blakestacey
Shot:
One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and “discouraging her from seeking mental health care,” per an official university statement.
Princeton University’s Board of Trustees voted Monday to fire Joshua Katz, Cotsen Professor in the Humanities, effective immediately.
The university said in a statement that the dismissal followed an investigation initiated in February 2021 after Princeton received a detailed written complaint from an alumna who had a consensual relationship with Katz while she was an undergraduate under his academic supervision. That relationship was the focus of a 2018 disciplinary proceeding against Katz, which resulted in a penalty of unpaid suspension in 2018–19 and three years of probation following his return, Princeton said. The unnamed alumna did not participate in or cooperate with the 2018 disciplinary proceeding, according to Princeton. But when she came forward in 2021, she provided what Princeton called “new information,” triggering a new investigation. The second inquiry did not revisit the policy violations for which Katz was previously punished, according to Princeton: “It only considered new issues that came to light because of new information provided by the former student.”
“The 2021 investigation established multiple instances in which Dr. Katz misrepresented facts or failed to be straightforward during the 2018 proceeding, including a successful effort to discourage the alumna from participating and cooperating after she expressed the intent to do so,” the university said. “It also found that Dr. Katz exposed the alumna to harm while she was an undergraduate by discouraging her from seeking mental health care although he knew her to be in distress, all in an effort to conceal a relationship he knew was prohibited by university rules. These actions were not only egregious violations of university policy, but also entirely inconsistent with his obligations as a member of the faculty.”
Garnish:
Katz has previously denied that he engaged in any conduct beyond that for which he was suspended in 2018. He’s argued that Princeton wanted to fire him because of his political speech, including for a 2020 essay in Quillette which he referred to a Black student group as a “small local terrorist organization.” But Princeton’s dismissal announcement sheds new light on what the 2021 investigation was about; contrary to Katz’s public statement that he was being effectively retried for the same violations for political reasons, Princeton was now looking at a different set of allegations from the former undergraduate student herself, in part because Katz had (according to Princeton’s apparent findings) prevented her participation in the first investigation.
“It would be hard to abuse a law that forcibly sterilized everybody with an IQ under 90 provided that the person scored that low on an objective test blindly graded.” —Richard Hanania
A few months ago I was looking into Lojban and trying to figure out how I would translate “charge” (as in, “my laptop is charging”) and the best I could come up with is “pinxe lo dikca” (“drink electricity”)
So… if you think LLMs don’t drink, that’s your imagination, not mine.
My parents said that the car was “thirsty” if the gas tank was nearly empty, therefore gas cars are sentient and electric vehicles are murder, checkmate atheists
That was in the replies to this, which Yud retweeted:
Hats off to Isaac Asimov for correctly predicting exactly this 75 years ago in I, Robot: Some people won’t accept anything that doesn’t eat, drink, and eventually die as being sentient.
Um, well, actually, mortality was a precondition of humanity, not of sentience, and that was in “The Bicentennial Man”, not I, Robot. It’s also presented textually as correct…
In the I, Robot story collection, Stephen Byerley eats, drinks and dies, and none of this is proof that he was human and not a robot.
According to a Meta help page, Meta AI will respond to a post in a group if someone explicitly tags it or if someone “asks a question in a post and no one responds within an hour.”
God forbid it ever take longer than an hour for an actual human with actual knowledge to type a reply.
Carl T. Bergstrom, 13 February 2023:
Meta. OpenAI. Google.
Your AI chatbot is not hallucinating.
It’s bullshitting.
It’s bullshitting, because that’s what you designed it to do. You designed it to generate seemingly authoritative text “with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence,” i.e., to bullshit.
I confess myself a bit baffled by people who act like “how to interact with ChatGPT” is a useful classroom skill. It’s not a word processor or a spreadsheet; it doesn’t have documented, well-defined, reproducible behaviors. No, it’s not remotely analogous to a calculator. Calculators are built to be right, not to sound convincing. It’s a bullshit fountain. Stop acting like you’re a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit. The lesson one needs about a bullshit fountain is not to swim in it.
There is a way of seeing the world where you look at a blade of grass and see “a solar-powered self-replicating factory”. I’ve never figured out how to explain how hard a superintelligence can hit us, to someone who does not see from that angle. It’s not just the one fact.
It’s almost as if basing an entire worldview upon a literal reading of metaphors in grade-school science books and whatever Carl Sagan said just after “these edibles ain’t shit” is, I dunno, bad?
