New piece from Iris Meredith: Keeping up appearances, about the cultural forces that gave us LLMs and how best to defeat them
this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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Rekindled a desire to maybe try my own blog ^^.
I think beyond "Keeping up appearances" it's also the stereotype of fascists—and by extension LLM lovers—having trouble (or pretending to) distinguishing signifying and signified.
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Ok I have to say, I despise aella but as a promiscuous woman I completely fail to see what's supposed to be the problem with this particular form of play. That people like having casual sex? That they have slut pride? What.
I probably passed the 100 mark myself several years ago, I've hooked up with girls with much more obvious slut tattoos too, and we're all antifascist anarchists. Is this community ok with sneering at public sexuality now?
The only thing I found vaguely mid in that X is using a tattoo gun rather than scarification, branding, or at least stick-and-poke. But I don't kink-shame people for being casuals.
Personally I like sex work and amateur tattooing better when they aren't part of some convoluted attempt at rationalist virtue signalling on social media. Honestly it's kind of weird that you landed on disapproval of promiscuity as the reason anyone here would find the happy couple sneerable.
Not strictly related to the OP but fuck kink-washing sfba rationalism, at the very least the attempted normalization of non-con sex play in a subculture as inundated with cult dynamics as them should be fair game.
I cannot understand the reason y'all find the couple sneerable, as I look at that tweet and see something I very much would have done to one of my partners if they asked, and the language used by the bottom as the same language my partners might have used to describe the activity. If anything it's very much on the tame side, for our standards. Promiscuity is me trying to understand what is it that's so sneerable in the first place. Is it just "lol sex thing weird"? Is it "you'll regret your tattoo when you get older"? Me and my girls have done so much more intensely weirder sex things and more risqué tattoos. I expect to be ridiculed for it by like, cishet right-wing men, but to find that type of attitude here was shocking.
Like, "virtue signalling" as in the thing that rats accuse us of doing every time we have a motivation they cannot comprehend such as basic empathy, right? As in the rationalist's stereotypically verbose euphemism for what previous generations of misogynistic male nerds used to call "attention whoring"? Is that the sneerable thing then, that people like showing off when they do an unusual sex thing? Because if so I have like, years of mastodon flirty banter y'all can go sneer at, if we're branching out from "nerdy fascism bad" to "kink on main bad".
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oh, no, to be clear: this isn't about the sex/sluttiness - I have no issue with that at all. in a more general sense (over the wider set of things aella), her positioning herself as a "sex researcher" but often using that to bash specific groups or put out a specific narrative, that is far more problematic
but regarding this specific thing, tho: the "forced a tattoo on me" bit specifically, and all the rationalists doing their weird quasi-intellectual arguing with everyone who asks questions. the "forced" wording feels ... intentionally bait&switch? presumably (..hopefully?) there's mutual consent here, so it's a fucking choice to go frame the event that way
That's very much the language my play partners use online, though? I totally post banter like "that submissive was so blanked out that I took advantage of them by doing X", to which they'll reply "implying I didn't evily manipulated you into doing that in the first place", and so on. This is so commonplace in my communities that I failed to even understand what could be the problem before you pointed it out. I mean, "I forced my famous domme to mark me as a trophy as her #100 simp"? How would you exactly force (non-kink sense) someone to tattoo you anyway, and if you did and were unwise enough to brag about it, presumably the microcelebrity in question wouldn't like and retweet it? I took it to mean "I was so into the idea of being marked, I'm glad she agreed to my pestering", and I would bet money if any of my people talked in that exact wording, that's what everyone would take it as. I mean, otherwise I would probably have been arrested for the frequency of times I say "bye everyone gonna tie someone up and do unspeakably cruel things to them" and whatnot
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This is more on Aella Cult than on her tbh.
And didn't Aella and also Grimes have a come to jesus moment when they realized they hung out with a lot of bad people. Guess nothing came from that. (That part of them is always worse than these just a bit off antics they pull).
And didn’t Aella and also Grimes have a come to jesus moment when they realized they hung out with a lot of bad people
I would give this at least -9600 credibility points. neither of them are whoopsie-daisy'ing into these scenes and crowds, they both knew what and who
Sorry I was being a bit too vague because I didn't have any proof ready. But here it is. It is them covering their asses if there might be a fallout, a non-apology equivalent, as there has been no changes or dropping of names/extremist behavior since, it is all just vague vibes.
Cringe but my god the horde of buttmad nazis force me to be on weirdo & girl girl's side
Personally I have more questions about a Rationalist having an anarcho-communist flag tattoo.
anarcho-communist flag, username RatOrthodox, hangs out with eugenicist iq-anon types, somewhere on the longtermist scale. Has unblocked replies from a person who fell into all the alt-right signifiers and who is calling this 'Jewish' (anti-semitism and a holocaust joke, classy. If I sneer any harder I will start to look like Scott on that recent video).
