#Scott Alexander

[morlock-holmes]

Okay, guys, after reading a post by @centrally-unplanned I just took that ACX "AI Turing Test" that Scott Alexander did, and I am screaming, as the kids used to say.

You guys are way, way overthinking this.

I thought I would do better than average, and I guess I did; excluding three pictures I had seen before, I got 31/46 correct.

Not great if you're taking the SAT, but I feel like if I could call a roulette spin correctly 2 times out of 3 I could clean up in Vegas.

So, what is the secret of my amazing, D+ performance?

You have to look at the use of color and composition as tools to draw the eye to points of interest.

AI is really bad at this, when left to its own devices.

For example, here:

Part of the reason to suspect that this is AI is the "AI house style" and the bad hands that I literally only noticed right this exact second as I was typing this sentence. Even if the hands were rendered correctly, I would still clock this as AI.

The focal point of this piece ought to be the face of the woman and the little dragon she is looking at (Just noticed the dragon's wings don't match up either), but take off your glasses or squint at this for a second:

Your eye is being drawn by the bright gold sparkles on the lower right side of the piece. That particular bright gold is only in that spot on the image, but there's no reason to look there, it's just an upper arm and an elbow. The bright light source highlighting the woman's horn separates it out as a point of interest.

Meanwhile, the weird aurora streaming out of the woman's face on the left side means that it is blending in with the background.

In other words, the way the image is composed, and the subject matter suggest that your eye should be drawn here:

But the use of color suggests that you should look here:

That's a senseless place to draw the eye towards! It would be a really weird mistake for a human to make! In fact, I think there's a strong argument that the really close cropped picture of the face of the character is a strong improvement. It's still not a particularly good composition, but at least the color contrast now draws the eye to the proper points.

In fact, I would say that a good reason for my performance not being even better was this alarming statement at the start of the test:

I've tried to crop some pictures of both types into unusual shapes, so it won't be as easy as "everything that's in DALL-E's default aspect ratio is AI".

Uh...

So how about this one:

This is a lot better anatomically and in terms of the use of color and light to draw the eye towards sensible parts of the painting. The lighting makes pretty good sense in terms of coming from a particular direction and it also draws the eye to effectively to the face and the outstretched hand of the figure.

It's also a really flat and meaningless composition and subject matter that no renaissance artist would have chosen. What is this angel doing, exactly? Our eye is drawn to the face and hand, and the figure is looking off towards the left side, at, uh, what exactly?

But then I thought, "Well, maybe Scott chopped out a giant chunk of the picture, and this is just a detail from, like, the lower right eighth of some giant painting with three other figures that makes total sense"

This makes sense as a piece of a larger human made artwork, but if you tell me, "Nope, that's the whole thing and this is the original, un-cropped picture" I'd go, "Oh, AI, obviously.

All of the ones I had trouble with were AI art with good composition and use of color, and human ones with bad composition and use of color. For example, this one:

This has three solid points of interest arranged in an interesting relationship with different colors to block them out. I'd say the biggest tells are that the astronauts' feet are out of frame, which is a weird choice, and looking closely now, the landscape and smoke immediately to the right of the ship don't really make sense.

But again; I had to think, "Maybe Scott just cropped it weird and they had feet in the original picture."

Here's another problem:

StableDiffusion being bad at composition is such a known problem that there are a variety of tools which a person can use to manually block out the composition. In fact, let me try something.

I popped open Krita (Which now has a StableDiffusion plugin) and after literally dozens of generations and a couple of different models I landed on ZavyChromaXL with the following prompt:

concept art of two astronauts walking towards a spaceship on an alien planet, with a giant moon in th background, artstation, classic scifi, book cover

And this was the best I could do:

Not great, but Krita has a tool that lets you break an image into regions which each have different prompts, so I quickly blocked something out:

Each of those color blobs has a different part of the prompt, so the green region has "futuristic astronauts" the blue is the spaceship, the orange is the moon, grey is the ground and pink is the sky, which gives us:

Still way too much, so we can use Krita's adaptive patch tool and AI object removal to get:

I'm not saying it's high art, or even any good, but it's better than the stuff I was getting from a pure prompt, because a human did the composition.

But it's still so dominated by AI processes that it's fair to call it "AI Art".

Which makes me wonder how many of the AI pictures I called out as human made because one of the traits I was looking for, good composition, was in fact, actually made by a human.

