Greg Price

• Greg Price 28 Apr 2026 2:49 UTC

  1 point

  1

  in reply to: daijin’s comment on: Zach Stein-Per­l­man’s Shortform

  Rich Dad Poor Dad was a book, whose author worked for years to build it up into a brand. That’s very different from a Google doc, which is what Zach was contrasting with.

• Greg Price 27 Apr 2026 0:08 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: ryan_green­blatt’s Shortform

  Here’s yet another, quite different, meaning, which I heard used by a researcher at an AI company:

  • AIs produce output with recurring tics (“it’s not A — it’s B”, “genuinely”, etc.) that people notice and that start to grate on them

  Or perhaps more abstractly:

  • AIs produce output that many people learn to tell at a glance is from AI

  I don’t like that meaning because it’s not really about quality at all, or at most it’s about one narrow aspect of the output’s quality. But it seemed clear that those verbal tics are what the person had in mind when they explained they were working on a new “anti-slop” initiative. And it certainly fits that that’s an aspect which an AI company might want to prioritize.

  Personally, when I say “slop” I normally mean something that overlaps with some of the meanings you list but is a bit distinct:

  • An AI produced something low-quality, and a human chose to post that without bothering to bring it up to reasonable quality.

  So it’s about the human’s behavior as much as the AI’s performance. Partly that’s because the contexts where I use the term tend to be something to the effect of “don’t post slop here, it’s a waste of our time and yours”. (And because I know the term is ambiguous, I include a few words defining what I mean by it.)

• Greg Price 26 Apr 2026 23:26 UTC

  13 points

  2

  in reply to: David Joshua Sartor’s comment on: Eliezer’s Un­teach­able Meth­ods of Sanity

  Yes indeed. Wellerstein lays out the evidence from that speech in a 2018 post, and has a 2014 post offering an explanation of how Truman got that misconception in the first place. The two of those together convinced me that Truman really was confused about the fact that Hiroshima was a city full of civilians, and thought it was a military base.

  The speech was a radio address the evening of August 9, after the Nagasaki bombing. Truman and others wrote and revised it in the days before that, on the ship home from Europe after the Potsdam conference. A draft says, in language which appears to be from Truman:

  The world will note that the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima which is purely a military base. This was because we did not want to destroy the lives of women and children and innocent civilians in this first attack.

  which is just ridiculously wrong if you know that Hiroshima is a city. (A city which had a military base, but still.)

  After that draft, and before it was time to actually deliver the speech, (a) Truman sees an aerial photo of the city with its destruction, and (b) newspapers start reporting that a city was destroyed. The speech Truman delivered says instead:

  The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.

  Still untrue but less emphatic about it (no “purely”), and hedged with “insofar as possible” for the fact that civilians were indeed killed.

  That’s a brief summary of Wellerstein’s post about the speech. For a summary of the other post: Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, thought we really shouldn’t bomb Kyoto. The brass disagreed, and kept proposing to include it on the target list. Stimson went to Truman for backup, and presumably said something about Kyoto’s cultural importance and how it was less of a military target than others. Truman agreed; but what he took from the conversation — we know this from his diary — was that the other targets on the list were purely military, full of “soldiers and sailors … and not women and children”.

  I appreciated both posts. Better yet is this 2020 book chapter (paywalled but online) by Wellerstein covering both aspects. I haven’t yet read his 2025 book mentioned upthread, which covers the same material plus how Truman then reacted to his mistake by clamping down to try to ensure presidential control of nuclear weapons for the future.

  There’s a potential allegory here. After events ran away from Truman (with a bombing that wasn’t what he expected, and another he didn’t expect at all), he realized there was a problem and responded effectively, making an important contribution to the world’s avoiding any further use of nuclear weapons for the next 80 years and counting. But of course that was only possible because the first mistake wasn’t of a nature that foreclosed any regaining of control.

• Greg Price 26 Apr 2026 10:09 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Chasing Oliver’s comment on: Do not con­quer what you can­not defend

  Certainly Napoleon benefitted from people thinking he was for progress and reason. Many intellectuals elsewhere in Europe saw him that way… until he showed up in their country, pillaged the countryside, installed one of his brothers etc. as the new king, and brutally suppressed dissent. Then they tended to change their mind.

  All of which was pretty far from anything the founders of the French Revolution thought they were trying to make happen, to bring it back to the point habryka was making in mentioning Napoleon.

  I think an even clearer aspect is Napoleon’s behavior within France. He declared himself Emperor, complete with an elaborate coronation ceremony! Then he reintroduced a whole system of dukes, counts, and other titles of nobility. Definitely not what the revolutionaries had in mind when they overthrew the monarchy and declared the Republic.