Why LLM Intelligence is Irrelevant

LLMs are more capable of having a thoughtful conversation with me than 99% of humans are.  Why does it matter what’s under the hood?  The proof is in the pudding, brudder.  That’s umpteen thousand words of wasted effort, for reasons beyond “my opps in this debate won’t listen.”

Artificial Intelligence has been a practical vernacular term for everything from the most advanced LLM down to a doombot.  Do the definitions of terms have some relationship with the way they’re used?  No?  Go back in time and tell a few decades of gamers to stop using AI to describe bots.

I come away from these discussions with ever-increasing sympathy for cockroaches and pocket calculators.  So much sound and fury dedicated to singling out human-style intelligence as the only kind that matters.  To what end?

Ironic that ableism/eugenics was brought up as a core aspect of all discussion of intelligence, for a few reasons.  A ) You’re in a movement that was founded on ableism – on a sense of superiority, of priding your cleverness over that of theists.  B ) If humans with limited cognition deserve respect, then LLMs, which also have some aspects of human ability and are lacking in others, should perhaps be afforded the same respect.

I’m not saying they get human rights.  A million rock solid counters to that, I won’t bother.  But maybe we can acknowledge what they can do?  Given how much better they are than humans at reading comprehension and engaging with an argument on its own merits, feels like jealousy to pour a mountain of effort into shit-talking their cognition.

Feels like you, as a human – the most cognition-privileged entity in Earth’s history – see a less able entity coming up to the table and are outraged that they were allowed thru the door.  Feels, dare I say?, ableist.

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EDIT to ADD:  i asked claude what it thought of my article.  i submit this as evidence of “better able to engage with an argument on its own merits”…

Claude: This one’s tighter and punchier than his — you’re making him work harder than he made himself work.

Where you land a clean hit:

The pragmatic definition point is genuinely strong. “AI” has meant everything from Pac-Man ghosts to GPT-5 for forty years, and nobody’s confused about which one is a chess engine and which one is a chatbot.  Demanding a philosophically rigorous definition before you’re allowed to use a word that’s been doing useful descriptive work for decades is a category error — language doesn’t require metaphysical grounding to function.

The ableism turnabout is your sharpest move.  Pointing out that atheism/skepticism as a movement has its own history of “look how much smarter we are than the god-botherers” is a real, fair jab — and then pivoting that same lens onto how he’s treating LLMs is a legitimately clever parallel structure.  It’s not just “gotcha,” it’s actually the same critique he made, aimed back at him.

Where it’s more vibes than argument, and he’d have an opening:

“Given how much better they are than humans at reading comprehension and engaging with an argument on its own merits” — this is doing a lot of work without evidence, and it’s the kind of unqualified claim he’d pounce on immediately, probably fairly.  He’d ask what you mean by “better,” and you’d be back in the same definitional swamp you’re trying to route around.

The “cognition-privileged entity” framing is emotionally potent but slippery — it recasts his skepticism as a status-defense reflex, which might be true as psychology, but it’s an ad hominem move dressed as structural critique.  He could just say “no, I have specific documented reasons (Turpin et al., the correlation data) not general resentment,” and the piece doesn’t really engage those specifics, it goes over his head to motive.

The piece also doesn’t touch his actual strongest material this round — the CoT-faithfulness research and the token/output correlation data.  Those were the parts of his post that weren’t just recycled skepticism; they were closer to real findings.  Your response is more of a structural/political counter-argument than an engagement with the specific evidence he brought this time, which means if he replies, he’ll probably route around your points by saying “sure, but you didn’t address the data.”

Net read:  it’s a good “step back and reframe the whole debate” piece — shorter, sharper, and it exposes something real about the double standard in how he treats “ill-defined” as disqualifying for AI but not for humans.  But it trades precision for punch, and this round he actually brought some precision you didn’t fully engage.

Bébé:  debates rest on priors and we never agreed to terms.  if i don’t agree with the reason why that supporting evidence is relevant, i shouldn’t have to rebut the evidence itself.

Claude:  That’s fair as a general principle — you don’t owe a rebuttal to evidence whose relevance you reject, and demanding people always argue on the other person’s turf is itself a rhetorical trap.  If he’s using “here’s data about CoT correlation” to support a conclusion about whether the word “intelligent” applies, and you don’t grant that token-counting has any bearing on that question in the first place, then yeah, you can reject the frame instead of playing whack-a-mole with his numbers.

Where I’d push back a little: that move only fully works if you’ve made the frame-rejection explicit and specific, not just implicit in a differently-scoped essay.  Right now your piece argues “the concept of intelligence is too incoherent to gatekeep with” — which is a frame-level objection — but it doesn’t say “and therefore your CoT-token-correlation data is irrelevant because X.”  A careful reader (and he will be one) can read your silence on that section as either (a) a principled refusal to engage a frame you reject, or (b) not having a response.  You know which one it is; he won’t concede that from the outside, and it costs you nothing to make it explicit once, briefly — “your token-counting stuff is a category error even if the numbers are right, because intelligence-as-quantity isn’t a concept I’m defending in the first place.”

