It was grok who shut down arms shipments to Ukraine. Nobody knows why, they don’t notice until someone pointed it out, and nobody wants to admit that it happened. Prove me wrong.
"Grok looks to me like a model that was marinated in 4chan and Twitter, fine-tuned by wanking bonobos, and given no guardrails, because Musk thinks that’s how you end up with kids who call themselves xe/xir,"
This description sparked joy. I think I will keep it.
That "dialectic exercise," as you put it, has been haunting me, too. (I don't share the general sentiment that Mehdi Hassan performed brilliantly, though. He seemed scarcely more coherent than his interlocutors.) The entire show is appalling--the format, the luridness, the degradedness, the lack all intellectual standards and aspirations.
Compare that to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ. This debate probably played a similar role, culturally, in 1965. Many people saw it (I think it was televised in the US, if not live, then soon after); everyone was probably talking about it the next day, and the two men were, like Mehdi Hassan, widely admired for their skills as debaters.The topic was highly culturally charged, and the tone was emotional. That took place nearly within my lifetime, yet it's like seeing another species--a much more intelligent one.
Is it not clear that we've done something *terrible* to our cognitive ability since then? Compared to literally anyone in public life today, both men seem like giants of the intellect. It isn't a minor difference. Has any civilization before ours seen such a steep reduction in verbal intelligence over such a short period? In basic reasoning skills? I'm pretty sure that this is entirely because of the Internet--nothing else accounts for it--and particularly social media.
You'd think it would give us pause that the people who brought us social media, with all of the unexpected, catastrophic, and tragic cdamage it's done to our societies, are the very ones who are now racing to bring us AGI. We *know* these people can't be trusted. Their track record is abysmal. But we don't learn. And perhaps their products have ensured we *can't* learn.
I would challenge your analysis here, Claire (specifically: "Is it not clear that we've done something *terrible* to our cognitive ability since then? Compared to literally anyone in public life today, both men seem like giants of the intellect. It isn't a minor difference. Has any civilization before ours seen such a steep reduction in verbal intelligence over such a short period? In basic reasoning skills? I'm pretty sure that this is entirely because of the Internet--nothing else accounts for it--and particularly social media."
When the Globe theater was constructed in 1599 and started performing Shakespeare's plays, who was in the audience? "The cheapest tickets, costing one penny, allowed working-class individuals—such as laborers, apprentices, servants, and artisans—to stand in the open-air "pit" or yard. These "groundlings" made up a significant portion of the audience, often numbering in the hundreds. Historical accounts, like those from contemporary writer Thomas Platter in 1599, describe the Globe as a place where common folk enjoyed plays alongside food and drink, creating a lively atmosphere."
When Mozart's (arguably) most sophisticated opera, Così Fan Tutte, had its inaugural exclusive run at the Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna in 1791, who was in the audience? "The lower classes, or “common folk,” attended as groundlings or in cheaper seats, similar to the Globe Theatre’s model in Shakespeare’s time. Standing room tickets were priced low (around 7–14 kreuzers), making the opera accessible to laborers, servants, and apprentices. Schikaneder’s theater was known for its populist appeal, with The Magic Flute’s fairy-tale elements, comic characters like Papageno, and lavish staging (e.g., magical effects) drawing in less affluent audiences. Contemporary accounts, like those in Viennese newspapers, note the theater’s rowdy, diverse crowds, indicating significant lower-class attendance."
After the Bolshoi Ballet troupe first started performing in its own theater in 1826, the most popular ballets were La Sylphide in the 1830s and Giselle in the 1850s. Who was in the audience? "The lower classes, including laborers, artisans, and domestic workers, attended in significant numbers, particularly in cheaper standing areas or upper galleries (as low as 10–15 kopecks). Accounts from the 1830s and 1840s note lively, diverse crowds, with workers enjoying the spectacle of dance and music, especially during festive seasons or public holidays."
Compare that with the last 75 years:
After the Sydney Opera House was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973, its most performed works were La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, and Swan Lake. Who was in the audience? The lower classes are not even mentioned. It's the upper classes, professional middle classes, and tourists (who are drawn from the same two layers).
