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Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

He's not worried about bias, since it's "an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake." Meanwhile, the preprint's author seems to affirm in the comments that he believes "Which organ in a frog has a function similar to the function of lungs in a bird?" is really just an IQ question.

Emil O. W. Kirkegaard: "learning outcomes" are really just intelligence tests, which they call PISA etc.

November 29, 2025 at 11:45 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

This sounds like a joke, but it's literally the argument. Here's Scott Alexander, who would like you to believe Lynn's numbers have been confirmed by a preprint that averages them with data on learning outcomes and finds the result correlates similarly with measures of national development.

Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake.

November 29, 2025 at 11:45 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=G...

Prohibiting certain words, therefore, would not deprive egos of their expressive possibilities so much as change egos. Neurath explained that one eventually learns, as he did, to avoid dangerous words "half-consciously and without constraint" (1941a, p. 146). The result is not the same person with new linguistic habits but--literally--a changed person: "Building up a Universal Jargon needs a comprehensive training, which is connected with an alteration of our whole attitude.... What comes from an `experiment' with a modified scientific language will be analyzed by a man who is modified by this `experiment,' which is more than an experiment: it performs a kind of self-education" (1941b, p. 216; author's emphasis).

Those who like to use words that come to be prohibited may feel frustrated at first, but their mental habits will change along with their vocabularies. With the success of the Unity of Science Movement, for instance, the divisions between the sciences--and the words used to delineate them--would start to seem anachronistic: "A new generation educated according to unified science will not understand the difference between the `mental' and the `physical' sciences, or between `philosophy of nature' and of `culture'" (Neurath 1933, p. 9). Similarly, devotees of metaphysics would miss their favorite concepts no more than scientists of today miss the vocabularies of phrenology or alchemy.

Screenshot of part of a list of potential prohibited metaphysical words with sources in parentheses where Neurath mentioned or discussed each word:

explanation (h, k)
external world / internal world (a)
fact (a, k)
forces (a)
good/bad (a, d17)
good/evil (c226, d17)
idea (f)
immanent (d8)
interests (m, a16)
interpretation (i)
intuition (d8)
judgment (i)
justice (a, c23)
material/immaterial (a)
meaning (a, a18, b66, c218, e147)

September 4, 2025 at 4:13 AM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

Added a section. I didn't include this example to begin with because I was worried that it would trigger much more defensiveness than the other examples, particularly considering the effort Alexander puts into preempting attacks here. Maybe it will help to address that directly.

I’ve quoted this entire passage since I want to emphasize very clearly that I’m not trying to use this as a bludgeon against Alexander for not reaching the same conclusions that I did about the survey. I’m pointing this out for the sake of anyone reading him: when he says he’s been freaking out, recognizes his biases, and wishes for reasons to disbelieve the study, be aware he was citing it 7 years prior as evidence for his opinions alongside his strategy to promote those opinions without publicly endorsing them.

September 3, 2025 at 8:21 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

Oops, the screenshot from his review got dropped. This is the passage I was talking about.

Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch

September 2, 2025 at 5:01 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

I did email him at the time. Never heard back, but at least he hasn't cited it since as far as I've seen. (I wrote something like this in a footnote in the above, but later made a separate post I could reference, since it keeps coming up: muireall.space/expert-opini...)

Hi Scott,

You recently wrote, in your review of The Cult of Smart,

> Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email).

This is me sending you an email. Every time a new paper from this survey comes out I see people bewilderingly taking it at face value. I appreciate that you expressed hesitance about it, and I hope that expression is made in good faith.

Some notes, just for a start, partially from memory: It's a survey of psychologists, not geneticists, recruited by the authors from journal bylines, professional societies, and conferences. (Fine, as far as it goes. We know what we're looking at, and it's probably not as bad as surveying the bishops on the existence of God.) The first author's views are well-known. (Heavy burden to show unbiased recruitment/response.) The response rate was 20% (out of 1300), and much lower for some questions. Moreover, there appears to be a very opinionated subgroup in the sample: the most positively-rated media source by far (and nearly only net-positive) for accuracy about intelligence is Steve Sailer. The US black-white IQ gap is attributed 50% to genetics, and that block of questions was answered by about twice as many respondents as the questions about international differences, where the average attribution was 20%.

