tl;dr: Tech youtuber who got way into studying the negative health effects of infrasound produced by data centers (to the point of his research being cited a bunch in relevant court cases) gets a voluminous substack hit piece published on his work by “an independent writer and researcher funded by a grant from Coefficient Giving to explore topics in AI and other areas”
So after some sniffing around, I realize I’m being brigaded by someone deep in the Effective Altruism community. The author is, quite literally, paid by rotational-wealth NPO to write this very article among many others. I know what you’re thinking, and I know how this sounds. The battle cry of the pseudoscientist is poisoning the well of criticism.
But please do browse his bibliography.
Andy lives in a parallel universe where datacenters don’t waste water, AI artwork is without victims, and using ChatGPT doesn’t harm the environment. This is one of the many takes that perfectly align with the board, contributors, and partners with Coefficient Giving, formally called Open Philanthropy, but changed after its close association with Sam Bankman-Fried was causing some well-earned skepticism.
Quite the coincidence that this comes out right around the time Kelsey Piper decided to get busy “debunking” Ed Zitron.
There’s already a follow up about the same people moving on to allegedly debunk a recent neuroscience paper on adverse infrasound effects on bsky.
A general reminder that this is sneer club, not debate club or snipe-at-one-another club. I am reluctant to lock this entire thread as it still seems possible that interesting and/or funny things will be said about it, but that reluctance will evaporate if people do not behave themselves. Play nice, assume that other awful.systems users are not fools, go play a round of GORILLAS.BAS, and tempt not the banhammer.
Sounds like a job for RationalWiki
Unrelated to this discussion, but Benn is also a prolific (and IMO incredible) musician: https://theflashbulb.bandcamp.com/
I always find it neat one of my favorite artists is also out there doing science and investigating important topics
First thought: Thank You for
SmokingVibe CodingSecond Thought: Having those dingdongs get so mad at him must feel extremely validiting lol
Andy Masley (the dude with the slobstick) has been around before. He’s the main source for the meme that datacenter water use is fine, actually
Previously on lobste.rs:
https://lobste.rs/domains/andymasley.substack.com
also big on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=andymasley.substack.com
Wow this is stupendously stupid: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/its-much-easier-to-hold-computers
Willfully misses the point that systems are unaccountable, not physical devices. Yes self driving cars are covered in cameras. But we revoke the licenses of drivers every day while allowing self driving cars on the road when the same model has caused accidents for which a human driver would have their keys taken away. We fire employees much more readily than we fire SAAS vendors. And if a person had posted what Grok did I suspect they would be in custody right now.
Good find, this is never-take-me-seriously stupid, and also does the beigeness thing of trying to gradually work around an accepted definition in order to almost make a point at the last minute, here being that since (we have apparently concluded that) (because of uh hypothetical brain surgery and stuff) accountability = improvability + punishability and nothing else so of course software can be held “accountable” in all the ways that matter.
His big mistake is not doing it at novel length so it’s really obvious that he’s being willfully stupid about it.
Jordan wants to be a pilloried martyr because it means that he doesn’t have to be a thoughtful or skeptical scientist. Meanwhile he’s making more mistakes than the Mythbusters. Previously, on Awful, he was shilling for HarmonyCloak, now productionized as ArtyShield.ai. Personally, I disagree with Masley about the connection between infrasound and uncanniness; we have explained multiple paranormal reports by measuring infrasound on location and Masley gives no alternative mechanism. But I agree with Masley that Jordan’s units are sloppy at best and don’t pass a sniff test; they certainly don’t accord with my experience of being inside several different datacenters.
We really are suffering something of a Spiders Elon effect with the xAI datacenter, which is so poorly operated that it has generated a cottage industry of YouTube skeptic-at-home motte-and-bailey rants where folks pretend that all datacenters are equivalent. It doesn’t help that the youth seem to think that datacenters are 2020s tech rather than 1980s tech.
Whether Jordan is correct or not (and I do get crank-vibes from him) is not really interesting from a meta-perspective. The interesting thing is that EAs can deploy astroturfers and they’re met with pitchforks and torches from the get-go. Everyone hates AI and datacenters, and Rationalist Explanations and Facts are not gonna change that in a hurry.
i don’t know why people think your comment is good, because it doesn’t actually add anything about the numbers, even though you pretend to link to mistakes (actually the wikipedia pages for mythbusters and spiders georg)
i’ve never heard of benn jordan before, i’m just suspicious of your self-confidence in general
the last time i replied to something you said it was because you were astonishingly wrong about 20th century marxist (and post-marxist) theory, and you had the same air of breezy knowledgeability back then as well, even though you had evidently not read a single word of the names you dropped
https://awful.systems/post/6533847/9681534
i was much nicer than i should have been about it at the time, but The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is an EXTREMELY short work. and you think it’s about “groups of artists”? Are you SURE?
I still don’t know who the fuck you are.
a much longer term SneerClub regular than you
If somebody talks very bluntly without caveats about a wide range of intellectually demanding subjects, and has a tendency to explain themselves with links to wikipedia articles (whether that’s about Mythbusters, psychoacoustics, or “High Modernism”*) I tend to get about as suspicious of that person and their motives as I do of other types of people who do similar stuff, from Eliezer Yudkowsky to Christian Revivalists, even if those motives boil down to nothing more threatening than an unchecked need to show off
*Come on man, you really should have read that one to check that it wasn’t a creepy screed that should have been deleted a long time ago
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