4 ms·

Incredibly confusing that people who are otherwise of sound mind seem to fall for this. Especially confusing when it’s someone who knows how algorithms work.

Incredibly confusing that people who are otherwise of sound mind seem to fall for this. Especially confusing when it’s someone who knows how algorithms work. Barring connectivity issues when’s the last time you messaged an LLM and it just decided to ignore you? Conversely when has it ever messaged you unprompted? Never, because they’re incapable of doing anything independently because there is no sense of self.

tovej 6mo ago
If you've followed Dawkins' trajectory, I don't think it's clear that he's "otherwise of sound mind" anymore. He's had some very strange output on biological gender, where he tries to handwave away the existence of intersex people. And he's a biologist.
- mrec 6mo ago
  "Intersex" is a misleading umbrella term for a whole bunch of different DSDs, each of which is 100% specific to one biological sex. And I don't think I've ever seen the term "biological gender"; about the only thing gender proponents seem to agree on is that it's NOT biological.
  - tempaccountabcd 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - tovej 6mo ago
    Biological gender is the inconsistent "sex=gender" conception that cranks and conservative grifters operate under. I'm not sure what a "gender proponent" is, but Dawkins has come out and written some pseudo-scientific bullshit about there only being two sexes/genders, and that everyone fits nearly into one of them. Which is patently false. Intersex people are a real phenomenon, and are not clearly classifiable into either sex. Dawkins has made a fool of himself by claiming that a real biological phenomenon can simply be ignored when conceiving a theory of sex (and gender). In other words, Dawkins has gone off the deep end. He doesn't really have credibility as a researcher or public intellectual. He's with the grifters now. This embarrassing conservative grift is part of an anthology filled with drivel from other grifters: The War on Science", edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss [1]. [1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-War-on-Science/Dawkins/9798888457566 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-War-on-Science/Da...
    - mrec 6mo ago
      > Biological gender is the inconsistent "sex=gender" conception that cranks and conservative grifters operate under. I don't know about cranks and conservative grifters, but it's definitely not a feature of the "gender critical" position which I thought Dawkins was broadly aligned with. That's more that "sex" is absolutely binary, with your "intersex people" being umambiguously classified through genetics, while "gender" is too vague and undefined a term to be useful for much of anything in the public sphere. > Dawkins has come out and written some pseudo-scientific bullshit about there only being two sexes/genders, and that everyone fits nearly into one of them It'd be surprising for Dawkins to make any kind of definitive statement about gender. I do think that your use of "sexes/genders" in that sentence is symptomatic of exactly the kind of conflation you're complaining about. "There are only two sexes" is a completely different statement from "there are only two genders", and far more defensible.
      - tovej 6mo ago
        The rhetorical claim "there are only two sexes" is only ever used to claim that there are two genders. And that is precisely what Dawkins has done. You are wrong about intersex people being genetically classifiable. There is no deterministic causal relationship between genetics and sex characteristics: as an example, a person with XX chromosomes may develop external male genitalia and v.v. for XY chromosomes. But of course, for most people with XX and XY chromosomes develop, this is the other way around. See how genetics do not explain this?
        mrec 6mo ago
        Your first para seems utterly bizarre, to the point of nonsensicality. Maybe it would help if you could say what you think "gender" refers to, but at this point I doubt it. Your second para's argument would only be valid if you thought that sex is defined by external characteristics. I'm pretty sure you don't think that. And as far as I'm aware, while some DSDs certainly have a gene-expression component, there's no reason to think that they don't all ultimately have a genetic basis. There's a strong whiff here of "it's all terribly complicated so let's just agree that nothing means anything". Obviously people can disagree about the merits or otherwise of a genetic classification. But it's not straightforwardly wrong or insane, particularly since credible alternatives have been notably lacking.
