So it looks like Mr. “Not consistently candid” has been at it again?

I will admit that they got me with this one: I genuinely thought the FrontierMath results meant something real. I didn’t think they would be that brazen about rigging a benchmark that was explicitly advertised as being kept private so that AI companies couldn’t train on the questions. More fool me I guess.

Why are these people obsessed with a measurement of people that has the worst statistical validity known to mankind? IIRC Taleb ripped IQ-obsessives to shit a couple of years ago with an extended rant / published paper on the various flaws, but even from a non-stats nerd perspective the idea that you can infer the “IQ” of an entire country from the studies that these people quote is absurd. We’re talking “I measured the IQ of a bunch of kids in an orphanage in 1968, so obviously I can infer from this the value of the entire nation” levels of absurd here. Even taking their words at face value (lol) the entire endeavour is ludicrous.

The whole thing just seems completely pointless: what’s the end goal here? Being able to line people up like trading cards achieves what exactly?

(Which leads inevitably to the depressing reality that the “why” is obvious, but unspoken of course: They just don’t want to come out and say it.)

The only concretely good thing in here is that the government is going to use it as a cudgel to impose upgrading the UK electrical grid over the objections of pathetic nimbys who value their views of rolling green fields to things like, oo, people managing to heat their homes in winter without going into debt.

If it also means the government putting the boot into local authorities to force them to permit local economic development I’ll take that too.

I already wasn’t going to read this screed, but now I’m definitely not going to read it. Sheesh.

jart is already banned: https://lobste.rs/~jart &, as that comment makes clear, their entire domain is now completely banned from lobste.rs. I think you might be overcompensating a tad here?

who tf is this?

They’re a self-described gay, furry ex-mormon who seem to have latched onto the rat & rat-adjacent communities (like EA) in the hope of finding a substitute for the certainty they used to find in religion. Last I heard they work for the Blocked&Reported podcast, i.e. Jesse Singal et al., alongside their job in the US military. (edit: their Twitter claims they’re a law clerk? I guess they moved on.)

On the surface they seem well meaning but naïve, the company they keep (perhaps) being a reflection of that.

For the rat & rat-adjacent soi-disant “communities” David is like the bogeyman. You see his name used in places like SSC to stand in for the otherwise nameless woke menace that’s coming for their precious bodily fluids.

I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.

You’d think these people would have learned by now that there’s no upside in them spending their precious time on this earth obsessing over why a group of people don’t like them, but nevertheless here they are: drawn like moths to the flame.

Prolix insanity is kind of a Rationalist / Rat-adjacent calling card.

This is going to be a banger, I can feel it.

neoreactionary harem with stack ranking

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

Who knows? They seem to know all these people personally, so I guess they attend rationalist cuddle puddles in SV or something.

I ran into them online a year ago when a Twitter follow shared their last essay with some acerbic comments about the lengths (both in the mental & absurd word count senses) they were going to do deny their desire to transition & they appeared in the comments after I made a snarky remark along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much”. Still quite proud of that one.

^F David Gerard

Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, “Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!” And you replied: “No, I’m not! That’s a lie.” And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive…

I‘m impressed at the way you still manage to live rent free in these chud’s heads. The bogeyman is real if you’re a rationalist apparently & his name is D.Gerard.

(Follows link to authors blog, reads blogroll)

JFC. Kathleen Stock. They have the entire universe of gender studies to choose from & Kathleen Stock is their philosopher of choice.

Demanding that EY et al define “woman” for them so that they can know whether or not they can transition is simultaneously hilarious and deeply sad.

I’m amazed that the random shitposting of a bunch of nerds who band together purely to dunk on terrible rationalist takes weighs so heavily on their minds. Aren’t they supposed to be above that kind of thing?

They’re up to their armpits in a pit of self-loathing of their own making & unable to take any of the proffered help because their self-imposed ethical system doesn’t permit it.

Profoundly sad is exactly what it is.

Molly White has been doing fine work.

So, having effectively run off with $billions of real people’s money, what next for the effective altruism crew? A pivot to AI doom-mongering?

You have just demonstrated that you don’t understand Taleb’s critique. Admittedly, his basic critique is buried in tons of verbiage, but your response here is an irrelevance.

IQ measurements are next to useless on an individual level because a) IQ measurement is terrible & non-repeatable with very large variance between successive tests for any given individual & b) IQ doesn’t measure the thing you actually want, which is task-specific performance: it has terrible correlation with any given task-specific measure, barely rising above “vaguely related”.

At the population-level, IQ suffers from terrible statistical issues, including circularity affecting outcomes (SAT tests in the US are a particular problem), and inter-population differences that make comparisons extremely noisy. The field is also historically full of charlatans who literally made up data out of thin air, even before you start in with the problems with the actual data they drew upon & the stats they applied to it.

Ultimately, It doesn’t matter that you can measure some “factor” and show that there’s a weak correlation with lifetime wealth, or prison likelihood or whatever if that measurement is an otherwise useless one: Using IQ as a measure of an individual is wildly inappropriate. Using it as a population measure is next to useless because of widespread issues with both the input data & the statistical analysis done to torture some kind of correlation out of said data & call the job done.

Finally, when you’ve done all these population level stats on your so-called “g-factor” and squeezed some kind of vague relationship between various groups & your “g-factor” out of the data, what are you doing that /for/? What good do you expect to do in the world with that information? Because the only real-world use seems to be advocating for blocking the immigration or education of specific groups of people, despite the fact that, as has already been pointed out, you cannot use IQ on an individual level because it has extremely poor predictive value at the individual level. Sounds … kind of racist don’t you think?

High-end stats is kind of Taleb’s thing, so he gets to be as insufferable as he likes dunking on IQiots imo.