And we already discussed the enormous difference in knowledge required of even elementary school graduates in the 1910s and American high school students (and even teachers!) starting in the second half of the 20th century.
Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987. The phenomenon was already irreversible by then.
What you are witnessing in the quality of public discourse is the consequence of the forces in play during the preceding generations.
There was no internet and no social media in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. What is responsible for such societal stratification and for the dumbing down of the population?
I'm sure you can guess my theory: the educational and cultural fallout of the political and economic policies pushed through by the progressive administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (with an assist by Richard Nixon).
Thank you, Claire, for the link to the Baldwin/Buckley debate. I agree with you that the genteel rules extant for the Baldwin/Buckley debate beat by a mile the Jubilee 'debate' - a 𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦, as it offers only a sham of 𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤 𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘶𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. Honestly, I was confused: 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 is what Oxford considers debate? I am glad you add your understanding and experience to offer clarity.
I shared the Jubilee video because it reminds me of John Gibbons; rotten to its core from within, Rome and its empire proved sitting ducks from 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 for the Goths, Visigoths, and Vandals, 𝘦𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘪. Seems clear the USA stands today upon a similar precipice.
btw, the tech overlords have made no secret their concern; their advance prep proceeds apace. The plans are convoluted but clear: in one instance, an armored vehicle with a motorcycle carried aloft, armament straddling the handlebars and panniers to help clear a possibly congested path to McCarran Airport, where a fueled and running jet awaits his arrival that will whisk him to his underground bolthole buried deep in New Zealand's hinterlands. That location armed and stocked to the 9s, with enough material and materiel to allow its user to wait out more than a handful of years. And the underground bolthole is no mere hole in the ground. Really, the plans are quite... charming.
A family member I cherish advised me to watch the whole Jubilee episode. I haven't even seen clips yet – and the description, "The entire show is appalling--the format, the luridness, the degradedness, the lack all intellectual standards and aspirations", does not make me eager to. Should I do it for love?
"Is it not clear that we've done something *terrible* to our cognitive ability since then?"
The raw ability? No. Civilizing it? Yes.
Bright people who make it in the attention economy ditch basic reasoning skills, not because they can't do them, but when they're rewarded for avoiding them.
Why stipulate, why concede a point, when you can convince the onlookers already rooting for you that you've "owned" your interlocutor better if you don't? To cooperatively reason with your interlocutor is a gesture of friendship, however slight. It's not the performative hostility that lets both sides preen to their fanbase that they "owned" the other side, affirming to their fans they're still uncontaminated by actually considering what their interlocutor has to say.
"Debate bro" culture isn't a side of YouTube I see much of. I'd rather use it to listen to a natural-history lecture, or music, or lectures about music – presentations *about* something other than deploring outgroups. But I have to know what to want in order to ferret out the good stuff.
I'm *just* starting to read this, but I have to say with the Metamorphosis reference in the opening line, you're officially my hero.
EDIT: Well, now that I'm done - I have no idea how we chimps are going to extricate ourselves from this hellacious Chinese finger-trap. One thing's for sure, I am going to update my own organic brain weights to discount the Gary Marcus and company take - something like "this is all a bubble anyway and doomerism is the foolish twin of the boosters, essentially providing free advertising". It's too much of a tempting security blanket.
I would love to have a number of different LLMs read this article and provide solutions to the problems it identifies. If they can, then there's no problem; if they cannot, then they're not so "intelligent."
Wow: ChatGPT is notably smarter than the others, isn't it. I've rarely interacted with Claude or Gemini, so I don't know if this is typical, but only ChatGPT immediately picked up on the difference between capability and intelligence.
There are many things we should be doing--including implementing *all* the measures suggested by all three of the LLMs. (I've written about this too, by the way--it's not the next part, but the part after.) They're suggesting these because these are the standard and universal recommendations of everyone who's ever thought about this. Even the CEOs now ignoring these rules used to believe all of that. But now that there's more money and power at stake than anyone can really get their heads around, they've forgotten that this is what they once thought. The *only* people who are against standards, regulations, and laws like these are the people who think there's a chance they'll somehow win this race and enjoy God-like wealth and power--for a while, anyway.