It honestly reminds me of the stories you'd hear from like the 60s and 70s of people cult-hopping because the specifics of the ideology or the religion didn't matter as much as the sense of believing in something. Notably a fair number of those people ended up in evangelical churches and, presumably, maga.
See also how he finds it good that capitalism has no logo, but still desires a logo for capitalism. And suggests others want it too.
But hey, of all the cult leaders in the space, Aella is prob the least bad. At least her cult doesn't come with a lot of mandatory reading homework.
I see now he's also got a supply and demand tattoo*? I don't fucking know. Maybe he thinks red and black is the antifa flag. Maybe he got it for sexy humiliation purposes. Maybe it's faded blue ink.
Yeah okay. Boring!!! You suck!!!
I have so many questions, stuff like, do you know what laws of nature are? (also, see the weak link between supply and demand and capitalism, various non capitalist systems also have supply and demand curves. "im not economically illiterate, just ideologically"). And 13? Wtf is wrong with your parents that they allowed that? At least my earlier 'wtf why is he hanging out with neo-nazis' has been answered.
E: also note the dead plant in the tattoo in progress pics. (An orchid I think).
I don't know what it is with capitalists and needing to prove to themselves they're aligned with the natural order. I'm a marxist but I can't imagine calling the TRPF a "law of nature". It would be embarrassing!
*
(I know there are, like, dozens of "scientific communist" diamat weirdos, but for the most part they have rightfully been tied to a tree and left in the 20th century.)
Yeah it fits a pattern, half of starship troopers is about how other societies had ideals not based on mathematical truths but theirs is (no proof is ever shown). Another reason why I think the book reads so much better as a parody. The Eternal Science of Marxism, but now for Warrior Libertarians (who cannot even fight a proper war, see the whole technodogs thing).
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Girls think the "eu" in "eugenics" means EW. Don't get the ick, girls! It literally means good.
So if you're not into eugenics, that means you must be into dysgenics. Dissing your own genes! OMG girl what
... how is this man still able to post from inside the locker he should be stuffed in 24/7
Seeing Yarvin mansplain eugenics really does make one wonder how he doesn't just get suckerpunched whenever he says anything at someone in public.
The eigenrobot thread he's responding to is characteristically bizarre and gross. You'd think eigenrobot being anti-eugenics is a good thing but he still finds a way to make it suspect. (He believes being unable to make babies is worse than death?)
I think he means "mass sterilisation of a population" Vs "mass murder of the same population", which is genocide either way, and then he would opt for the faster method.
Or something. Feels extra creepy discussing which genocide is better with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Re: extra creepy: and also with people their people in power.
I mean I guess you can argue that straight up murder has a certain honesty to it? At the same time that is mainly good because it makes it harder to justify what's happening compared to anti-miscegenation laws or restricting people to an open-air prison for a few generations. And we can see how that's working out in the current political climate.
sounds like he's posting from inside a dilapidated white panel van parked strategically just outside a legally-mandated exclusion radius surrounding a middle school
So, he's essentially Drake if he got into AI doom
Not beating the sexism allegations.
A new LLM plays pokemon has started, with o3 this time. It plays moderately faster, and the twitch display UI is a little bit cleaner, so it is less tedious to watch. But in terms of actual ability, so far o3 has made many of the exact same errors as Claude and Gemini including: completely making things up/seeing things that aren't on the screen (items in Virdian Forest), confused attempts at navigation (it went back and forth on whether the exit to Virdian Forest was in the NE or NW corner), repeating mistakes to itself (both the items and the navigation issues I mentioned), confusing details from other generations of Pokemon (Nidoran learns double kick at level 12 in Fire Red and Leaf Green, but not the original Blue/Yellow), and it has signs of being prone to going on completely batshit tangents (it briefly started getting derailed about sneaking through the tree in Virdian Forest... i.e. moving through completely impassable tiles).
I don't know how anyone can watch any of the attempts at LLMs playing Pokemon and think (viable) LLM agents are just around the corner... well actually I do know: hopium, cope, cognitive bias, and deliberate deception. The whole LLM playing Pokemon thing is turning into less of a test of LLMs and more entertainment and advertising of the models, and the scaffold are extensive enough and different enough from each other that they really aren't showing the models' raw capabilities (which are even worse than I complained about) or comparing them meaningfully.
I like how all of the currently running attempts have been equipped with automatic navigation assistance, i.e. a pathfinding algorithm from the 60s. And that's the only part of the whole thing that actually works.
I wouldn't say even that part works so well, given how Mt. Moon is such a major challenge even with all the features like that.
The actual pathfinding algorithm (which is surely just A* search or similar) works just fine; the problem is the LLM which uses it.
Another critihype article from the BBC, with far too much credulousness at the idea behind supposed AI consciousness at the cost of covering the harms of AI as things stand, e.g. the privacy, environmental, data set bias problems:
Tried to read it, ended up glazing over after the first or second paragraph, so I'll fire off a hot take and call it a day:
Artificial intelligence is a pseudoscience, and it should be treated as such.
