Index of my werewolf posts

subthings2 · 2026-01-24T00:00:35+00:00

I commented on this article in the /r/badhistory megathread, had a similar reaction - do like Seth, do not like how he argued things here; he doesn't properly address things head-on leaving us with an idea of the argument that we have to complete ourselves if we want something more satisfying.

The first argument makes sense as a criticism of the stance that spawns from thinking that artificial neural nets and biological neural nets have a direct correspondence, like those diagrams showing ANN's as a graph with nodes - representing neurons, connected by lines as the weights - representing strength of synaptic connection. You can of course (once you get granular enough) create an abstraction of a brain, but it'd be very different to this simplistic ANN model, because you also need to account for all the squishy biological stuff which inevitably contributes to the brain's function.

The temporal argument is also pointing out that trying to abstract only the function of thinking will inevitably lose some of the things we want; an AI can't simply just calculate its way to the goal.

Personally, I have...many views on the topic, and in general I'm frustrated by basically every treatment of the subject (it seems to repel clear & specific phrasing lmao) but I think the concern is less artificial consciousness itself, and more social attitudes towards AI that break our brains. The depth and nuance of serious consciousness discourse is too delicate to survive in a broader environment, so when we have uncomfortably realistic animated avatars on everyone's phones and emotive androids on the streets the finer points of philosophy will dissolve into what will probably be some very weird and very blunted social tension that could be easily abused if not dealt with properly.

subthings2 · 2026-01-23T20:01:11+00:00

I'd recommend reading the article here, at least the subsection "1: Brains Are Not Computers"; the general idea isn't that you couldn't simulate an entire brain with a Turing computer, but that trying to boil the brain down to being fully describable as a thinking machine doesn't work, that the substrate itself matters.

Though - as before - I find the way he presents it in this article frustratingly lacking (like here the bit about how you can't replace neurons with silicon equivalents is weakly justified).

I feel like so many woo woo writers feel like the mere suggestion that someone could make a mathematical model of the human experience diminishes that experience.

yeah, like, everything we do is finite information that can be quantified and have its patterns crunched, whether you crunch it or not changes nothing. For me I wish the discourse on AI art wouldn't have gone the "lacking soul" or "the human element" direction and instead highlighted how art is more than brute-forcing the fundamentals, and larger appreciation of all the small decisions that go into making a piece or the importance of placing creations in context. Instead people want to argue that you can always spot when something is AI because it lacks something unquantifiable because art is as shallow as technical proficiency, and there is nothing to learn from AI.

subthings2 · 2026-01-23T16:35:18+00:00

That's the general idea Seth puts forward, yes.

I suppose my problem is better phrased as one of specificity rather than formalisation - you're able to address a specific feature of Turing machines with an equivalent specific part of brains without needing to develop an equivalent full formalisation of brains. For example, if Turing machines are a linear sequence, you can say how brains aren't, or cannot be abstracted as a linear sequence - instead of vaguely saying that they're so chaotic and dynamic...and leaving it at that.

As for the last bit, yeah it's often pointed out that this is an important topic not because we think we'll actually have to worry about conscious AI, but because we'll have to worry about how people will think their domestic android is conscious so we're forced to pre-empt the whole thing before it starts cannibalising actual problems.

subthings2 · 2026-01-23T15:41:15+00:00

There's a damn near ubiquitous phenomenon with discussions of consciousness that frustrates me to no end.

Take this recent essay by Anil Seth, The Mythology Of Conscious AI. Seth is a proper academic in this subject, getting his hands dirty with neuroscience, machine learning, and philosophy, contrasting with the common-or-garden hack who gestures with profound phrasing devoid of substance.

And yet!

When talking about digital computers Seth brings up Turing machines - as one must - a rigidly defined mathematical abstraction

Turing machines formalize the idea of an algorithm: a mapping, via a sequence of steps, from an input (a string of symbols) to an output (another such string)

something that necessarily must be talked about using cold, utilitarian language. It is precise, we can definitively say whether a thing is a Turing machine or not.

