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.

Chaser:

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.

"The AI has to work — we trained it on an extensive corpus of papers by Jan Hendrik Schön!"

What if we used different words in a different context? Wouldn't the meaning change? Checkmate atheists

Image description: a series of three tweets by blue-checks.

Tweet from suzuha:

"techbro" is just the reemergence of thinking it's cool to hate nerds, mixed in with a bunch of resentment from watching the last 20 years of nerds taking over the world

Reply by Paul Graham:

It's more a way to hate men.

Reply by jason:

As one insider told me (who is not me): 'imagine an equally sexist name was given to, say, female pundits and journalists' ... what would the reaction be?'

It had already reached the university where I work by February 1!

And QAnon loons were already telling people to drink bleach in January.

(I remember a "welp, we're in for it now" moment when Trevor Bedford tweeted on the first of March that a genome analysis "strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for the past 6 weeks". The e-mail from the university chancellor saying that classes were canceled went out during the middle of a statistical-physics class I was teaching, the evening of March 11.)

I can barely get past the image caption. "An AI made this". OK, and what did you ask it for, "random shit"?

And then there's the section that seems implicitly to be arguing that we should take the risk estimates made on "internet rationality forums" seriously because they totally called the COVID crisis, you guys... Well, they did a better job than an economist, anyway.

I am listening to an audiobook of Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.

Well, there's yer problem right there

And it's been retracted:

Following publication, concerns were raised regarding the nature of its AI-generated figures. The article does not meet the standards of editorial and scientific rigor for Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology; therefore, the article has been retracted.

This retraction was approved by the Chief Executive Editor of Frontiers. Frontiers would like to thank the concerned readers who contacted us regarding the published article.

"Aghast"? No, more like two or three ghast, at least

"How long is't ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?"

My informal impression is that they range from "OK" to "... the Hell?!".

As a physicist with a background in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics before moving to quantum information theory, let me reassure you that I speak from training and decades of experience when I say, "No, you dork ass loser."