119 - Toxic Oasis

About a week ago a good friend finally managed to convince me to test out Twitter. It is where most people in AI/ML interact and congregate, as well as a place where many investors live...it safely exceeded my expectations, to say the least.

While I've regarded Twitter historically with disdain, partly for the short-form requirement and the culture it engrains as a byproduct of that, my mental image of Twitter, extrapolated from the posts that are shared elsewhere, was far FAR too mild.

It is presently full of cult-like and viral delusions focused on AI/ML, politics, Cancel Culture, and almost every other absurdity that would likely find itself unwelcome in any more "Civil" context. In investigating the platform I had to take frequent breaks, dedicating considerably more time to meditation and clearing my mind. The only comparable experience I could point to was when I once scraped together a dataset of cognitive biases from the worst parts of 4Chan posts, which I knew by their reputation to be full of bias.

Twitter today may well be the deepest cesspool that the internet has to offer, worse even than infamous corners like 4Chan. The deepest and most deranged delusions are actively circulating among AI/ML people and their investors there, like an orgy of viral pathogens in a Leper colony.

In light of this, some of the mystery of how such deep delusions in AI/ML have proliferated and been sustained has been peeled away. However, this also paints a much grimmer outlook for 2024 than my prior predictions had accounted for.

Investors swimming in that cesspool have far worse things than bankruptcy to look forward to, and it is no wonder why they invest in such half-wits if Twitter remains a source of "information" that they take seriously.

I've found a new purpose for the abbreviation "MoE" after this experience, "Mixture of Excrement". That is precisely what Twitter has to offer. Perhaps, given that Twitter was renamed to "X", the maximally appropriate abbreviation is "MoE-X".