Carl T. Bergstrom
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carlbergstrom.com
Carl T. Bergstrom
@carlbergstrom.com

Professor, UW Biology / Santa Fe Institute

I study how information flows in biology, science, and society.

Book: *Calling Bullshit*, http://tinyurl.com/fdcuvd7b

LLM course: https://thebullshitmachines.com

Corvids: https://tinyurl.com/mr2n5ymk

he/him .. more

Carl Theodore Bergstrom is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist and a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States. Bergstrom is a critic of low-quality or misleading scientific research. He is the co-author of a book on misinformation called Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World and teaches a class by the same name at University of Washington. .. more

Biology 21%
Mathematics 20%
Pinned
Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.

thebullshitmachines.com
INTRODUCTION
thebullshitmachines.com

Reposted by Carl T. Bergstrom

It’s really hard to defend industry academic collaborations with meta as earnest, if they’re internally burying evidence of harm.

www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Tonight I'm looking through my grandfather's high school yearbook from Comanche, Oklahoma.

I'm blown away by this photo of the football team lined up on the dirt of main street, 101 years ago.

And all caps.

For the record I did none of the above though the cover artist did me no favors.

LOL yeah that too!

One of my favorite things to do is to complain about contemporary technology. Right now I'm hurtling through the sky in a metal tube at something north of 500 mph and momentarily the (wireless) internet was giving me 14 kbps which is only 10x as fast as my phone in 1985 but then it increased 10000x.

Yes. This is very entirely consistent with what I’ve seen.

I don't have words for the sort of confused this makes me feel.
Reporter: Are you affirming that you think the president is a fascist?

Mamdani: I've spoken about --

Trump: Just say yes, it's easier than explaining.
Reporter: Are you affirming that you think the president is a fascist?

Mamdani: I've spoken about --

Trump: Just say yes, it's easier than explaining.

Yeah. Exactly.

More on this phenomenon. (gift link)
They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.
www.nytimes.com

Wait until you hear about instagram.

But inevitable given the amount of bad fanfic these things are trained on.

Finally, I know of at least one case where the letter writer, deep into an episode of AI-induced psychosis, asked the LLM why scientists were not responding. The machine suggested that perhaps the scientists were trying to steal his discovery.

This will get someone killed sooner or later.

The letter writers are being convinced by LLMs that they have made monumental discoveries that they don't remotely begin to understand, not even to the point of being able to explain for themselves what they think they have found.

While letters of yore would attempt to signal seriousness with exhaustive if often incoherent technical detail, the current crop of LLM-induced letters are hopelessly vague, carrying grandiose names (a unified theory of fractal cybernetic enthalpy) but without any detail, mathematical or otherwise.

Of course I've received crank letters for decades. But there's a decided shift in the frequency and the tenor of what is arriving now. The LLM-induced ones are immediately recognizable as such.

Yes, I wrote about that at the time.

No, you don't have to take my word for it. You can just go fuck yourself.

Oh fuck this left right and center.

Totally.

Nothing funnier than technology-induced mental illness.

Or something.

Lots of calls for me to publish these emails.

Last thing I'm going to do is publicly mock people dealing with mental health challenges for being exploited by OpenAI etc.

Yes, he's fantastic. Not a member of the group but this collaboration is exquisite.

Get out of my inbox

Just your periodic reminder that Sweetheart — out of Oslo, Norway — is the best Americana band that you've never heard.

Tidal: tidal.com/album/413132...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxSF...
Sweetheart feat. Nils Petter Molvær – «Nothing Lasts Forever – Live From A Living Room» – Part 1
YouTube video by Sweetheart
www.youtube.com

A nontrivial fraction of these people appear to be seriously unwell.

OpenAI claims that they have the situation well under control.

My inbox suggests otherwise.
I am by no means a prominent public intellectual, but my inbox is increasingly filled with messages from people who have been convinced by sycophantic chatbots that they have discovered revolutionary theories that entirely upend our scientific understanding of the universe.

Cool story in the @salish-current.org about our collaboration with Sedro-Woolley high school teachers Linsey Kitchens and Anna Ferdinand to bring _Modern Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines_ (thebullshitmachines.com) to a high school audience.
Sedro-Woolley English teachers bring AI literacy into the classroom
Several English classes at Sedro-Woolley High School are implementing lesson plans designed by Linsey Kitchens to help students understand the limitations of artificial intelligence programs such as C...
salish-current.org

I mean sure but it’s a small price to pay to keep someone from me illegally downloading an Elsevier publication.