I think they took the rather elementary fact about random walks that the variance grows linearly with time and, in trying to make a profundity, got the math wrong and invented a silly meaning for "in retrospect".
Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:
Scott Alexander was accused of being secretly a right-wing racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled, and I think a bunch of his followers believed it, and now they're shocked and hurt that he's actually the sincere center left guy he said he was the whole time.
(Via.)
(For convenience: The leaked e-mails in which he admits to being secretly racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled. And his endorsement of super-racist Richard Lynn from last month.)
Over on Bluesky, Mike Drucker sneers this as "German scientists in 1945 filling out their job application for Operation Paperclip".
I'd swear I've seen that exact same "realization" from Aella before, when she posted something like "I got really into tradcath practices for [the writer's barely disguised fetish] reasons, and now I'm shocked that they really actually do hate sex work."
Edit to add:
ok what the FUCK is goin on with the neo-trads? I was just over here enjoying this free life, individualism, subversive, unwoke cultural movement and I thought everybody was on board but suddenly BAM we've got a a bunch of them spawning into sex-negative tradcaths or whatever [...] i'm just sad cause i thought this section of culture were my allies. we both were like 'leave me alone, authoritarian government/culture', and were appropriately skeptical of novel identity movements, willing to say the weirdo things.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sT5MX8jK9tHiBM5NK/re-taste
A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.
No it doesn't, you fools, you absolute rubes
If you consider your normative values to be true, then everything looks like progress.
wat
Scott Alexander was a founding though-leader behind the Lightcone salon.
Your future region of the spacetime diagram is inside a locker, nerd
https://xcancel.com/tsarnick/status/1882927003508359242
Eliezer Yudkowsky says he would like to be a post-human some day, but the way to get there is by experimenting on augmenting biological intelligence through adult gene therapy targeting the human brain with suicide volunteers who may end up schizophrenic rather than taking a "leap of death" into unconstrained AI development
(found via flipping through LW for sneerable posts/comments)
And I'm sure that your snide remark will both tell them what to simplify and explain how to do so.
Enjoy your free trip to the egress.
I mean, no, not really? "New AI is not as energy-efficient as first advertised" is just a special case of "AI is not as advertised", i.e., the least surprising turn of events.
I don't think the Scholastic Book Fair ever gave its blessing to the Star Trek Voyager tie-in novel where a derelict starship is the centerpiece of a battle between alien races-of-the-week that has raged for generations and stripped the metal from all the habitable planets in the sector. The derelict is from the species of the "this is tranya, I hope you relish it as much as I" guy played by Ron Howard's brother.
Her talk of people being "desperate" for Scoot to be racist suggests a dismally gamified view of life. I mean, he's a racist. However I feel about that, it doesn't change the basic fact. She's playing for a weird gotcha of some kind that could only ever make sense if you (a) regard writing as point-scoring and also (b) accept Richard Lynn-ism as science.