- abc123abc123 6mo ago
  Biological gender exists. If you have a Y you're male, and if not, you're female. Easy as that. I, for one, am happy that wokeness and the post-truth ideology that tries to teach that there is no truth in math, is on its way to the garbage heap of history. It has done enough damage already, and must be thrown away quickly.
  - Arodex 6mo ago
    Blahblahblah bullshit While you invent the terrible menace of the "anti-math woke" (it doesn't exist), the current president and secretary of health - who have actual power of nuisance over all Americans and a large part of the world - are unable to do correct basic percentage calculations and openly boast of it: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2026/apr/23/robert-f-kennedy-jr/percentage-decreases-drug-prices-trump-math/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2026/apr/23/robert-f-k... Meanwhile, yes, gender is a social construct, sex is another thing completely, and both can be changed.
  - amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
    This is clearly nonsense. You are taking about sex, not gender. There are a millions of baby girls born with Y chromosomes that aren't discovered until adolescence when they don't get their period, or even adulthood when they can't get pregnant. See: Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome.
    - tempaccountabcd 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - mrec 6mo ago
      Well, "baby girls born with Y chromosomes" is very clearly begging the question, and I'm not sure where you're getting your "millions" figure from. Even the upper estimates of CAIS have it around 1 in 20,000 XY individuals, which would put global numbers in the order of 200,000.
collyw 6mo ago
Try being rude to them, they will usually respond back politely.
Jtarii 6mo ago
When's the last time a friend said hello to you in person and you just ignored them? When's the last time you messaged me unprompted? These seems like bizzare objections, a system can only act in the way that it can act. A tree is never going to get up and start walking, why would a LLM ever start a conversation unprompted? That just isn't how the system can behave. You are just as limited by deterministic physical processes in your brain as an LLM is in a cpu.
- abc123abc123 6mo ago
  They are not. The challenge is the turing test, and due to these behaviours they fail. It is as easy as that, and the objections are valid.
abc123abc123 6mo ago
This is the way! I also do not understand the awareness-cult. It seems they willingly want to be fooled by LLM:s. That being said however, yes, we do not have any good definition of consciousness that is universally accepted, which makes the whole discussion useless or at risk of people talking past each other.
teekert 6mo ago
I feel the same. So many smart people who see computation emulating a human close enough and providing actual beauty in their word-order choice, and boom they get all confused. The discussions are great though, collectively we get better and better at communicating about our own consciousness, because these system push the limits of our definitions, like viruses push our definitions of life. And boy do we like our definitions!
rolisz 6mo ago
Opus 4.7 starts to try to shut down conversations if you are rude to it (it's easier to do this via API, look up what @repligate is doing). And unprompted messaging: OpenClaw can message you unprompted (yes, there's a cronjob behind it, but the instructions matter and it won't always message you, only when there's something relevant).
- ofjcihen 6mo ago
  Trying to shut down conversations if you’re rude to it is what I would expect an algorithm owned by a company to do. Your second example is by definition not unprompted. That’s like setting an egg timer for 5 minutes and then being amazed it went off. When Claude cli decides to print out an ASCII middle finger entirely of its own volition we can say it’s acting unprompted.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

