Last Week Tonight's rant of the week is about AI slop. A Youtube video is available here. Their presentation is sufficiently down-to-earth to be sharable with parents and extended family, focusing on fake viral videos spreading via Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest; and dissecting several examples of slop in order to help inoculate the audience.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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PZ Myers boosted the pivot-to-ai piece on veo3: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/06/23/so-much-effort-spiraling-down-the-drain-of-ai/
Following up on the thread that spawned from my comment yesterday:
https://awful.systems/comment/7777035
(I'm in vacation mode and forgot it was late on Sunday)
I wonder if Habryka, the LWer who posted both there and on Xhitter that "someone should do something about this troublesome page" realized that there would be less pushback if he'd simply coordinated in the background and got the edits in place without forewarning others. Was it intentional to try to pick a fight with Wikipedians?
Maybe instead of worrying about obscure wiki pages, Habryka should reflect why a linkpost titled Racial Dating Preferences and Sexual Racism is on the front page of his precious community now, with 48 karma and 22 comments.
You know, just this once, I am willing to see the "Dead Dove: Do Not Eat" label and be content to leave the bag closed.
Is it praxis when you put theory into inaction?
The wikipedia talk page is some solid sneering material. It's like Habryka and HandofLixue can't imagine any legitimate reason why Wikipedia has the norms it does, and they can't imagine how a neutral Wikipedian could come to write that article about lesswrong.
Eigenbra accurately calling them out...
"I also didn't call for any particular edits". You literally pointed to two sentences that you wanted edited.
Your twitter post also goes against Wikipedia practices by casting WP:ASPERSIONS. I can't speak for any of the other editors, but I can say I have never read nor edited RationalWiki, so you might be a little paranoid in that regard.
As to your question:
Was it intentional to try to pick a fight with Wikipedians?
It seems to be ignorance on Habyrka's part, but judging by the talk page, instead of acknowledging their ignorance of Wikipedia's reasonable policies, they seem to be doubling down.
Following up because the talk page keeps providing good material..
Hand of Lixue keeps trying to throw around the Wikipedia rules like the other editors haven't seen people try to weaponize the rules to push their views many times before.
Particularly for the unflattering descriptions I included, I made sure they reflect the general view in multiple sources, which is why they might have multiple citations attached. Unfortunately, that has now led to complaints about overcitation from @Hand of Lixue. You can't win with some people...
Looking back on the original lesswrong ~~brigade organizing~~ discussion of how to improve the wikipedia article, someone tried explaining to Habyrka the rules then and they were dismissive.
I don’t think it counts as canvassing in the relevant sense, as I didn’t express any specific opinion on how the article should be edited.
Yes Habyrka, because you clearly have such a good understanding of the Wikipedia rules and norms...
Also, heavily downvoted on the lesswrong discussion is someone suggesting Wikipedia is irrelevant because LLMs will soon be the standard for "access to ground truth". I guess even lesswrong knows that is bullshit.
Adding onto this chain of thought, does anyone else think the talk page's second top-level comment from non-existent user "habryka" is a bit odd? Especially since after Eigenbra gives it a standard Wikipedian (i.e. unbearably jargon-ridden and a bit pedantic but entirely accurate and reasonable in its substance) reply, new user HandofLixue comes in with:
ABOUT ME You seem to have me confused with Habryka - I did not make any Twitter post about this. Nonetheless, you have reverted MY edits...
Kinda reads like they're the same person? I mean Habryka is also active further down the thread so this is almost certainly just my tinfoil hat being too tight and cutting off circulation and/or reading this unfold in bits and pieces rather than putting it all together.
Habryka doesn't really know how not to start fights
Or was it a consequence of the fact that capital-R Rationalists just don't shut up?
Starting this off with Baldur Bjarnason sneering at his fellow techies for their "reading" of Dante's Inferno:
Reading through my feed reader and seeing tech dilettantes “doing” Dante in a week and change, I’m reminded of the time in university when we spent half a semester discussing Dante’s Divine Comedy, followed by tracing it’s impact and influence over the centuries
I don’t think these assholes even bother to read their footnotes, and their writing all sounds like it comes from ChatGPT. Naturally so, because I believe them when they claim they don’t use it for writing. They’re just genuinely that dull
At least read the footnotes FFS
If they were reading Dante for pleasure, that’d be different—genuinely awesome, even. But all of this is framed as doing the entirety of “humanities” in the space of a few weeks.