[liskantope]

I've been feeling devastated about last week's disaster of a debate (among other political developments) and see it as evidence that Biden was never a fit candidate for reelection. And at this point I really don't think he has it in him to stick out a job like the presidency all the way until 2029. But I think a lot of people are really overreacting in terms of what kind or variety of weakness it exposed in Biden. I'm a little stunned by how many people -- not generally Republicans or anti-leftists or leftists who have a bias against Biden already, but moderate-left-ish types such as Scott Alexander and Kat Rosenfield -- who seem convinced of things like that the debate shockingly but obviously "proved" that Biden is completely senile, has a clinical level of dementia, is unfit to be president right at this moment (let alone for 4.5 more years), obviously isn't acting as president but must be sitting around dazed while others do the work for him, that the Biden team's insistence that Biden is fundamentally fit has now glaringly been exposed as a complete lie, etc.

One particular narrow range of skills was on display at the debate, and I'm not sure exactly what succinct term to use for it, but it was something like "smooth articulation ability", and it's something I think about a lot as a communicator in my own professional context. There have always been certain mental states I get into (often triggered by stress or sleep deprivation) where words and sentences don't come out as clearly, get caught up in the moment on the wrong beat and get sidetracked, and struggle to get wrapped up without becoming run-ons that lack in a conclusion, where I mumble and stammer easily, and where I have trouble recalling particular words and phrases on the fly, and these contrast dramatically with my moments where the opposite is the case. This especially affects my teaching: it used to fairly often be the case that I had "bad days" where I could tell right from the start of the 75-minute class period that I wasn't going to be able to form thoughts as well as on my "good days". With more experience I've gradually learned how to minimize the "bad days", but I'm still prone to it if I'm not careful. Yet, even at my worst moments of this, it says nothing about my knowledge of the topic I'm teaching about, nor about my fitness in general. It's a very narrow aspect of my mental abilities.

Now one could point out that a huge part of being a politician is being a absolute world-class "smooth articulator". And that's true, and Biden certainly was once, and clearly old age has eroded his ability at this. But it's kind of beside the point when someone is suggesting that stumbling a lot at a debate is evidence of having dementia and being too old for one's job, other than that our being accustomed to politicians being extremely skilled at articulation is obfuscating the fact that for a typical person (whether old and senile or not), having to express one's ideas on the fly in the style of a presidential debate is incredibly difficult. I believe the great majority of adult humans -- including those who are dismissing Biden now, including a lot of the very intelligent and generally articulate among us, including myself -- would probably not be able to do much better than Biden did at that debate if we were placed in his position, and it doesn't say much about our ability to make decisions in the role of US president or about our dementia status.

All that said, what matters most in a presidential debate is the vibes each candidate gives off, and Biden definitely gave off "doddering old man" vibes in just about the worst way possible, which will certainly make a lot of people not feel okay about voting for him, whether or not they've seriously reflected on his capability of performing the actual non-public tasks required of a president.

[denizthe]

Scott Alexander

[st-just]

Did you know: White noise was named because its wave spectrum resembles white light. Pink noise was named because its wave spectrum resembles pink light. Brown noise was named after Robert Brown, who helped discover it. This is one of my least favorite facts.

-Scott Alexander, Book Review: Rhythms Of The Brain

[90smovies]

[recordcrash]

Long ago, I started maintaining a fiction recommendation list at the Homestuck Discord, after the original comic ended in 2016. We were all desperately looking for more stories like it, because with that awful ending, it hardly felt like we had finished anything. [...]

There’s an interesting disconnect between it and this blog. I’ve reviewed some of its featured works upon reread, but the vast majority remains untouched, to the point I highly doubt many of you know it exists. This post will bridge that gap: I’m going to write at least one short review per work in every category of the list.

Read the full post here.

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Ed Wood (1994, Tim Burton)

12/07/2024

[rhetthammersmithhorror]

MONSTERS | The Demons | S2.E8 | 1989

[misomythus]

I’m an expert on Nietzsche (I’ve read some of his books), but not a world-leading expert (I didn’t understand them).

[opheliagallery]

Photographed by: Scott Alexander

[illizstrations]

for being rivals, we sure do have a lot of ex dodgers on our team 🤔

[vintagewarhol]

[liskantope]

Drat, I just realized that I let the 10-year anniversary of my first seeing Scott Alexander's writing pass unrecognized by me. It must have been, most likely, January 13th, 2014 that a distant Facebook friend (likely friended from certain philosophical-discourse-ish Facebook groups years earlier but I already couldn't remember; we've certainly never met) posted Scott's Slate Star Codex essay "A Response to Apophemi on Triggers".

