By all means you can ignore them and refuse to mention them, and call people silly for continuing to pay attention to them, but a "discourse sanction" is not what I think LessWrong is about. People should feel free to engage in whatever ideas they want, regardless of who or what originated them.

I feel like Claude didn't get tripped up here by not providing precise enough instructions, or the op not giving the instructions the benefit of the doubt enough times.

Ha! Turing complete Navier-Stokes steady states via cosymplectic geometry.

In this article, we construct stationary solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations on certain Riemannian $3$-manifolds that exhibit Turing completeness, in the sense that they are capable of performing universal computation. This universality arises on manifolds admitting nonvanishing harmonic 1-forms, thus showing that computational universality is not obstructed by viscosity, provided the underlying geometry satisfies a mild cohomological condition. The proof makes use of a correspondence between nonvanishing harmonic -forms and cosymplectic geometry, which extends the classical correspondence between Beltrami fields and Reeb flows on contact manifolds.

@gwern perhaps a new addition to your [Surprisingly Turing Complete](https://gwern.net/turing-complete) page.

None of the evidence or framing here is particularly worse than what I would expect from a biased against LW search & retelling of the history, and that is what you're getting if you read Bouchard's writing, so this seems like effectively zero evidence.

It is also notable that they have nothing good to say about LessWrong's response. I think at minimum you have to credit the trading gains many LessWrongers made at the time, and MicroCovid.

That is not to say they are wrong about how early LessWrong was, just that it provides extremely little evidence. Better to read DirectedEvolution's review of Seeing the Smoke.

My guess is the aversion is real, and maybe somewhat cynically I see the rejection of phone calls and emails as motivated mostly by rebellion/fashion cycles rather than anything else. Phone calls and emails just aren't cool anymore. Your parents used them, yuck! And all the boring, very uncool workplaces and companies require them. Very similar to how gen-z dislikes Facebook in favor of Instagram. Facebook is where the boomers are.

The book in which Alex Wellerstein really makes the case was also released yesterday, buy it here!

There is also recent debate about whether Truman was even well informed about the fact that Hiroshima was a city rather than a "purely military target", eg see the book The Most Awful Responsibility, well reviewed by many including Richard Rhodes, as well as the excellent interview with the author by Dan Carlin.

There is a dis-analogy, in the former case you have a single goal, get good at chess. In the latter case there are many goals we want AIs to do, ranging from coding to running scientific experiments to curing diseases and even making art. Obviously if you want a generalist you will want to teach general skills.

Secondly, a big reason labs are focusing on ML research is to get on the recursive-self-improvement super-exponential curve.

Your analogy addresses neither of these points, and I do think that these points are the primary reasons why people are trying to get AIs to do well at ML research. Therefore I think your analogy is bad and you should not make inferences or plans using this logic.

I feel like there was a time just after ChatGPT became big where there were so many different new & competing frameworks for what exactly was going on, shard theory and simulators in particular but also active inference the MIRI views and all the people rolling their own ontologies with which to understand LLMs, and notably trying to make those ontologies explicit and comparing them against each other.

Maybe I'm just around very different people now or doing very different work than I was (I am on both counts), but those conversations aren't really happening anymore. I don't know whether its for good or ill all things considered, but I do get nostalgic for them sometimes.

Interestingly, my tweets were (for whatever reason) much better than usual during this period.

Presumably because you were drunk and angry