where they're going to be used.

That was ten years ago. Today, lab grown diamonds are cheaper than natural at any size or quality, which is why the diamond cartels are sh*tting little bricks that are almost as hard.

And the convert energy into fertilizer glitch.

Sure they were. They took copies back in a DeLorean.

Bingo, we have a winner!

Or maybe...they just aren't actually "smarter or somehow more capable"?

It seems like the more parsimonious explanation.

I find it interesting that this analog to Gell-Mann Amnesia is so strong, and likely results from the models having absorbed so much journalism and other internet content of similar quality. They seem brilliant in areas you're ignorant of, and rubbish on things you know well.

It's amazingly hard for people to accept what that logically implies, whether they are thinking about journalists, politicians/celebrities, or LLMs.

Every humpback whale is related to every giant sequoia through a chain of intermediaries as similar as a mother and child (proof: go up via mothers to the first eukaryote, then back down).

That doesn't mean you can _incrementally_replace_parts_ of a whale until it's a tree, with every intermediate being viable.

Some AI brainworm that eats AI, obviously.

My best guess (rot13, to avoid spoilers) is xvjv & obbol?

> This is not a reasonable take in 2026.

I think it is. Why is it that the only people in any field I'm aware of that think the AI output in their field is high quality are either the ones that are carefully crafting the output themselves or were producing/consuming slop themselves before all this started? (Outsiders pretty uniformly like the output, which is why I drew the parallel to Gell-Mann amnesia.)

Hard disagree. If we send someone out exploring and they discover something (maybe?) but their account of their journey is impossible for anyone else to follow and contains obvious hallucinations, what have we gained?

The counter example, yes.

"Some subset of this collection is valid, therefore they all are" is not a valid inference. It's more like what we call "proof by intimidation".

Or, just maybe, they share a key property with the mounds of popular writing, journalism and random internet accretions they were trained on: they seem total rubbish on anything you know about deeply, but brilliant on everything else.

Their math is as just as good as their rambling writing and their Ghiblified poster art. Most people don't seem to realize that.

Yes, but if they're worried about competition (or liabilities for past and ongoing transgressions, or both) catching up with them and wanted the government to step in and save them from themselves by regulating the industry...they'd be doing pretty much what they seem to be doing. Interesting, isn't it?

NO. Most definitely not. Nor am I advocating any sort of gatekeeping.

My entire point is that there is a legitimate perspective, held by real people, from which the "strip mining" analogy is perfectly apt. There were fishermen working these waters for many generations before the trawlers came, and they see the situation differently than the people who've got a vested interest in the company running the factory fishing operations.

I find it hilarious how people seem to think spending enormous effort to fix obvious failures, only to immediately uncover a new round of obvious failures is a recipe for exponential takeoff. So I guess we're both going to be pretty amused over the next few years, huh?

I'm blind. In my defense, I was looking for a linear-shaped linear motor, and took that for a spinning doodad.

So... no? The paper shows the motors used in the printer, and some of the parts it produced, but not the actual actuator it made.

So the fact that the Library of Babel (i.e. all possible books) contains occasional gems means that you can't object to using it on principle? That would seem to follow from your logic.

What about a filtered set "all well formed books"? Or "all well formed books that are plausible enough that they could convince a reasonable person, regardless of their accuracy"?

It's generally taken that a cup of sewage in a barrel of wine makes a barrel of sewage. Surely a reasonable person could claim that a barrel of sewage was still sewage, even if it contained several cups of wine?

1) I never said the problem was effort; I was trying to explain the strip mining analogy, and it's one of the two anchors that make the analogy work.

2) Mathematicians didn't create this economy; it was foisted upon them by the same managerial mentality that brought us "publish or perish" and "the monthly sales quota".

3) I can't tell if you honestly don't get why the strip-mining analogy resonates, or...?

Here's another analogy: if we suddenly discovered personal teleportation, and marathon runners were complaining that it was ruining the sport, would you say "they're pulling a 180 and claiming that marathon running was never really about getting to a point 26 miles away as fast as possible, but that's contradicted by their revealed preferences"?

The strip mining analogy is better though, because it captures the sense of irreversible goal-loss when a problem goes from being "unsolved" to "solved".

Strip mining is very apt if you view the economics of the present system as "effort -> recognition -> career advancement". Even in strip mining, the resources that had been buried are now available for use in the broader economy. What's no longer available is the living that was to be had digging them out.

1) With proven technology, nuclear is "practically infinite" in the same sense (available fuel will out-last the sun, even at 10x current energy usage).

2) The "residual heat" is long gone, and my whole point here was that saying nuclear was limited when geothermal is a form of nuclear was disingenuous/misleading. Trying to turn that into a scare / safety issue is exactly the sort of nonsense I was objecting to.

3) There are lots of viable long-term storage options, including grinding it up, mixing it with the tailings and putting it back into the same hole we dug it out of. Or dropping it into a subduction zone, and letting it fuel future geothermal plants. But we won't do any of those, because it's far too valuable. If you are worried about things being "misleading and exaggerated" you probably shouldn't be bringing up the nuclear waste "problem".

"Geothermal also has two key advantages over nuclear generation. Nuclear power plants are dependent upon a finite resource (uranium), and nuclear waste disposal is both controversial and costly. In contrast, geothermal generation depends on a virtually infinite source (heat generated in Earth’s interior), and there are no long-term waste issues."

1) Scientific consensus is that the Earth is also finite.

2) Also, the heat generated in the Earth's interior is...nuclear power.

3) Nuclear waste disposal is a political problem, not a technical one; it is "controversial" and "costly" precisely because it's used for these sorts of unserious comparisons.

I love the idea of geothermal, but this sort of nonsense has to be called out and shamed.