I'd advise against taking these numbers as the kind of expert consensus one should anchor one's opinion on, even with some ad-hoc adjustment or low weight. It's probably safest to ignore survey data in general, but this seems straightforwardly corrupted. One could reasonably suspect it was done or taken advantage of to launder fringe views. It's at least frustrating to see it come around every year with an amnestic "big if true". (I don't mean from you -- I don't remember you linking it directly, although I believe you did link a post prominently featuring it a few years back, without specific commentary.)

M

September 2, 2025 at 4:48 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

Ah, well.

Another pie chart, this one titled "White dude?" with 86% being "White man"

August 30, 2025 at 8:31 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

Titotal did something like this for his book reviews. titotal.substack.com/p/the-walled...

A pie chart titled "Racial diversity" regarding authors of books Scott Alexander has reviewed, with 92% white passing

August 30, 2025 at 8:29 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

So what’s great about writing? It is more durable than the spoken word, of course. But just as importantly, writing allows us to take a step back from language, survey it, fine-tune it, and construct complex structures where one text argues with two others, each of which footnotes fifty others. It would be hard to imagine science without the ability writing provides to survey language from above and use it as building material.

Generative AI represents a second step change in our ability to map and edit culture. Now we can manipulate, not only specific texts and images, but the dispositions, tropes, genres, habits of thought, and patterns of interaction that create them. I don’t think we’ve fully grasped yet what this could mean.

July 6, 2025 at 2:27 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

On what to do about “the most intractable factor militating against socially responsible science and engineering: namely, the enormous value placed on (certain kinds of) technical merit, and the disregard for those deemed not to have (those kinds of) merit.” (Mody, The Squares)

In other words, we have to see “good” science and engineering as relatable to some kind of shared good, rather than evaluating what counts as good in solely technical terms.

much that is “good” that cannot be measured by technical standards: meaning, solidarity, opportunity, material advancement, spiritual enlightenment, mystery, fascination, and so on. Science and engineering necessarily draw on the society of which they are part and parcel for the valorization of these more-than-technical goods that are generated out of technical activity.

First part of Richard Lyman quote: If we are in difficulties partly because our functions are many, and our focus can therefore never be single, it will do us no good to try to return to some simpler day. . . . Instead we ought to glory in the fact that some people are learning to appreciate Keats in one part of the campus, while others are solving problems of linear programming in another. Glory in it, and make a towering virtue of necessity by exposing the one group to the other, and each to a thousand further groups, at every available opportunity.

Second part of Lyman quote: If we are in difficulties partly because our functions are many, and our focus can therefore never be single, it will do us no good to try to return to some simpler day. . . . Instead we ought to glory in the fact that some people are learning to appreciate Keats in one part of the campus, while others are solving problems of linear programming in another. Glory in it, and make a towering virtue of necessity by exposing the one group to the other, and each to a thousand further groups, at every available opportunity.

March 27, 2025 at 6:55 AM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

This does not pretend to be careful thinking even by his standards pbs.twimg.com/media/GhcJzS...

January 18, 2025 at 5:19 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

Neat. x.com/ClementDelan...

Screenshot of Tweet from ClementDelangue, 16 Dec 2024:

Just 10 days after o1's public debut, we’re thrilled to unveil the open-source version of the groundbreaking technique behind its success: scaling test-time compute 🧠💡

By giving models more "time to think," LLaMA 1B outperforms LLaMA 8B in math—beating a model 8x its size. The full recipe is open-source🤯

This is the power of open science and open-source AI! 🌍✨

[Graph labeled "Test-Time Compute-Optimal Scaling", plotting "MATH-500 accuracy" against "Number of generations per problem", where data points with increasing number of generations using Llama 3.2 1B surpass Llama 8B 0-shot CoT by 64 generations per problem.]

December 17, 2024 at 12:15 AM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

(From muireall.space/pdf/consider.... The context is thinking about what we might see in different scenarios for growth of AI firms. "Comparable models can run on anyone's infrastructure within a year or two" is an indicator for a scenario with less growth—particularly via C and D here.)

Screenshot of text from the essay:

In this scenario, AI will contribute to social and economic change, but
it is not on a path to reach transformative capabilities.