Every AI winter, the label AI becomes unwanted and people go with other terms (expert systems, machine learning, etc.)... and I've come around to thinking this is a good thing, as it forces people to specify what it is they actually mean, instead of using a nebulous label with many science fiction connotations that lumps together decent approaches and paradigms with complete garbage and everything in between.
I'm gonna be polite, but your position is deeply sneerworthy; I don't really respect folks who don't read. The article has quite a few quotes from neuroscientist Anil Seth (not to be confused with AI booster Anil Dash) who says that consciousness can be explained via neuroscience as a sort of post-hoc rationalizing hallucination akin to the multiple-drafts model; his POV helps deflate the AI hype. Quote:
There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious. Others, such as Prof Anil Seth who leads the Sussex University team, disagree, describing the view as "blindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism." … "We associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go together in humans. But just because they go together in us, it doesn't mean they go together in general, for example in animals."
At the end of the article, another quote explains that Seth is broadly aligned with us about the dangers:
In just a few years, we may well be living in a world populated by humanoid robots and deepfakes that seem conscious, according to Prof Seth. He worries that we won't be able to resist believing that the AI has feelings and empathy, which could lead to new dangers. "It will mean that we trust these things more, share more data with them and be more open to persuasion." But the greater risk from the illusion of consciousness is a "moral corrosion", he says. "It will distort our moral priorities by making us devote more of our resources to caring for these systems at the expense of the real things in our lives" – meaning that we might have compassion for robots, but care less for other humans.
A pseudoscience has an illusory object of study. For example, parapsychology studies non-existent energy fields outside the Standard Model, and criminology asserts that not only do minds exist but some minds are criminal and some are not. Robotics/cybernetics/artificial intelligence studies control loops and systems with feedback, which do actually exist; further, the study of robots directly leads to improved safety in workplaces where robots can crush employees, so it's a useful science even if it turns out to be ill-founded. I think that your complaint would be better directed at specific AGI position papers published by techbros, but that would require reading. Still, I'll try to salvage your position:
Any field of study which presupposes that a mind is a discrete isolated event in spacetime is a pseudoscience. That is, fields oriented around neurology are scientific, but fields oriented around psychology are pseudoscientific. This position has no open evidence against it (because it's definitional!) and aligns with the expectations of Seth and others. It is compatible with definitions of mind given by Dennett and Hofstadter. It immediately forecloses the possibility that a computer can think or feel like humans; at best, maybe a computer could slowly poorly emulate a connectome.
...fields oriented around neurology are scientific, but fields oriented around psychology are pseudoscientific.
When a good man gazes into the palantir and sees L Ron Hubbard looking back
To be fair I also believe psychology is by and large pseudoscience, but the answer to it is sociology, not the MRI gang.
There are parts of the field that have major problems, like the sorts of studies that get done on 20 student volunteers and then get turned into a pop psychology factoid that gets tossed around and over-generalized while the original study fails to replicate, but there are parts that are actually good science.
Touting neuroscience as especially informed and scientific about minds is very brave.
I am not sure that having "an illusory object of study" is a standard that helps define pseudoscience in this context. Consider UFOlogy, for example. It arguably "studies" things that do exist — weather balloons, the planet Venus, etc. Pseudoarchaeology "studies" actual inscriptions and actual big piles of rocks. Wheat gluten and seed oils do have physical reality. It's the explanations put forth which are unscientific, while attempting to appeal to the status of science. The "research" now sold under the Artificial Intelligence banner has become like Intelligent Design "research": Computers exist, just like bacterial flagella exist, but the claims about them are untethered.
Scientists and philosophers have spilled a tanker truck of ink about the question of how to demarcate science from non-science or define pseudoscience rigorously. But we can bypass all that, because the basic issue is in fact very simple. One of the most fundamental parts of living a scientific life is admitting that you don't know what you don't know. Without that, it's well-nigh impossible to do the work. Meanwhile, the generative AI industry is built on doing exactly the opposite. By its very nature, it generates slop that sounds confident. It is, intrinsically and fundamentally, anti-science.
Now, on top of that, while being anti-science the AI industry also mimics the form of science. Look at all the shiny PDFs! They've got numbers in them and everything. Tables and plots and benchmarks! I think that any anti-science activity that steals the outward habits of science for its own purposes will qualify as pseudoscience, by any sensible definition of pseudoscience. In other words, wherever we draw the line or paint the gray area, modern "AI" will be on the bad side of it.
No, I think BlueMonday is being reasonable. The article has some quotes from scientists with actually relevant expertise, but it uncritically mixes them with LLM hype and speculation in a typical both sides sort of thing that gives lay readers the (false) impression that both sides are equal. This sort of journalism may appear balanced, but it ultimately has contributed to all kinds of controversies (from Global Warming to Intelligent Design to medical pseudoscience) where the viewpoints of cranks and uninformed busybodies and autodidacts of questionable ability and deliberate fraudsters get presented equally with actually educated and researched viewpoints.
Having now read the thing myself, I agree that the BBC is serving up criti-hype and false balance.