Martin Lowe

Over-educated social scientist, beloved shitposter and insult connoisseur, recently returned from a gruelling odyssey.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

https://t.co/bLWS4Xr9Bv

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

@Giovann35084111 «Empirically false at the aggregate level» 😂🤦

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

In the future, instead of conducting interviews with potential employees, employers will talk to an AI with full access to their IG algorithm, at the end of which they’ll be more intimately familiar with them than a spouse or best friend.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

https://t.co/YpwqyGgQmy

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

@QiaochuYuan Mathematics is a language for describing stuff. Like all languages it takes time to learn, and like all languages it can be translated (imperfectly) into any other language.

This all hinges on different conceptions of what it means to ‘understand’ something.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

https://t.co/cWjbb2GiqH

[Coddled Affluent Professional @feelsdesperate]

When it comes to billionaires my take is the opposite of Leftists:

Billionaires SHOULD consume all their wealth: megayachts, English castles, mountains of cocaine, own a dozen homes and 30 cars - do it! Spend it all!

The worst thing that can happen is for a billionaire to try to ‘do good in the world’ and shovel money to NGOs for some cause they get excited about. That’s the worst thing that can happen. Charitable donations should be taxed at 500%. A billionaire’s lavish lifestyle poses no threat to me but their misguided ‘good intent’ is absolutely cancerous and potentially civilization ending.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

Seconded.

In a nutshell: In the late stage fiat economy, even human connection has been commoditized, faked and subjected to inflationary forces.

Scarcity always catches up in the end though, which is both comforting, in the long run, and scary in the short.

[Curtis Yarvin @curtis_yarvin]

This is very good

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

Why does both humans and LLM’s confabulate when the memory location they’re searching turns up empty?

Especially since, presumably, LLM’s are in no way programmed to do so.

[Robert Kroese @robkroese]

I think this phenomenon is almost entirely metaphorical availability. LLMs have given us a way to describe behaviors that have been observed for a long time--essentially that most people don't really do much actual thinking most of the time

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

@z_mustard @michaelmalice It’s a variant of a famous quote of his, only it’s ‘anarchy’ instead of homeschooling.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

All critiques of homeschooling end up as a description of status quo

Cc @michaelmalice

[🎄The Real Christmas Mustard 🎄 @z_mustard]

@allie__voss I've been a public school teacher for 15 years.

You are smart enough to homeschool your kids.

Every critique of homeschooling is already happening every day in every public school

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

@JamesTate121 Norway is about to find out what happens when the state tries to confiscate people’s wealth.

I sincerely wish I didn’t have to be a part of this experiment.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

@dystopiangf A good test is whether phd. students would want A) the work, but no diploma, or B) the diploma, but no work.

I would go for option A in a heartbeat, but the reason I stopped applying for a phd. was the distinct impression that 98% of everyone else in academia would go for B

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

When you confuse the abstract institution of science (eg. «purposeful knowledge creation», or something like that) with its concrete instatiation in a particular era (eg. universities).

Universities were certainly involved in a lot of purposeful knowledge creation these past centuries, but the jury’s still out on whether they were necessary or even a net positive.

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

The collapse of trust in science is going to go down in history as one of the most sad, bizarre, and destructive social contagions of modern times.

We fed billions, cured diseases and powered nations - yet people ran toward conspiracies instead.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

The problem is obviously institutionalized mass education, and the solution is obviously to end that misbrgotten experiment, and go back to the university being a highly exclusive nerd club.

Just the fact that 90% of phd. candidates is there to get the paper, and not to do the work, should be a sign that something has gone terribly wrong.

Does anyone think Feynman, Chomsky or von Neumann went to university to get the diploma?

And does anyone believe such personalities would get through a normal tenure track today, not to mention get funding for their wildly ambitious research projects?

«My dissertatio will be about how my entire field is mistaken about its own subject matter»

Yeah, good luck with that.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

The obvious solution to this is for professors to have closer contact with their students. Talk to each of them, learn of their thinking style, get to fucking know them.

Oh, is that too much? You have 150 students in your class? It would mean the end of industralized mass education?

Yes. Yes it does.

And that’s a very good thing. Universities used to be a highly exclusive nerd club, and we’re now at the tail end of an experiment in which they play the role of universal certification agencies for white collar jobs instead.

It has been an unmitigated disaster. In @bryan_caplan’s words: «a system whose primary effect is to transfer vast sums of money from the young and poor to the old and rich».

Let’s all hope that it’s over now.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

If you find this depressing, it should be a very clear sign that you’re not thinking clearly about education.

If technology renders your preferred testing method useless, it means that your preferred testing method was always useless.

It means you were testing for something that didn’t require intelligence.

(Btw. It was always possible for students to get a person to write assignments for them, so nothing’s really changed - except that the access to outside help has become accessible to those who don’t have the cash/connections to outsource the work)

[Phil Hoyeck @PAHoyeck]

I'm not even in the mood to joke about this, it's so depressing. You can't assign take-home essays anymore; it's completely pointless. Writing and reasoning abilities are very noticeably plummeting. Very discouraging to think where this is all going.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

@EricLevitz Ordinary scandinavian here 👋

These measures and the conclusion they support is BS.

Norway is heading off a cliff, and government is being ever more inventive in trying to hide it.

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

Well, by «me» I mean my conscious mind.

If my subconscious can give me a hint, why can’t it give me more?

Because it doesn’t have the concepts? But the hint is deeply conceptual.

You get the point? It can say *something*, but just not much. What is the thing stopping it from saying more (assuming it does know more - I still consider the pattern matching algorithm a possibility).

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

I’m fascinated by a different experience, namely the one where a rough idea pops into my head. But *from where*?

I’ve begun seeing these as hints from my subvonscious about stuff worth paying attention to. Because I’ve so often found interesting stuff from investigating these clues. It can be the idea that two theories are related, or a proposition that doesn’t seem true at first.

But *why does the information package have to be so small*?

If my subconscious mind knows that this is worth thinking about, *it* must have thought about it first. One would think that it knows more than it’s letting on. Or is it not intelligent, and more like a stupid pattern recognition algorithm?

[Martin Lowe @NormalDenizen]

Much the same journey here, but the additional step of realizing that, although it is strictly true that good parts of cristianity can be had without christianity, our ability to design complex evolved systems are both practically limited and, to some extent, principally limited as well.

I think bitcoin is the most astounding designed complex system I know of, if we define complexity as «many interlocking, non-arbitrary and necessary constraints to keep the system performing its task» (a variant of HTV).

But designed complexity, in the sense of systems designed to perform specific functions, cannot compete with the stupid disrespect of complexity you find in evolved systems. Evolution does not care how complex the system becomes, or how many functions it has.

The flipside is that it doesn’t care about parasites, scaling or sustainability either.

So, given that christianity is an evolved system, we should expect it to have unknown benefits *and* unknown drawbacks.

And it could be that any set of systems that serves positive functions x, y, z, is so constrained that it basically is christianity. In other words, you could be saying «we can have non-dog friendly animals with a wagging tail, canines, barking, paws etc.».

The constraints is the description, kinda?

OK now I’m just rambling (I’m really just trying to formulate some stuff here).