Key drivers and indicators
Key drivers towards this scenario relate to profitability of AI research and
production:
1A Specialization of hardware and infrastructure for a particular paradigm
of AI
1B AI training runs as major capital projects
1C Difficulty capturing value from training large AI models
1D Uncertainty about returns from scaling new methods

December 15, 2024 at 10:29 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

In May 2023, I wrote that I expected an open-source model competitive with GPT-4 by the end of 2024. Unfortunately, I wasn't more specific about "open-source", but in the context of the essay I was thinking of open weights. Seems generally agreed that Llama got there, at least?

Screenshot from an appendix containing predictions related to the essay mentioned in the post:

While I forecast as a hobby, I’m generally disinclined to give probabilities
when no decision hinges on them. In this case, because the essay body
attempts to avoid weighing evidence while suggesting places to look for ev‐
idence, it seems important to provide some context on my own views for
the sake of transparency.
1. In 10 years, I judge that the weight of evidence is against similarity to
Scenario 1: 50%
2. In 10 years, I judge that the weight of evidence is against similarity to
Scenario 2: 5%
3. An open‐source model competitive with GPT‐4 is available by the end
of 2024: 60%

December 15, 2024 at 10:28 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

(Another example with privacy. I feel like I don't often see statements like this from technological optimists, but that's either by cultural accident or because they're talking their book, not because liberal/left priorities are incompatible with or obstacles to high-tech flourishing.)

At the foundation: privacy has fundamental individual value, as a source of individual freedom, power, and agency. It helps give individuals a sense of safety, enabling more imaginative personal exploration, and so leading to more individual growth, a richer self, and a deeper human experience. These benefits in turn give privacy a fundamental social value. It enables a deeper diversity of thought and action in the world, leading to more invention, more variation, a more creative and robust society. Privacy also helps enable many other individual and social rights (and their consequences), including freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of investigation. Without privacy, we wouldn't have Copernicus or Galileo or Jane Austen or Rachel Carson or Martin Luther King. We wouldn't have benefited from the scientific or human rights revolutions. And so not only does privacy enrich human experience directly, it has also enabled transformations in human society that benefit us all broadly.

December 1, 2024 at 5:11 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

A bit tangential, but some of my favorite parts are refreshing statements of traditional concerns from an "optimistic" perspective: if this is as far as current methods for aligning individual interests with collective good get us, we're not on track for utopia when technology gets more powerful.

Screenshot of text from the linked essay:
This was one of Adam Smith's most extraordinary insights – that people acting in their own self-interest in a market economy may also serve the common good. Indeed, this is the primary justification for today's market economy – a point sometimes forgotten or not acknowledged by free market maximalists59. AGI places significant pressure on this alignment: starting or joining an AGI startup is certainly in individuals' self-interest, but may be against our civilization's interest. I believe that if we can solve the Alignment Problem for Individuals, then all else will follow. This is yet another reason to care about problems like climate and too much wealth inequality: they are failures to solve the Alignment Problem for Individuals, and institutional solutions which address those are likely to help address the Alignment Problem for Individuals more broadly60.

December 1, 2024 at 5:03 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

(I suppose, for example, my own "bundle of intuitions" doesn't lead with "feeling for how much potential lies hidden in the physical world" despite my training as a physicist.)

Screenshot of text from the linked essay:
My experience is that the people who (like me) worry about xrisk from ASI (and, more broadly, from science and technology) are also those who instinctively believe recipes for ruin are likely to one day be discovered. It suggests it's just a matter of time. People who instinctively don't believe recipes for ruin are ever likely to be discovered are much more likely to be dismissive of xrisk. Here, for instance, is John Carmack refusing to consider the question. Perhaps this is motivated reasoning on Carmack's part, but he's too thoughtful and intellectually honest for me to believe that's likely. I suspect it's because different people acquire different bundles of intuition from their past experience, particularly their past expert training. Those bundles of intuition take thousands of hours to acquire, and vary greatly for different types of expertise – one is acquiring an entire expert subculture. And different bundles of intuition lead to very different conclusions about whether recipes for ruin are ever likely to be discovered. I suspect, for instance, this is why many economists don't find xrisk compelling – compared to a physicist or chemist they have very little feeling for how much potential lies hidden in the physical world, just as physicists and chemists often have poorly-developed intuitions about economics and scarcity.