I know that some of them believe it will end very, very badly--but they don't think it's stoppable, so they figure they'll at least get rich. There are also some who truly believe that it's no big deal, and in fact a good thing, if we're replaced by AI: that's just "evolution," and the AIs deserve to win because they're more evolved. (The culture around this sounds insane.)
Meanwhile, people like Elon and his Russian stooge buddy David Sacks are telling Trump that any limit or regulation at all on what Elon is allowed to do means China will win and the woke AIs will trans everyone's kids. Trump has obviously swallowed that hook, line, and sinker.
I don't know whether implementing all of those suggestions would save us--and I suspect they're not enough--but if we don't do at *least* that, we're just insane. That's the *minimum* standard of safety a society any society that wants to live would insist upon.
Ah, I see the problem. Mitchell Porter asks "What are your thoughts?" Put that way right after my verbatim quote, then of course the machine will address what I said instead of what Claire said. Computers are literal. I'm glad it did get around to Claire's essay later.
Thank you for running with this. Each response examines my comment first. That's not what was requested, but OK. Unfortunately, while my remark is clearly mostly facetious to a human reader, the machines took it as a serious proposal. Also OK. I was trying to suggest a recursion-based perspective. (For example, Derrida wrote books about how all texts were necessarily indeterminate and unbounded. When asked by journalists if his own texts were also indeterminate, he reportedly fled the room. That sort of thing.)
The machines then do address Claire's points. To me they sound perfunctory: regulate, educate... The sort of unthinking stock reactions one finds by scraping the internet on other topics too. But then what else would anyone expect?
It was grok who shut down arms shipments to Ukraine. Nobody knows why, they don’t notice until someone pointed it out, and nobody wants to admit that it happened. Prove me wrong.
Good article Claire. I enjoyed the Rocky III reference.
"Grok looks to me like a model that was marinated in 4chan and Twitter, fine-tuned by wanking bonobos, and given no guardrails, because Musk thinks that’s how you end up with kids who call themselves xe/xir,"
This description sparked joy. I think I will keep it.
By now everybody has viewed at least snippets of this dialectic exercise. The complete 100 minutes episode...
https://youtu.be/2S-WJN3L5eo
Claire limns one possible future; this video reveals another.
Those futures can both be true.
That "dialectic exercise," as you put it, has been haunting me, too. (I don't share the general sentiment that Mehdi Hassan performed brilliantly, though. He seemed scarcely more coherent than his interlocutors.) The entire show is appalling--the format, the luridness, the degradedness, the lack all intellectual standards and aspirations.
Compare that to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ. This debate probably played a similar role, culturally, in 1965. Many people saw it (I think it was televised in the US, if not live, then soon after); everyone was probably talking about it the next day, and the two men were, like Mehdi Hassan, widely admired for their skills as debaters.The topic was highly culturally charged, and the tone was emotional. That took place nearly within my lifetime, yet it's like seeing another species--a much more intelligent one.
Is it not clear that we've done something *terrible* to our cognitive ability since then? Compared to literally anyone in public life today, both men seem like giants of the intellect. It isn't a minor difference. Has any civilization before ours seen such a steep reduction in verbal intelligence over such a short period? In basic reasoning skills? I'm pretty sure that this is entirely because of the Internet--nothing else accounts for it--and particularly social media.
You'd think it would give us pause that the people who brought us social media, with all of the unexpected, catastrophic, and tragic cdamage it's done to our societies, are the very ones who are now racing to bring us AGI. We *know* these people can't be trusted. Their track record is abysmal. But we don't learn. And perhaps their products have ensured we *can't* learn.
I would challenge your analysis here, Claire (specifically: "Is it not clear that we've done something *terrible* to our cognitive ability since then? Compared to literally anyone in public life today, both men seem like giants of the intellect. It isn't a minor difference. Has any civilization before ours seen such a steep reduction in verbal intelligence over such a short period? In basic reasoning skills? I'm pretty sure that this is entirely because of the Internet--nothing else accounts for it--and particularly social media."