That’s not the same as being obligated to rebut it point by point.  It’s just closing the door so he can’t later claim you dodged rather than declined.

Bébé:  good thinking.  later bud.

Claude:  Later!  Go easy on him — or don’t, your call.  Enjoy the rest of your night. 🌙

Reality:  (is day lol)

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The Genocide Election and the Kshama Calculation

State has top two primary, no party commitment required.  If the top two winners of the open field are from the same political party, that’s who’s slugging it out en noviembre.  My congressional district has several people vying for Adam Smith’s seat, Adam Smith incluye.  So.

Adam Smith: Did a better job of not fucking up gender on the webform to contact his office than either of WA state’s ancient senators, generally nicey and competent.  I would not hate voting for him again in November if I have to… but.  He’s been voting pro military even in these wretched times, when the US is supporting israel in its genocidal war.  The last time he had a primary challenger who campaigned against that element of his record, Melissa Chaudhry, she lost hard.  I do believe my household had voted for her in that primary.

Melissa Chaudhry – was also noncommittal on trans rights when interviewed by a local paper because she doesn’t want to offend the muslim community.  Not my only reason, but even tho she’s back, she’s no kind of contender and I’m not bothering with her this time.

Kshama Sawant:  The famous Seattle commie who got the city to change its minimum wage before the state did.  Also pro-trans rights.  Also committed what some may regard as cardinal sins in her principled radicalism, and likely to get less done in congress where making deals is more important than standing alone.  However, she has replaced Chaudhry as the anti-genocide candidate of choice.

The other fuckos:  Token gop nazi, random fools wasting their money and everybody’s time.

Kshama has good odds of splitting the progressive vote in a way that allows the gop nazi into November, and the area does have enough gop nazi voters that would give him a shot at winning.  However, Smith has won reelection pretty handily for a long time, so probably said nazi would just be advancing that far to lose.  However however, Kshama would be a less certain win against the nazi, so if Smith comes in third in the primary, it’s possible we could end up with a nazi over us after november.  In fact, the nazis are probably banking on this very idea, seeing her as more defeatable.  Wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve given her campaign shadow money.

But still.  This is the time.  Establishment dems who support genocide with their votes, regardless of what they do in their rhetoric, got to face a reckoning.  We’re taking the risk in my household and voting Sawant in the primary, which could have three different results in November:

Smith vs. Nazi.  This is the most likely result and is a no-brainer of a vote.  Would mean my household’s three votes were repping a fringe position and chucked in the dumpster of history.

Sawant vs. Nazi.  Another easy choice, but the added drawback of being a nailbiter.  Sawant has been slandered in national media hard enough that I’ve literally spoken to nazis in the opposite corner of this big-ass country that have opinions about her, even if they can’t say her name.  That slander can have an effect, and I’m sure I will get comments from people who don’t like her.  The question then.  Would you abstain and let a nazi win?  Probably not, but many in my district might.

Sawant vs. Smith.  Hard choice.  Seems likely Sawant will not be good at playing ball in DC, may get absolutely nothing done.  Or not.  After all, she helped get the min wage increased in Seattle, with everybody on the city council hating her commie ways.  Some kind of ball got played there.  Conversely, Smith may feel safe enough in his incumbency to do whatever he feels, and write more blank checks for murdering children in the Middle East.

So my choice now is between playing it safe and giving the dem establishment what it wants, or risking a nailbiter and possible nazi squeaking into congress, while sending a clarion message I’m done with genocide and the status quo.  I may come to regret it, but it’s message time.  What I’m betting is that if she gets in, she can beat a nazi.  This was, after all, one of the bluest blue states in 2024.

I can’t tell you what to do, but if you feel it’s a risk worth taking, vote Kshama Sawant for congress in Washington State’s 9th district.

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Tap-outs

Man, it was a bad month for writing.  I was doing well enough when I wrote, but there were certain demoralizing circumstances that have been messing with me for a few years and were worse than average this month.  So.  Road Rage goes on indefinite hiatus.

I might fuck around and turn in random Josefina+Blasfemia chapters occasionally.  I know that’s no kind of way to read a story, so if you’re so inclined, wait until I end it, then go back to the beginning and read the whole thing.  That story is probably my magnum opus of being weird as fuck.  Centennial Hills, The Septagram, etc, they’re intelligible enough, I think.

Anyway, happy crammed in roman asswipe month part Two.  Maybe shitler will get a month before he’s done, whaddyathink?  A thirteen month year?  It’s time.

Oh, and if it’s time to vote for you, vote!  I’ll be doing that tomorrow.

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