Mind you, this isn't the most important 10-year anniversary for me this year, as I didn't follow up on learning who Scott Alexander was or familiarizing myself with Less Wrong or the rationalist community until my spring semester was over several months later, sometime in May 2014, and I didn't (re)adopt the handle Liskantope and start participating in any way until a couple of months later still. When I first read "a response to Apophemi" ten years ago, I'm not sure I registered the name of the author, and I distinctly remember assuming that Slate Star Codex was some sort of community blog or forum, perhaps through glancing at the archives and seeing an implausible number of posts for only one author, and more likely because most of my exposure to "the blogosphere" had been through community blogs / online magazines / something of that sort (e.g. Feministing, Jezebel, Freethought Blogs). But reading a blog post like that was an absolute revelation to me, and I still have fairly vivid memories of some of my thought processes as I went through it section by section. I recall forcefully filing it away in my mind as "I need to follow up on the source of this to see if there's more, but not until this new semester is over and I have more time."

The revelation for me came from not only the (honestly rather earthshaking) event of this being the first article I ever read (as opposed to the occasional poorly-calibrated Facebook comment from that one friend) arguing against the general SJ mentality of the time (I was introduced to the term "Social Justice" through this essay and had internally been referring to it by several other terms up until that time; "woke" wouldn't show up until several years later), and eloquently at that, and not seeming to come from a conservative or otherwise obnoxious viewpoint. It was also that I had just never encountered anyone who wrote quite like this, with so much genuine politeness and compassion for the other party whose views they were arguing against and yet so rhetorically forceful against them at the same time, with a particular combination of intellectual meticulousness, and easy-to-read, semi-informal, lightness to the writing style, through which the general good character of the writer palpably comes through.

(Well, the brief paragraph about "hoisting the black flag" is pretty sinister actually, and I prefer to think that Scott was being carelessly hyperbolic. I don't think I took any notice of it on the first or second reading during 2014, though. At the time I had no idea who the "Heartiste" was that Scott was referring to.)

It's always interesting to reread something from a full decade ago and think about how long that is in "internet years" and how ways of talking about certain things has changed. Scott used the ze/zir pronouns which were (unfortunately) still very popular at the time but, as I recall, not for much longer, and he switched to they/them within a few months of this. He seems to use transsexual interchangeably with transgender (as I remember I kind of did at the time as well) and even used cissexual, which I didn't recall was ever a word. And, of course, although he discussed racism as a name-calling word quite a bit, he basically used "SJ" and "feminism" quite interchangeably, reflecting a perception I shared throughout the first half of the 2010's of SJ being essentially equivalent to (the popular internet form of) feminism.

It's still kind of a mystery to me exactly who Apophemi was. Okay, looking back at their post that Scott was responding to, it seems they were also going by Cyrus Alexander, and were an Oberlin student at the time. But, given that once I got into rationalist community stuff a few months later, I basically never heard anything about them again, and their Wordpress blog's most recent update is from only half a year later, I have to wonder what it is about their blog or this particular essay demanded so much of Scott's attention. Apophemi's post isn't even particularly substantial or hard-hitting or well-written; why did it carry so much weight? Was it just that Apophemi was directly attacking the rationalist community and got a critical number of shares and reblogs? Was Apophemi just a temporarily famous figure in that corner of the online world, rather like the Tumblr-user Hotel Concierge was for a brief period around a year later before becoming almost forgotten? It is interesting that only two (arguably three, counting Ozy, mentioned multiple times not by name in Scott's piece) characters were involved in the first big controversial rat-community-related essay I was exposed to, and then one of them immediately and permanently disappeared from my view.

EDITED TO ADD: I also forgot to mention that Scott's "response to Apophemi" explicitly describes the cancellation attempt against him when he was editor of his college newspaper, and as far as I know, this is the earliest time Scott explicitly talked about this traumatic life event (except that he probably talked about it in his LiveJournal at the time it happened, but as he had locked the pre-college-graduation period of his LJ right before I came across it -- likely primarily because of this incident! -- I and most others have never seen it). He (understandably!) pretty much never mentioned it so explicitly again in the next decade, so my very first introduction to Scott included knowing this about him while I don't think that many among his bulk of later fans did. But it's an interesting (probable) coincidence that, as of several days ago, he first described the event again in his January 24th post on trauma/politics, ten years later to the month.

[fipindustries]

This is such a funny answer. Scott threw a quick joke about how some people become addicted to obsessing over gender and trans people and a bunch of terfs got their knickers in a bunch over it. So your man says "you know what? You probably ARE addicted to getting angry at transpeople, get over it"

[st-just]

There are so many skyscrapers. I’m an heir to Art Deco and the cult of progress; I should idolize skyscrapers as symbols of human accomplishment. I can’t. They look no more human than a termite nest. Maybe less. They inspire awe, but no kinship. What marvels techno-capital creates as it instantiates itself, too bad I’m a hairless ape and can take no credit for such things.

-Scott Alexander, Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco

[90smovies]