When the Globe theater was constructed in 1599 and started performing Shakespeare's plays, who was in the audience? "The cheapest tickets, costing one penny, allowed working-class individuals—such as laborers, apprentices, servants, and artisans—to stand in the open-air "pit" or yard. These "groundlings" made up a significant portion of the audience, often numbering in the hundreds. Historical accounts, like those from contemporary writer Thomas Platter in 1599, describe the Globe as a place where common folk enjoyed plays alongside food and drink, creating a lively atmosphere."
When Mozart's (arguably) most sophisticated opera, Così Fan Tutte, had its inaugural exclusive run at the Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna in 1791, who was in the audience? "The lower classes, or “common folk,” attended as groundlings or in cheaper seats, similar to the Globe Theatre’s model in Shakespeare’s time. Standing room tickets were priced low (around 7–14 kreuzers), making the opera accessible to laborers, servants, and apprentices. Schikaneder’s theater was known for its populist appeal, with The Magic Flute’s fairy-tale elements, comic characters like Papageno, and lavish staging (e.g., magical effects) drawing in less affluent audiences. Contemporary accounts, like those in Viennese newspapers, note the theater’s rowdy, diverse crowds, indicating significant lower-class attendance."
After the Bolshoi Ballet troupe first started performing in its own theater in 1826, the most popular ballets were La Sylphide in the 1830s and Giselle in the 1850s. Who was in the audience? "The lower classes, including laborers, artisans, and domestic workers, attended in significant numbers, particularly in cheaper standing areas or upper galleries (as low as 10–15 kopecks). Accounts from the 1830s and 1840s note lively, diverse crowds, with workers enjoying the spectacle of dance and music, especially during festive seasons or public holidays."
Compare that with the last 75 years:
After the Sydney Opera House was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973, its most performed works were La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, and Swan Lake. Who was in the audience? The lower classes are not even mentioned. It's the upper classes, professional middle classes, and tourists (who are drawn from the same two layers).
And we already discussed the enormous difference in knowledge required of even elementary school graduates in the 1910s and American high school students (and even teachers!) starting in the second half of the 20th century.
Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987. The phenomenon was already irreversible by then.
What you are witnessing in the quality of public discourse is the consequence of the forces in play during the preceding generations.
There was no internet and no social media in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. What is responsible for such societal stratification and for the dumbing down of the population?
I'm sure you can guess my theory: the educational and cultural fallout of the political and economic policies pushed through by the progressive administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (with an assist by Richard Nixon).
Thank you, Claire, for the link to the Baldwin/Buckley debate. I agree with you that the genteel rules extant for the Baldwin/Buckley debate beat by a mile the Jubilee 'debate' - a 𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦, as it offers only a sham of 𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤 𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘶𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. Honestly, I was confused: 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 is what Oxford considers debate? I am glad you add your understanding and experience to offer clarity.
I shared the Jubilee video because it reminds me of John Gibbons; rotten to its core from within, Rome and its empire proved sitting ducks from 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 for the Goths, Visigoths, and Vandals, 𝘦𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘪. Seems clear the USA stands today upon a similar precipice.
btw, the tech overlords have made no secret their concern; their advance prep proceeds apace. The plans are convoluted but clear: in one instance, an armored vehicle with a motorcycle carried aloft, armament straddling the handlebars and panniers to help clear a possibly congested path to McCarran Airport, where a fueled and running jet awaits his arrival that will whisk him to his underground bolthole buried deep in New Zealand's hinterlands. That location armed and stocked to the 9s, with enough material and materiel to allow its user to wait out more than a handful of years. And the underground bolthole is no mere hole in the ground. Really, the plans are quite... charming.
A family member I cherish advised me to watch the whole Jubilee episode. I haven't even seen clips yet – and the description, "The entire show is appalling--the format, the luridness, the degradedness, the lack all intellectual standards and aspirations", does not make me eager to. Should I do it for love?
"Is it not clear that we've done something *terrible* to our cognitive ability since then?"
The raw ability? No. Civilizing it? Yes.
Bright people who make it in the attention economy ditch basic reasoning skills, not because they can't do them, but when they're rewarded for avoiding them.