December 1, 2024 at 4:46 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

Photo of a Marvin Bell poem from The Book of the Dead Man (#3)
1. About the Beginnings of the Dead Man

When the dead man throws up, he thinks he sees his inner life.
Seeing his vomit, he thinks he sees his inner life.
Now he can pick himself apart, weigh the ingredients, research
his makeup.
He wants to study things outside himself if he can find them.
Moving, the dead man makes the sound of bone on bone.
He bends a knee that doesn’t wish to bend, he raises an arm that
argues with a shoulder, he turns his head by throwing it
wildly to the side.
He envies the lobster the protective sleeves of its limbs.
He believes the jellyfish has it easy, floating, letting everything pass
through it.
He would like to be a starfish, admired for its shape long after.
Everything the dead man said, he now takes back.
Not as a lively young man demonstrates sincerity or regret.
A young dead man and an old dead man are two different things.
A young dead man is oil, an old dead man is water.
A young dead man is bread and butter, an old dead man is bread and
water—it’s a difference in construction, also architecture.
The dead man was there in the beginning: to the dead man, the sky
is a crucible.
In the dead man’s lifetime, the planet has changed from lava to ash
to cement.
But the dead man flops his feathers, he brings his wings up over
his head and has them touch, he bends over with his beak
to the floor, he folds and unfolds at the line where his
armor creases.
The dead man is open to change and has deep pockets.
The dead man is the only one who will live forever.

Second part of the poem from the previous image.

2. More About the Beginnings of the Dead Man

One day the dead man looked up into the crucible and saw the sun.
The dead man in those days held the sky like a small globe, like a
patchwork ball, like an ultramarine bowl.
The dead man softened it, kneaded it, turned it and gave it volume.
He thrust a hand deep into it and shaped it from the inside out.
He blew into it and pulled it and stretched it until it became full-
sized, a work of art created by a dead man.
The excellence of it, the quality, its character, its fundamental
nature, its raison d‘être, its “it” were all indebted to the
dead man.

The dead man is the flywheel of the spinning planet.
The dead man thinks he can keep things the same by not moving.
By not moving, the dead man maintains the status quo at the center
of change.
The dead man, by not moving, is an explorer: he follows his nose.
When it’s not personal, not profound, he can make a new
world anytime.
The dead man is the future, was always the future, can never be
the past.
Like God, the dead man existed before the beginning, a time marked
by galactic static.
Now nothing remains of the first static that isn’t music, fashioned
into melody by the accidents of interval.
Now nothing more remains of silence that isn’t sound.
The dead man has both feet in the past and his head in the clouds.

November 30, 2024 at 4:40 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

Interesting perspective on interdisciplinarity, from The Squares by Cyrus Mody: “the conditions for that [neoliberal] kind of university were created in the turmoil of the long 1970s, even though virtually no one said that that was the kind of university they wanted.”

We can see here how reforms championed by the New Left were also taken up by their establishment foes as a way of preserving institutions—and how those same reforms paved the way for a neoliberal university that neither the SDS nor establishment figures like Bill Rambo had had in mind.

The end result was a university made up of atomized individuals, each pursuing a research portfolio or pedagogical trajectory tailored to their personal preferences, rather than pursuing a path that would integrate the individual into a collective body of expertise.

November 19, 2024 at 8:00 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

(A later, expanded version of that article (scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SP...) has this startling bit about one of the responses Toumey got to the original.)

Also, there was this message from a fourth person at Caltech, who wrote to Engineering &
Science:
Mr. Toumey has taken a very minor and rather insignificant factoid, and through
magnification and distortion, and the expenditure of considerable energy and resources,
achieved a large increase in the entropic state of the universe, resulting in a significant
damage to the environment in the form of wasting large amounts of high quality paper,
and diverted a large population of bright people from thinking about anything important;
a real form of damage to the intellectual environment as well… I expect he can be
appreciated in the way paleontologists value the contributions of dung beetles, who will
pick away at the flesh until the bones of the dead are bright, white, and clean.

November 16, 2024 at 3:23 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

On nanotechnology’s Feynman heritage (Chris Toumey, "Apostolic Succession"): calteches.library.caltech.edu/4129/1/Succe...

