Samantha Cole, writing for 404 Media:

Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.” [...]

“The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue,” Dietterich wrote. Dietterich told me in an email on Friday morning that this is a one-strike rule — meaning authors caught just once including AI slop in submissions will be banned — but that decisions will be open to appeal.

I see no cognitive dissonance in being pro-AI, in general, but vehemently anti-slop.

Take a quick look at the most consequential graph of the last two decades, below.

But first, the news: the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Change (i.e., the IPCC, the organisation promoting the Climate Scare) has officially withdrawn the warmist scenario known as RCP8.5.

This is roughly what the IPCC's RCP8.5 predicts:

The “8.5” in RCP8.5 refers to the amount of added solar energy the atmosphere will trap by 2100—specifically, 8.5 watts per square meter. That’s very high—likely to bring about a shocking 5 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels.

RCP8.5 was the kind of climate scenario lurking behind Greta Thunberg’s accusation, in her September 2019 speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” It’s the kind of pathway young people in England were thinking about when they decided they needed to launch “Extinction Rebellion.” It’s been a fundraising bonanza for climate activist groups from Adelaide to Zurich, the main player in every single alarmist climate critique you’ve read in the last 15 years.

And it’s been the default setting for literally thousands of climate science papers—Google Scholar lists more than 30,000 published since 2018 alone. It was from this kind of research that we got lurid papers like “Future of the human climate niche,” where respectable Dutch climate scientists claimed that one in three human beings live in regions that will become unlivable in the next 50 years. It was this kind of research that gave rise to countless breathless headlines about how outdoor labor was about to become impossible across much of the tropical world, and alarmist documentaries claiming the ocean was about to end up without any fish. It was RCP8.5 that turned David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth” into the most read story in the history of New York Magazine, and later propelled the book version to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

The story of RCP8.5 is ultimately the story of what goes wrong when people convinced they are defending “The Science” catastrophically misunderstand how science works, and when politicized activists glom onto legitimate scientific tools and insist on ramming the round peg of probabilistic forecasting into the square hole of fundraising emails.

Yesterday, at Vancouver Websummit — a tech conference here in British Columbia featuring a surprisingly large roster of political commentators — I saw Curtis Yarvin speak. Yarvin is this far-right character who has become a bit of a media darling lately, repeatedly profiled in the prestige press and subject to much of the same dark titillation that characterizes how the liberal intelligentsia so often thinks about right-wing celebrities these days. His big, naughty idea is that dictatorship is preferable to democracy, and this apparently has some currency with both tech CEOs and the Vance-ite wing of MAGA.

At Websummit, Yarvin’s talk was structured as a debate between himself and Ramesh Srinivasan, moderated by Cenk Uygur. Srinivasan was not a particularly good advocate for democracy; he seems like a nice guy but was way too deep in a certain pit of lefty malaise to spring to the defense of American institutions. It’s hard to defend democracy when you don’t believe America even is one, as he at one point claimed. Whatever points he tried to make were mushy and unfocused.

You’d think this would give Yarvin, who has such a reputation for being this ferocious character, a clear advantage, but it didn’t. I imagine most of the audience filling the main auditorium of the convention center left thinking they had wasted time on one of the conference’s more mediocre events.

I was taken aback by how dull and uncharismatic Yarvin is, and how shallow and undeveloped his arguments are. Despite his reputation as the “bad boy philosopher,” I found he comes off as neither.

He is a flat speaker with little stage presence. He’s not animated or funny or charming or sassy or wild. He has a slumped posture and very dark eyes that peer from beneath downward-pointing black eyebrows, giving him a fixed expression that’s less menacing than gloomy. Coupled with his curtains of parted dark hair, he has an uncanny resemblance to Snape from the Harry Potter films. He came out wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt for reasons I’m sure he was eager to explain, but never did.

I didn’t think Yarvin’s talents as a speaker or thinker came anywhere close to meeting his obvious desire to be a serious provocateur. His most interesting defense of dictatorship was an observation that there are many well-functioning institutions in American life that are run as dictatorships, even hereditary monarchies — mainly corporations — and no one seems to find fault with those. It was unclear how seriously he believed this, however, for he’d also often cite, in a more sneering way, examples of liberals governing as dictators, including Dr. Fauci and LBJ, who he clearly thought made America worse by virtue of their authoritarian style. When Cenk asked him about checks and balances, he similarly seemed fine with conceding that effective dictators require a cabinet with impeachment power and so forth, which, as my friend SoyPill noted in a video takedown of Yarvin, quickly just winds up reinventing liberal democracy. Overall, he spoke more like a college student making a half-assed defense of a challenging position in debate club than someone who’d thought particularly deeply about his supposed signature issue.