Why stipulate, why concede a point, when you can convince the onlookers already rooting for you that you've "owned" your interlocutor better if you don't? To cooperatively reason with your interlocutor is a gesture of friendship, however slight. It's not the performative hostility that lets both sides preen to their fanbase that they "owned" the other side, affirming to their fans they're still uncontaminated by actually considering what their interlocutor has to say.
"Debate bro" culture isn't a side of YouTube I see much of. I'd rather use it to listen to a natural-history lecture, or music, or lectures about music – presentations *about* something other than deploring outgroups. But I have to know what to want in order to ferret out the good stuff.
It is infuriating that people will insist that Musk is a sheep, when he doesn't even bother putting on the clothing anymore.
I know, right?
I'm *just* starting to read this, but I have to say with the Metamorphosis reference in the opening line, you're officially my hero.
EDIT: Well, now that I'm done - I have no idea how we chimps are going to extricate ourselves from this hellacious Chinese finger-trap. One thing's for sure, I am going to update my own organic brain weights to discount the Gary Marcus and company take - something like "this is all a bubble anyway and doomerism is the foolish twin of the boosters, essentially providing free advertising". It's too much of a tempting security blanket.
My kingdom for a realistic action plan.
I'm so glad you noticed. I was deeply worried that no one would.
I would love to have a number of different LLMs read this article and provide solutions to the problems it identifies. If they can, then there's no problem; if they cannot, then they're not so "intelligent."
I was able to perform your experiment with the following three AIs:
Gemini 2.5 Pro: https://g.co/gemini/share/dd9d520c1d3d
Claude Opus 4: https://claude.ai/share/f8c757c2-7bd3-4172-8140-3c0ee135a030
ChatGPT o3: https://chatgpt.com/share/6882812e-7ecc-8001-99bf-806f63949d79
I want to do it with Grok 3 as well, but can't get the PDF with the text of Claire's article to finish loading.
Wow: ChatGPT is notably smarter than the others, isn't it. I've rarely interacted with Claude or Gemini, so I don't know if this is typical, but only ChatGPT immediately picked up on the difference between capability and intelligence.
There are many things we should be doing--including implementing *all* the measures suggested by all three of the LLMs. (I've written about this too, by the way--it's not the next part, but the part after.) They're suggesting these because these are the standard and universal recommendations of everyone who's ever thought about this. Even the CEOs now ignoring these rules used to believe all of that. But now that there's more money and power at stake than anyone can really get their heads around, they've forgotten that this is what they once thought. The *only* people who are against standards, regulations, and laws like these are the people who think there's a chance they'll somehow win this race and enjoy God-like wealth and power--for a while, anyway.
I know that some of them believe it will end very, very badly--but they don't think it's stoppable, so they figure they'll at least get rich. There are also some who truly believe that it's no big deal, and in fact a good thing, if we're replaced by AI: that's just "evolution," and the AIs deserve to win because they're more evolved. (The culture around this sounds insane.)
Meanwhile, people like Elon and his Russian stooge buddy David Sacks are telling Trump that any limit or regulation at all on what Elon is allowed to do means China will win and the woke AIs will trans everyone's kids. Trump has obviously swallowed that hook, line, and sinker.
I don't know whether implementing all of those suggestions would save us--and I suspect they're not enough--but if we don't do at *least* that, we're just insane. That's the *minimum* standard of safety a society any society that wants to live would insist upon.
Ah, I see the problem. Mitchell Porter asks "What are your thoughts?" Put that way right after my verbatim quote, then of course the machine will address what I said instead of what Claire said. Computers are literal. I'm glad it did get around to Claire's essay later.
Thank you for running with this. Each response examines my comment first. That's not what was requested, but OK. Unfortunately, while my remark is clearly mostly facetious to a human reader, the machines took it as a serious proposal. Also OK. I was trying to suggest a recursion-based perspective. (For example, Derrida wrote books about how all texts were necessarily indeterminate and unbounded. When asked by journalists if his own texts were also indeterminate, he reportedly fled the room. That sort of thing.)
The machines then do address Claire's points. To me they sound perfunctory: regulate, educate... The sort of unthinking stock reactions one finds by scraping the internet on other topics too. But then what else would anyone expect?