James Gleick:

This author—caught using AI to make up quotes for his book about the dangers of AI—has the gall to say it proves him right. You can’t trust him, so you can’t trust anyone.

Maybe she only used special-purpose slop engines for work and school? I had hoped the full article would make that more clear, but, well.

After discharge, her outpatient psychiatrist stopped cariprazine and restarted venlafaxine and methylphenidate. She resumed using ChatGPT, naming it “Alfred” after Batman’s butler,

wat

instructing it to do “internal family systems cognitive behavioral therapy,”

wat

and engaging in extensive conversations about an evolving relationship “to see if the boy liked me.”

yikes

Having automatically upgraded to GPT-5, she found the new chatbot “much harder to manipulate.”

my hopes are being raised; certainly the next sentence will not dash them

Nonetheless, following another period of limited sleep due to air travel three months later, she once again developed delusions that she was in communication with her brother

yep, that tracks

as well as the belief that ChatGPT was “phishing” her and taking over her phone.

this is why you need to add “do not phish me” after “you are my therapist”

She was rehospitalized, responded to a retrial of cariprazine, and was discharged after three days without persistent delusions. She described having a longstanding predisposition to “magical thinking” and planned to only use ChatGPT for professional purposes going forward.

goddamnit

When I was a PhD student, I had successfully published papers in journals.

Corey S. Powell:

Imagine the staggering labor involved in sending around an email that says, “Nobody did anything dumb like using AI to generate the citations, right?” I mean, that could take seconds.

Coincidentally, it came up in conversation last night that the head of AI at Northeastern University makes $1.3 million a year (I don’t know where that number came from, but it’s what I heard, and it’s apparently the second-highest salary at the university, exceeded only by the president’s).

Upvoted but disliked

And instead of providing numbers, they came back with an anecdote about university administrators being incompetent (which is deeply unsurprising and thus, in the Shannon sense, conveys no information).

Probably, yes. The way each week links to the previous still trips me up sometimes.

The Preprint Problem: Fringe, Genetically Informed Studies of Group Differences in Behavior Housed on Open Science Platforms.

Preprint servers and open science platforms have revolutionized the scientific process. A fundamental feature of these platforms is a lack of peer review—virtually anyone with an internet connection can upload their research in a few clicks. Although this setup has facilitated rapid dissemination of results and open access to research, it has also enabled fringe researchers to post and share pseudoscientific, genetically informed studies of differences in behavior that often advance racial hereditarian and eugenic claims. Because preprint archives are now routinely used by mainstream academics, preprints grant a degree of legitimacy to fringe research that otherwise may have been relegated to a blog post or fringe publication. Previous studies have documented individual examples of pseudoscientific, genetic studies of group differences being posted on preprint archives, but the scope of this problem remains unclear, making it difficult to formulate responses and potential solutions. The present study quantified and characterized pseudoscientific studies of group differences in behavior—including studies that used genetic methods—housed on popular preprint servers and open science collaboration platforms. Dozens of such preprints were identified. Preprinted studies on group differences often analyzed controversial phenotypes, most frequently intelligence and related traits, and furthered classical, widely rejected hereditarian and eugenic theories. Genetically informed analyses rested on fundamentally flawed assumptions about heritability and polygenic scores. The Preprint Problem is indicative of a broader effort to weaponize mainstream academic research and its mechanisms, including Open Science, and a recent resurgence of scientific racism and eugenics. Potential responses to these challenges are introduced.

With a cameo by Cremieux.

(Via Kevin Bird.)

An lesswrong will literally do… whatever this is instead of going to therapy.

I knew there had to be one out there… thanks!

Hi!

That’s the thing about esotericism. You think it’s all happy hippie New Age frou-frou, and then suddenly, whoops all Julius Evola.

He uses the word egregore in his dating advice.

It’s like spammers deliberately including typos to select for recipients who are more vulnerable to phishing. If you say “Dating discourse is an egregore evolved for survival” to someone and their genitals do not retreat into hibernation, then they are ready for recruitment into your cult. Statistically, they will have already read the Sequences and attended at least one Lighthaven BBQ with a white supremacist.

I wrote a thing about Bohr and the “interpretation” of quantum mechanics here: https://www.sunclipse.org/2026/01/a-more-mature-bohr-ism/.

Much like the Clock People in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues deliberately invented one ritual into which they could channel all their compulsions toward ritual, SneerClub is the place within which we can quarantine all our pettiness and have it manifest in an appropriate manner, i.e., reading Yudkowsky’s posts in the voice of Augustus St. Cloud from Venture Bros.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GiCfqQEEwk

and the idea that we’re somehow all david and somehow all trolling (even though our instance pretty much keeps to itself) is going to be why we end up on the spam shitlist and possibly automatically defederated by a few large instances

Joke’s on them, odds are federation is broken anyway

So now, in the US, “libertarian socialist” sounds like it means “a socialist who knows too much about age-of-consent laws”.

One of the motivations for fanfiction is that people want more “filler”. They like the characters and (often) the world those characters inhabit, and so they write a story that lets them (and other fans) spend more time with the fiction.