i/o✓

I agree with this, but there's still a problem with how LLMs too often provide users information that contains a liberal or "goodthinky" framing. Let me give you the most recent example I ran into: Last night, I asked Gemini for the mean SAT score across all HBCUs. (I knew what the score was, but I wanted confirmation before posting a tweet.) Instead of giving me what I asked for, it provided a list of the five HBCUs with the highest average SATs, along with brief descriptions of the "excellence" of each of these schools. So, I did what I always do, which is call it out. I asked: "Why did you provide the average student SAT scores for the top 5 HBCUs, and not the mean of all of them? Why did you do this?" Gemini responded the way it always does, with an effusive apology, admitting its mistake, and then it provided a figure. But the figure was the top of the typically stated mean range, not the actual mean. So, again, I had to call it out, and, again, it apologized and then gave me the actual mean. I guess what I'm saying is, yes, LLMs are likely to have a positive effect countering "fake news" and conspiracy theories, but it would be nice if they didn't so frequently resort to unhelpful "goodthink" on some of the more contentious and "sensitive" culture war issues (like those relating to race and gender). Finally, I'll add this: They all do seem to be getting less biased and more nuanced as time goes on. Three years ago, it was pointless asking most of them questions on certain topics, but these days, although sometimes only after some prodding, you're likely to get what you need within a reasonably fair and balanced presentation.

Report from nonpartisan centrist think-tank CSIS: "2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right."

About the methodology: "This analysis defines terrorism as the deliberate use or threat of premeditated violence by nonstate actors with the intent to achieve political goals by creating a broad psychological impact. Using this definition, CSIS researchers compiled and analyzed a dataset of 750 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States between January 1, 1994, and July 4, 2025.... This brief defines left-wing terrorism as that which is motivated by an opposition to capitalism, imperialism, or colonialism; black nationalism; support for LGBTQ+ rights; support for environmental causes or animal rights; adherence to pro-communist, pro-socialist beliefs or 'anti-fascist' rhetoric; opposition to government authority under the belief it is a tool of oppression responsible for social injustices; support for decentralized political and social systems, such as anarchism; or partisan extremism, where violence is justified against political opponents and parties perceived as advancing right-wing agendas. Right-wing terrorism as used in this analysis includes incidents motivated by ideas of racial or ethnic supremacy; opposition to government authority, believing it is tyrannical and illegitimate; misogyny, including incels; hatred based on sexuality or gender identity; belief in the QAnon conspiracy theory; opposition to abortion; or partisan extremism, where violence is justified against political opponents and parties perceived as advancing left-wing agendas. Note that terms such as 'left-wing terrorism' and 'right-wing terrorism' as used in this brief do not correspond to mainstream political parties in the United States, such as the Democratic and Republican parties, nor do they correspond to the overwhelming majority of political liberals and conservatives in the United States."

The replies to this tweet are about as retarded as any I've ever seen in a while, and include black people who believe that a 9% black representation in Harvard's new freshman class — a percentage that's about 9 times greater than it would be under a purely academically meritocratic admissions process — is somehow racism against black people, and one person arguing that blacks interested in excellence should instead attend HBCUs (where the mean SAT is the equivalent of a 92 IQ).

Black enrollment at Harvard College fell for the third consecutive year since SCOTUS overturned race-conscious admissions

It's like if a school system reduced the annual salary of its janitors from $800,000 to $400,000, and the janitors complained that the system was rigged against them.

For those of you interested in following a list which seeks to provide a balance of perspectives from across the political spectrum:

Harvard admissions cannot help but be racist. While the 43% Asian share is a massive improvement (although still short of the percentage that one would expect in a purely academically meritocratic process), it's the 9% and 11% black and Hispanic percentages that provide proof that grotesque levels of preferential treatment of these groups persist (but especially for blacks). Two analyses of Harvard's undergrad admissions data (one conducted within Harvard itself) found that the black undergrad share would be around 1% and the Hispanic share about 3% in a system in which academic performance (such as high school GPAs and SAT scores) was determinative.

Asian-Americans in Harvard’s Incoming Class More Than Double, to 43.2 Percent Newly released data on the Harvard College class of 2030 say the class is 43.2 percent Asian-American, a record high and more than double the level when Students for Fair Admissions first sued Harvard alleging racial discrimination in admissions. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that Harvard was unlawfully using race as a factor in admissions. Since then, the numbers of Hispanic and black students in the incoming Harvard classes have dipped, while the numbers of Asian-Americans have soared.

One thing is indisputable: Harvard will push every envelope to a point of indecency and absurdity to get as high a percentage of black students on campus as possible.

