Eye You

Pangram is ostensibly very good. They claim their program detects all LLMs, outperforms trained humans, and has 99.98% accuracy. This means that Pangram correctly identifies AI-written text 99.98% of time. They claim a very low false positive rate, somewhere between 0.01% and 0.16%. They claim that Pangram detects "humanized text",...

I see people repeatedly make the mistake of referencing a very low liquidity prediction market and using it to make a nontrivial point. Usually the implication when a market is cited is that its number should be taken somewhat seriously, that it's giving us a highly informed probability. Sometimes a...

Have you guys heard about this Epstein stuff? Shit's pretty crazy. Note: I'm not going to provide a summary of the situation or talk about evidence; this piece is for people that already know these things. I'm going to avoid specifics about what Epstein and co did, and instead will...

So, The Possessed Machines. There's been some discussion already. It is a valuable piece -- it has certainly provoked some thought in me! -- but it has some major flaws. It (sneakily!) dismisses specific arguments about AI existential risk and broad swaths of discourse altogether without actually arguing against them....

As with LLMs, so too with humans. Anthropic released Claude's Constitution today. It's excellent in many ways, and I will have more to say about it (including some criticisms) in other posts. What I'd like to do here is point out how this document straightforwardly can be applied to human...

In September, I applied Lumina probiotic[1]to my mouth. I did this around noon. I noticed effects within six hours. Usually my mouth would begin developing a... taste even just a few hours after I brushed my teeth. But at 6 pm that day, there was no off taste! And at...

So, it's recently come out that Oliver Sacks made up a lot the stuff he wrote. I read parts of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat a few years ago and read Musicophilia and Hallucinations earlier this year. I think I'm generally a skeptical person, one who...