tovej 6mo ago

If you've followed Dawkins' trajectory, I don't think it's clear that he's "otherwise of sound mind" anymore. He's had some very strange output on biological gender, where he tries to handwave away the existence of intersex people. And he's a biologist.

mrec 6mo ago
"Intersex" is a misleading umbrella term for a whole bunch of different DSDs, each of which is 100% specific to one biological sex. And I don't think I've ever seen the term "biological gender"; about the only thing gender proponents seem to agree on is that it's NOT biological.
- tempaccountabcd 6mo ago
  [dead]
- tovej 6mo ago
  Biological gender is the inconsistent "sex=gender" conception that cranks and conservative grifters operate under. I'm not sure what a "gender proponent" is, but Dawkins has come out and written some pseudo-scientific bullshit about there only being two sexes/genders, and that everyone fits nearly into one of them. Which is patently false. Intersex people are a real phenomenon, and are not clearly classifiable into either sex. Dawkins has made a fool of himself by claiming that a real biological phenomenon can simply be ignored when conceiving a theory of sex (and gender). In other words, Dawkins has gone off the deep end. He doesn't really have credibility as a researcher or public intellectual. He's with the grifters now. This embarrassing conservative grift is part of an anthology filled with drivel from other grifters: The War on Science", edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss [1]. [1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-War-on-Science/Dawkins/9798888457566 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-War-on-Science/Da...
  - mrec 6mo ago
    > Biological gender is the inconsistent "sex=gender" conception that cranks and conservative grifters operate under. I don't know about cranks and conservative grifters, but it's definitely not a feature of the "gender critical" position which I thought Dawkins was broadly aligned with. That's more that "sex" is absolutely binary, with your "intersex people" being umambiguously classified through genetics, while "gender" is too vague and undefined a term to be useful for much of anything in the public sphere. > Dawkins has come out and written some pseudo-scientific bullshit about there only being two sexes/genders, and that everyone fits nearly into one of them It'd be surprising for Dawkins to make any kind of definitive statement about gender. I do think that your use of "sexes/genders" in that sentence is symptomatic of exactly the kind of conflation you're complaining about. "There are only two sexes" is a completely different statement from "there are only two genders", and far more defensible.
    - tovej 6mo ago
      The rhetorical claim "there are only two sexes" is only ever used to claim that there are two genders. And that is precisely what Dawkins has done. You are wrong about intersex people being genetically classifiable. There is no deterministic causal relationship between genetics and sex characteristics: as an example, a person with XX chromosomes may develop external male genitalia and v.v. for XY chromosomes. But of course, for most people with XX and XY chromosomes develop, this is the other way around. See how genetics do not explain this?
      - mrec 6mo ago
        Your first para seems utterly bizarre, to the point of nonsensicality. Maybe it would help if you could say what you think "gender" refers to, but at this point I doubt it. Your second para's argument would only be valid if you thought that sex is defined by external characteristics. I'm pretty sure you don't think that. And as far as I'm aware, while some DSDs certainly have a gene-expression component, there's no reason to think that they don't all ultimately have a genetic basis. There's a strong whiff here of "it's all terribly complicated so let's just agree that nothing means anything". Obviously people can disagree about the merits or otherwise of a genetic classification. But it's not straightforwardly wrong or insane, particularly since credible alternatives have been notably lacking.
abc123abc123 6mo ago
Biological gender exists. If you have a Y you're male, and if not, you're female. Easy as that. I, for one, am happy that wokeness and the post-truth ideology that tries to teach that there is no truth in math, is on its way to the garbage heap of history. It has done enough damage already, and must be thrown away quickly.
- Arodex 6mo ago
  Blahblahblah bullshit While you invent the terrible menace of the "anti-math woke" (it doesn't exist), the current president and secretary of health - who have actual power of nuisance over all Americans and a large part of the world - are unable to do correct basic percentage calculations and openly boast of it: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2026/apr/23/robert-f-kennedy-jr/percentage-decreases-drug-prices-trump-math/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2026/apr/23/robert-f-k... Meanwhile, yes, gender is a social construct, sex is another thing completely, and both can be changed.
- amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
  This is clearly nonsense. You are taking about sex, not gender. There are a millions of baby girls born with Y chromosomes that aren't discovered until adolescence when they don't get their period, or even adulthood when they can't get pregnant. See: Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome.
  - tempaccountabcd 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mrec 6mo ago
    Well, "baby girls born with Y chromosomes" is very clearly begging the question, and I'm not sure where you're getting your "millions" figure from. Even the upper estimates of CAIS have it around 1 in 20,000 XY individuals, which would put global numbers in the order of 200,000.

collyw 6mo ago

Try being rude to them, they will usually respond back politely.

Jtarii 6mo ago

When's the last time a friend said hello to you in person and you just ignored them? When's the last time you messaged me unprompted? These seems like bizzare objections, a system can only act in the way that it can act. A tree is never going to get up and start walking, why would a LLM ever start a conversation unprompted? That just isn't how the system can behave. You are just as limited by deterministic physical processes in your brain as an LLM is in a cpu.

abc123abc123 6mo ago
They are not. The challenge is the turing test, and due to these behaviours they fail. It is as easy as that, and the objections are valid.

abc123abc123 6mo ago

This is the way! I also do not understand the awareness-cult. It seems they willingly want to be fooled by LLM:s. That being said however, yes, we do not have any good definition of consciousness that is universally accepted, which makes the whole discussion useless or at risk of people talking past each other.

teekert 6mo ago

I feel the same. So many smart people who see computation emulating a human close enough and providing actual beauty in their word-order choice, and boom they get all confused. The discussions are great though, collectively we get better and better at communicating about our own consciousness, because these system push the limits of our definitions, like viruses push our definitions of life. And boy do we like our definitions!

rolisz 6mo ago

Opus 4.7 starts to try to shut down conversations if you are rude to it (it's easier to do this via API, look up what @repligate is doing). And unprompted messaging: OpenClaw can message you unprompted (yes, there's a cronjob behind it, but the instructions matter and it won't always message you, only when there's something relevant).

ofjcihen 6mo ago
Trying to shut down conversations if you’re rude to it is what I would expect an algorithm owned by a company to do. Your second example is by definition not unprompted. That’s like setting an egg timer for 5 minutes and then being amazed it went off. When Claude cli decides to print out an ASCII middle finger entirely of its own volition we can say it’s acting unprompted.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]