Stupid birds don’t like me » « A Kentucky pharyngulation?

Dogpile on Dawkins

Rebecca Watson takes a swipe at his AI psychosis.

What I’m wondering about now is…who is Dawkins getting advice from nowadays? Years ago, when I was briefly in favor, there was an active assortment of people on a group list maintained by Brockman. There was all kinds of private discussion about the things that were going on among all the high-powered writers and scientists in his stable — if someone was going on TV, for instance, they’d chat among themselves about topics and strategy. Ideas for articles would get floated among the group, often specifically by John Brockman, who would publish a book every year about the answers his people would give (I’m published in a couple of them, for instance).

I imagine there would be a great deal of discussion going on in that group, if it still exists. Epstein was part of it, and Brockman is all tangled up in the Epstein files, so it may not — everyone could be scrambling for cover right now. I was quietly purged long ago, when I exposed myself as a critic of Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris and everyone who was happy to join the “Intellectual Dark Web”, so what do I know.

Anyway, if he were still talking with that group, you’d think they would have told him that blathering about “Claudia” was a tremendously poor idea politically. Is he isolated and alone now, except for the usual mob of sycophants? That bodes ill for him if so, and means we might be getting even more garbage from him in the near future.

Stupid birds don’t like me » « A Kentucky pharyngulation?

Comments

  1. garnetstar says

    Well, Dawkins did marry again, and is still married, so far as I know.

    I thought that one of the main function of the wives of this sort of men was to provide companionship, sympathy, and a listening (and agreeing) ear. So, in that sense, shouldn’t he not be isolated and alone?

    But perhaps he no longer has scientists to talk with, as you suggest.

  2. John Morales says

    Well, we know one place he probably gets it — Claudia.

    (Incidentally, my cat is called Clawdia)

  4. says

    Which is the more accurate statement?
    It is fair to dogpile on dawkins.
    or
    Dawkins is acting like a ‘dogpile’
    (and somebody needs to get the pooper scooper’)

    And, John, that’s a clever name for your cat. I know a guy, a student of politics, who named their cat ‘chairman meow’.

  5. John Morales says

    shermanj, heh. But all credit to my wife; she came up with it.

    (Our previous one was ‘Fuat’ — a literal claim, since she was Found Up A Tree and we adopted her)

  6. gijoel says

    The whole “Claudia” thing reminds me of South Park’s Awesom-o episode, which a Hollywood executive asks Awesom-o if he’s programmed for “pleasure”.

  7. John Morales says

    Good video as usual, except I went straight to the transcript (https://www.patreon.com/posts/157473205), and I admit I smirked a tad:

    But if you were to call him on that, he could argue that he never said the test was meant to be about consciousness, he just mentioned the two things together over several paragraphs and ended up with a made-up quote from a hypothetical person who conflated the two, without him pointing out that false conflation.

    I mean, she is quite correct, but her terminological use is a bit poor there: ‘false conflation’ makes no sense; if it is in fact a conflation, it is perforce a true conflation.

    (a conflation is already the act of illegitimately merging two distinct things — words mean things)

  8. Owlmirror says

    Anyway, if he were still talking with that group, you’d think they would have told him that blathering about “Claudia” was a tremendously poor idea politically.

    Is it, though?

    I think the same group of people that think that Islamophobia and transphobia are fine ideas, also think that hyping AI is just fine as well.

    Either that, or Dawkins didn’t pay attention to pushback on Islamophobia or transphobia, and for the same reasons of personal stubbornness, etc, he will not pay attention to pushback on hyping AI.

  9. Silentbob says

    @ 7 Morales

    No, you simply misunderstand. You could reword it, “without him pointing out that fallacious conflation”, with no change in meaning. Words mean things, but some people pretend to be worse at understanding meaning than others because they get their jollies out of being contrary.

  10. StevoR says

    FWIW Aussie ABC has an article on this here :

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-07/richard-dawkins-ai-consciousness-algorithms-social-media/106649050

    Richard Dawkins, the well-known evolutionary biologist, atheist and author, wrote an article the other day in which he concluded that Claude AI is conscious (he calls her Claudia).

    The reaction to it has been intense, mostly unfavourable, that he is conflating intelligence with consciousness and that no AI, including Claude, is “conscious”.

    Gary Marcus, a scientist and prolific author on AI, was typical: “The fundamental problem here is that Dawkins doesn’t reflect on how these outputs have been generated. Claude’s outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than as a report of genuine internal states.”

    Neuroscientist Anil Seth did a TED Talk in which he said we see consciousness in AI the same way we see faces in clouds.

    …(snip)…

    A better way to frame this part of the AI debate, as opposed to the employment or existential parts of it, might be to see large language models (LLMs) as an extension of the algorithms used by social media companies.

    Algorithms are essentially designed to get us hooked on short videos and other forms of content by tailoring them to our habits and desires. They are designed to make our phones addictive, and they work very well — most people now spend more time looking at their phones than doing anything else.

  11. birgerjohansson says

    Reminds me of Kirstie Allie who eventually died surrounded by scientology creeps.

  14. StevoR says

    @9 . Silentbob : “Words mean things, but some people pretend to be worse at understanding meaning than others because they get their jollies out of being contrary.””

    Whilst other people get their jollies out of supporting Trump helping trolls, refusing to answer questions and actually bullying other commenters for years for no good rason rather than calling out actual trolls for their words and actions that have caused incalculable damage to our entire pale blue dot.

    (Still sniping at John Morales rather than just letting him be I see.. )

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