Which descriptor would you most associate with Benjamin Netanyahu?

David Reich: If you say a white British person is a pure descendant of people who lived in Britain a long time ago, "nothing could be further from the truth... And this idea that any one people is somehow purely descended from the people who lived in the past [which was something people thought prior to the genetic revolution], it’s really an untenable picture. Every time we look, it’s not true." In the 80s, the idea developed "that as people move around, they split, they don’t remix,... But the truth is, from genetic data... all of those groups are profoundly mixed, of multiple very divergent groups..." "And so there’s no one time that we’ve been able to reconstruct where there’s a single homogeneous population that’s ancestral to everybody who comes after. Rather, it’s some kind of constant change over time, with mixtures, separations, structuring, and coming back together... It used to be that we had this null hypothesis that no mixture occurred, and we would test that null hypothesis. And that is almost a silly null hypothesis at this point, because everybody is mixed." "And the thing that becomes clear from ancient DNA is that... the strategy used by these direct-to-consumer ancestry testing companies of using modern-day Irish as surrogates for who lived in Ireland in the past — maybe that works in the last thousand years, but it’s not even going to really work very well 2,500 years ago or 3,000 years ago, because there’s just too much mixing and migration." "There are interesting exceptional areas. There actually seems to be an unusually high amount of continuity over many thousands of years in many parts of the Americas, which is really fascinating. But there too, there are disruptions as well. So the pattern seems to be, for the most part, that there are periodic profound movements of people coming from somewhere else, either completely displacing or mixing with the people who were there before."

I deleted that tweet about Malcolm Gladwell because the views he expressed on black dominance of the sprints in an interview I saw years ago were later updated and refined in a published essay in which he acknowledged factors other than just effort and culture.

The people on this platform I respect the most are those who constructively criticize their own tribe (or don't even have a tribe), are ruthlessly guided by a coherent set of principles, will acknowledge and accept facts that do not flatter their own positions or worldview, change their positions when facts warrant it, avoid hypocrisy (or at least acknowledge when they are engaging in it), and are capable of stripping away their own personal history and any moral arguments in order to inspect the logical or factual structure of an argument (i.e., cognitive decoupling). But truth-seeking and intellectual honesty demand more than most people are willing to invest.

If you knew how quickly people forget the dead you would stop living to impress people. — Christopher Walken

Cartoonish fear porn from the imagination of the third-dumbest rightwing influencer in America. Too dumb to be enjoyed as camp and too earnest to be experienced with ironic detachment. A slobbering towering achievement in agitslop.

I used AI to create this short film. America, you’ve been warned.

Awaiting the block.

Prominent accounts are already expressing outrage over RFK Jr.'s comments, but it's actually even broader than what he's saying: Muslims in general (and not just Arabs) have not distinguished themselves in science, at least in the modern age.

RFK: "There's five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don't produce science. They don't win the Novel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature."

There was of course a golden age in Arab science, but that was around a thousand years ago.

I just "vibe coded" something for the first time. It took the AI about 20 seconds to write the HTML for a type of online MP3 player that I've been unsuccessfully trying to find for years. It works perfectly and is exactly what I wanted.

Isaac Saul ranks his top ten favorite fast-dining restaurants. I have never eaten at or been inside any of them. This is not at all about food or cultural snobbery. I imagine the food in these places is a good deal tastier than the bland fare I prepare for myself every day. It's probably just a reflection of my general detachment from the way most Americans live. For example, I don't have cable. Or a smartphone. I have never taken out a loan (except mortgages on my first two houses). I have never had a credit card. My car is 21 years old. I will be disappointed if I don't get at least another ten years out of it. I have worked two days a week most of my adult life. I've been inside a mall only twice in the past twenty years. I have never thrown a party. I have never operated a grill, and I don't even know what would be involved in doing such a thing. Maybe most other Americans could also provide a long list of non-conforming things about themselves. I don't know.

1. Olive Garden 2. Chipotle 3. TGIF 4. Outback Steakhouse 5. Denny's 6. Chili's 7. Hooters 8. Buffalo Wild Wings 9. Applebee's 10. P.F. Changs

AI could push back against public irrationality like conspiracy theories, fake news, & medical quackery. Whereas social media optimize for sheer engagement (clicks, likes, & reposts), AI is sold as a useful product that aids decision-making in the real world. For all the problems of LLMs, they're less likely to send users down a conspiratorial rabbit hole. This may restore the influence of epistemically responsible expertise. So argues the philosopher Dan Williams @danwilliamsphil