Quoted text screenshot, ending with:
First, we have an altered sequence of influence.
The theory of apostolic succession posited that first
there was “Plenty of Room”; then there was much
interest in it; and finally that caused the birth of
nanotechnology. My analysis suggests something
different: first there was “Plenty of Room”; then
there was very little interest in it; meanwhile, there
was the birth of nanotechnology, independent of
it; and finally there was a retroactive interest in
it. I believe we can credit much of the rediscov-
ery to Drexler, who has passionately championed
Feynman’s paper.

November 16, 2024 at 3:21 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

If, decades after Smalley, it will take further decades of coordinated, focused work to even potentially yield results, I don't think a taboo or sociological trap adds much to an explanation of why positional chemistry stalled.

Screenshot of text with "However, they created a taboo against working on positional chemistry or funding it" highlighted:

To preview where we’ll go in a bit more detail, by the end of this essay we’ll have concluded the
following:
● There is a strong theoretical case for at least some forms of positional chemistry being
possible
○ Actually in two different initial categories
■ Vacuum mechanosynthesis
● This is being tried secretively in Canada by enthusiasts
■ Ribosome-like molecular additive manufacturing
● This is not being seriously tried yet by any well-supported
research program
○ With decades of focused, coordinated work informed by systems goals, either of
these could potentially lead to forms of positional chemistry
○ It is not yet clear exactly how general-purpose these could be
● Early attempted refutations (Smalley debate) raised straw man objections; they don’t
rule out either path
● However, they created a taboo against working on positional chemistry or funding it

Screenshot of text continuing from previous, with "This then might, or might not, lead to big real world applications, many decades down the line" highlighted.

Because positional chemistry is also a very hard systems problem, beyond the reach
of any one scientist or lab, individual courageous researchers can’t escape this
sociological trap by quietly showing a demo
● This means that you don’t see many people even submitting grant proposals or
theoretical papers on positional chemistry, let alone making major experimental progress
on it
● In such a situation, one needs a DARPA-like coordinated series of programs to
unlock progress
● Progress on a “ribosome-like” mode of positional chemistry (“molecular 3D printing”) is
enabled by recent advances like DNA origami, and more modular forms of protein
engineering
● The field needs more crystalline goals and subgoals, but early developments are
likely NOT good as commercial ventures
To be clear, I’m not saying positional chemistry is necessarily a “be all and end all” technology.
I’m just asking if we can pinpoint why it may have become stalled as a research field, and what
it might take to jump start it as a research field. This then might, or might not, lead to big real
world applications, many decades down the line. It’s research!

November 15, 2024 at 12:27 AM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

This is a nice overview of a "physics perspective" on emergence from Ross H McKenzie—"There is more to emergence than novel properties".
Part 1: condensedconcepts.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-...
Part 2: condensedconcepts.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-...

Screenshot of text: The first five characteristics discussed below might be classified as objective (i.e., observable properties of the system) and the second five as subjective (i.e., associated with how an investigator thinks about the system). In different words, the first five are mostly concerned with ontology (what is real) and the second five with epistemology (what we know). The first five characteristics concern discontinuities, universality, diversity, mesoscales, and modification of parts. The second five concern self-organisation, unpredictability, irreducibility, downward causation, and closure.

October 23, 2024 at 1:40 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

G C Waldrep
Apocatastasis
For the instruments are by their rhymes, as Kit Smart wrote. Walking out yesterday the bud's promise seemed a crystalline hallucination, spring's early flowing stone, the maimed sycamores climbing in geometry grey as steel, as smoke, as the sky
that hangs low as stiff washing from the lines. Pity small life, the stem that pushes up from this hard surface, the insensate bravery. If we anthropomorphize the world, the night reduces to our capacity for hope
and all tender fallacies. Thus purity. Thus metaphor's gift, the ice that spools and circles at skin's surface. My love,
there is no winter but the winter of the heart. Perhaps this cold will pass. Perhaps
that bridge was not a harp at all.

October 22, 2024 at 11:40 PM

Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

Davis's derivation was basically pseudoscientific. It performed well in wind-tunnel tests, probably because of accidental similarities with later laminar-flow designs. It also probably didn't translate into real performance benefits for the same reasons those designs didn't, and quietly disappeared.

Paragraph from later in the chapter detailing the Davis's derivation.

February 3, 2024 at 7:29 PM

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