There's a large part of the left which is reacting to do (such as on Bluesky) by saying that this is a sign that there was a terrible media focus on Arday. But this is the wrong lesson. The fault is primarily with Cambridge and Liverpool John Moore University. Cambridge when faced with the myriad evidence of plagiarism and academic dishonesty, could have just fired him. But they didn't. And Liverpool could have said that the thesis contained plagiarism, but they tried to claim otherwise when it was pretty obvious. And the plagiarism is pretty blatant as you can see just from reading the original post by Nathan Cofnas on it. https://substack.com/@nathancofnas/p-207415162 (Cofnas having unpleasant or reprehensible views doesn't make this analysis inaccurate.) Cofnas doesn't mention there, but it is also worth noting that when Arday plagiarized, as he did there and in other things, he routinely targeted for plagiarism works of people who were of low social status, people from developing countries and the like. This looks like targeted plagiarism, premeditated to avoid detection or response.

And that was aside from all the other things, like his bizare claims about his running record, or his claims about raising massive sums of money for charities, or how he also claimed to be non-verbal until he was 11 and illiterate until he was in his teenage years. Or how he claimed to be on a TV show which had been canceled. And he claimed to have gotten people showing up to threaten him in person at his office in Cambridge but then Cambridge was unable to find any evidence such events occurred. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday#Allegations. Or how Arday got the police to investigate people who brought up concerns https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo.

If Cambridge had acted early on and fired him and just let him go, the attention level this got would have been far smaller. And it isn't the fault of the media here. Cambridge is one of the most prestigious universities on the planet. If Cambridge or Oxford is keeping on someone who is a fabulist who has plagiarized and lied, then it is the job of the media of the pay attention to that.

Unfortunately, the wrong lessons will likely be learned. The left will see this as primarily about racism, not noticing that while some people were motivated by racism, that Adray wouldn't have been in his position if it weren't for genuine problems with the university in accepting him to his position and then defending him when all of this started coming out. Parts of the left will likely see this as a reason to go defend the next academic accused of bad behavior purely because they are on the right. The extreme right will use this as a cudgel against "DEI" and to shmear other minority academics, the vast majority of whom are completely qualified and some of whom have overcome genuine hardship to get where they are.

I have to feel very sorry for Arday's children and spouse. They don't deserve this. And obviously, Arday bears most of the blame; at the end of the day, people are responsible for their own actions, and if he hadn't kept adding lie on top of lie, this would not have happened. But Cambridge does bear responsibility in part. I doubt that the University will spend any time engaging in the self-examination that should occur.

That an attempt at manipulation won't succeed doesn't mean there's not a problem with the attempt. And this is regardless newsworthy in terms of being another reason to not use AI in adversarial proceedings and similar contexts.

I don't normally watch TV news at all, so that wasn't an option. But when it did happen, I was appalled. That CBS did end up about two weeks later somewhat agreeing that they were forgeries. But even then, they did a pretty bad job there, essentially just saying they could not prove they were authentic, when they were in fact obvious forgeries. However, many of the people involved with that debacle did get fired. As far as I'm aware, no one involved in that has been involved with CBS for over a decade. I also did specifically avoid anything with Dan Rather for a long time given that I found his behavior surrounding the whole thing to be so terrible.

It isn't our decision to insert partisan politics in. Ellison's decisions with CBS, which is part of the same corporation did that. If he happened to give money to a candidate I disagreed with it might be different.

My spouse and I greatly enjoyed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and consider it to be one of the best Star Trek shows ever done. But we didn't renew our Paramount subscription to watch it. This was due to Paramount and Ellison turning CBS news into Trump's mouthpiece, and doing things like spike Sixty Minutes episodes which were critical of Trump's deportations and only aired after it had essentially been accidentally leaked online, months after it was supposed to run https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/cbs-airs-60-minutes-report-on-trump-deportations-that-was-suddenly-pulled-a-month-ago. The real final straw for us was when Paramount became the only channel to watch Trump's MMA event in front of the White House.