I think people can have bad politics and still be engaging. I wrote a while ago about Slavoj Zizek, whose politics I think are comparably shallow and vague but is undeniably a funny and compelling performer. Many people on the far right, from Ann Coulter to Alex Jones, have a flamboyant stage presence that makes them hard to turn away from. The degree that political commentary has become entertainment is not an uncomplicated good, but charisma is part of the art of effective communication, and can be used to compensate for a lack of weak ideas. Yarvin strikes me as the worst of both worlds; a guy with little to say who doesn’t seem to be having fun saying it.

The post How Effective Is Ken Griffin’s Response to Zohran Mamdani? appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.

There is something strangely fascinating about listening to modern communists condemn the economy.

Not because their conclusions are persuasive, but because their complaints often contain the seeds of an argument they refuse to recognize.

Listen carefully to what they attack.

They rage against bailouts.

Against politically connected corporations.

Against regulatory capture.

Against monopolies protected by the state.

Against subsidies, favoritism, lobbying, central banking distortions, corporate welfare, and the revolving door between business and government.

And in describing these things, they unknowingly describe not capitalism, but the corruption of markets through political privilege.

Yet somehow, after accurately identifying the disease, they prescribe a larger dose of the poison that created it.

That is the comedy at the center of the modern socialist mind.

If a businessman becomes wealthy through voluntary trade by offering products people willingly buy, he is denounced as exploitative. But if that same businessman becomes wealthy through state contracts, bailouts, tariff protections, licensing barriers, subsidies, or regulatory manipulation, the communist still calls it capitalism.

The distinction between wealth earned through production and wealth extracted through political favoritism disappears entirely.

This is because many socialists do not actually oppose coercive power. They oppose not being the ones directing it.

They speak endlessly about “corporate greed,” but rarely stop to ask why corporations spend billions influencing governments in the first place. The answer is obvious: because governments possess enormous discretionary power over markets.

When the state can grant favors, suppress competitors, print money, guarantee loans, control licensing, shape regulations, and socialize losses while privatizing political influence, businesses will inevitably compete for political access.

That is not a free market problem. That is a political power problem.

The true irony is that genuine capitalism leaves far less room for the kind of corruption socialists condemn.

Under actual free exchange: • Businesses cannot force customers to buy from them

• Failure is punished instead of subsidized

• Political connections matter less than consumer satisfaction

• Profits depend on delivering value voluntarily

• Losses cannot simply be transferred onto taxpayers indefinitely

But the socialist cannot acknowledge this without undermining his own worldview. So every abuse committed through state intervention is relabeled “capitalism,” even when the mechanism involved is plainly political coercion rather than voluntary trade.

It becomes a rhetorical shell game: Government intervention that fails is capitalism.

Corporate privilege is capitalism.

Inflation caused by monetary policy is capitalism.

Bailouts are capitalism.

Cronyism is capitalism.

Protectionism is capitalism.

Anything involving money, hierarchy, inequality, or corporations is simply placed under the same label regardless of whether the underlying mechanism is voluntary exchange or state privilege.

And so the communist spends his days passionately condemning the consequences of concentrated political power while simultaneously demanding that even more economic power be concentrated politically.

It is like watching a man complain that gasoline causes fires while pouring it onto his own house.

The truly amusing part is that if one stripped away the labels and simply described the principles involved, many communists would accidentally endorse large portions of capitalism before realizing what they had agreed to.

A system where: • No corporation receives special legal privilege

• No business is bailed out

• Politicians cannot manipulate markets for allies

• Consumers choose freely

• Competition disciplines producers

• Failure is allowed

• Transactions are voluntary

That sounds suspiciously close to the thing they claim to oppose.

But admitting this would require acknowledging a difficult truth:

Much of what modern socialists hate is not capitalism at all. It is the predictable result of mixing political power with economic favoritism while still calling the outcome “the market.”

And once that distinction becomes clear, the entire moral narrative begins to wobble.