As I discussed with my spouse, I could imagine a Star Trek episode involving a world where there was a terrible media corporation and people kept supporting it despite the evil it did because it had their regular entertainment. And then, I could see what Captain Pike would have said to those people in some speech asking if that's really worth it? So, what would Captain Pike have me do? I guess in the actual ethos of Star Trek, a show which cares about progress, and diversity, and accepting people of all sorts, and standing for democracy and freedom against oppressors wherever they are, we will not give money to Paramount under its current leadership. And given Ellison's new threats, it seems like that decision was even more justified.

Yes. Monitoring radio channels constantly is something that most civilian boats just don't do. 16 VHF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_16_VHF is the standard emergency line and Coast Guard and similar keep monitoring it, but a lot of people don't. I've sailed a fair bit (although on a much smaller boat, generally a 27 foot sailboat), and I'm utterly unsurprised to find out a large yacht would not have been monitoring 16 or any other distress channel.

The fundamental problem is the same both examples. "Should be" is doing a lot of work, and as the systems improve, the ability for something to go badly wrong because one human wasn't paying attention goes up. Or worse, an AI deliberately conceals part of its course of action from the human, which we've already seen happen.

What? No. That's ridiculous. That an AI takes as a default going to do this, and is even capable of doing this underscores exactly how these systems can be a problem. If this a reasonable course of action for the AI, then we have some serious problems. What's the next step:

Person: AI, I don't want to go to Cathy's party. Her friends are so boring and I'm exhausted. Find me an excuse.

AI: I've caused a nuclear reactor melt down at the nearby reactor. Now the party won't happen because the whole region is being evacuated.

Systems which when given a goal will go out of their way to achieve that goal are exactly the sort of thing that people were concerned about a decade ago when discussing things like the Paperclip maximizer hypothetical. And people like Yudkowsky were mocked for discussing it then. Now it is happening and we're told that well, of course that's the idea would do, this is just over-hyped clickbait? Seriously?

Or, an alternative, they are genuinely concerned and are trying to balance their own financial incentives (which would be to rush out the models quickly) with the actual danger. If you prefer, look at what happened with Kimi. That model was open-weights, and a security firm testing it ended up with (in part due to their own sloppiness), a similar sort of containment breach to what Anthropic and OpenAI have reported https://www.wired.com/story/moonshot-kimi-k3-ai-model-escape-sandbox/. So that's an open model being reported to do the same thing by an independent security group with no incentive to lie. So one should take it seriously in their case. And if it is real for Kimi which is almost certainly weaker than any model being currently built/evaluated by Anthropic or OpenAI, that should cause you to take their own concerns about these new models more seriously also.

I suggest you go and read the link. It discusses why Occam's razor is a reasonable rule and also why it does not in fact put personal deities as a simple hypothesis when done correctly although it uses "witch" as the same type of category. In essence, some things like "witch" or "god" are types of items that feel very simple to human minds, but really aren't when you try to describe them precisely.

This is not accurate. Occam's razor has multiple forms that are carefully and don't run into the issue you have. See for example here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor for an introduction to some of the relevant ideas.

Dyson spheres, Dyson swarms, and similar objects all have a lot of advantages. In the same way, we don't live in houses made of sticks and stones because our current houses have advantages.

If you want to harness a lot of energy, or you want a really big civilization where everyone can talk with each other, then a Dyson sphere is better. If you spread out to multiple star systems, you have to wait for years between contact. It seems likely that a sufficiently advanced civilization would try both. And the white dwarf Dyson swarms would require much less material, engineering work, etc (probably orders of magnitude less).

That's a neat and plausible idea. And if that's the case, then the concerns I raised don't really fall out at all.

This is a good reason to suspect that asteroids are more common on worlds with life. But 65 million years, and millions of years before that show it just isn't that common. For a natural disaster to be the Great Filter it would need to be happening every few hundred years.