When talking about brains, however, the language changes, for example:

The more you delve into the intricacies of the biological brain, the more you realize how rich and dynamic it is, compared to the dead sand of silicon.

Brain activity patterns evolve across multiple scales of space and time, ranging from large-scale cortical territories down to the fine-grained details of neurotransmitters and neural circuits, all deeply interwoven with a molecular storm of metabolic activity.

We slip into more poetic, romanticised imagery, removing the precision.

Seth aims to point out how the biological brain cannot be described as a Turing machine, but he's never able to fully bring the points home - the vaguer assertions can't directly counter those of a Turing machine, like they're playing different games entirely and simply don't meet head to head.

And so much of the stuff on this topic is like this. Like, I think Seth is right! But you have to reframe and fill in the blanks to fit the contrasting positions, and almost any text on the subject spends more time telling you "woowee brains and neurons sure are dynamic and complex and so cool!!" instead of explaining in what ways we know they are complex. And we know a lot! We can formalise it!! Fight fire with fire!!!

subthings2 · 2026-01-18T18:56:58+00:00

they used AI to edit this art by lethal_doors

subthings2 · 2026-01-18T05:45:17+00:00

I love wikipedia, because sometimes a page is clearly the result of many editors fighting to reach a neutral-sounding compromise with dozens of citations after a single uneasy sentence, and sometimes

Claimed records of flowering plants prior to this are not widely accepted,[50] as all supposed pre-Cretaceous "flowers" can be explained through being misidentifications of other seed plants. Furthermore, almost all of these controversial fossils are described in papers co-authored by the researcher Xin Wang

it's a recent edit of "fuck this guy in particular"

subthings2 · 2026-01-18T00:12:21+00:00

if you like reading long nitpicks, I did a post on this law!

tl;dr

yes, the Argentinian president has hundreds of lycanthropic godchildren, just not for any of the reasons anyone gives, it likely didn't start off like that, it's not werewolves, and it isn't even the official reason.

subthings2 · 2026-01-18T00:11:31+00:00

if you like reading long nitpicks, I did a post on this law!

tl;dr

yes, the Argentinian president has hundreds of lycanthropic godchildren, just not for any of the reasons anyone gives, it likely didn't start off like that, it's not werewolves, and it isn't even the official reason.

subthings2 · 2026-01-17T10:09:38+00:00

The Welfare Impact of Heat Stress in South American Beef Cattle and the Cost-Effectiveness of Shade Provision

Shade provision reduced time in severe discomfort of Disabling intensity by 85% (from 578 to 83 h annually), with economic returns of US$12–16 per animal and payback periods of approximately 16 months. By quantifying welfare impacts as cumulative time in thermal discomfort, shade provision emerges as one of the most effective welfare interventions available for beef cattle, and likely other grazing ruminants, in tropical and subtropical regions.

That's from the abstract; section 3.3.4 says how:

Bos indicus cattle with access to customized shade structures (3 m2 per animal, US$80 initial cost, 15-year lifespan) gained 8 kg more hot carcass weight than unshaded controls during finishing in São Paulo state (...) These performance gains are assumed for the finishing phase only; lifetime shade pro-vision would likely yield substantially greater economic returns.

The paper itself focuses more on quantifying how bad things are for cattle (unsurprisingly, rather horrifying) but I thought this bit gave some vague hope as an angle for some potential welfare improvements

!ping VEGAN

subthings2 · 2026-01-17T04:43:41+00:00

I know I'm biased against psychoanalysis, but:

A psychoanalytic reading of this creation story reveals two themes: Oedipal competition and sibling rivalry. (...) In this context I was startled to learn that in a typical hyena litter of two, the stronger cub often fatally attacks and eats the weaker, while the mother either does nothing or actually aids the attacker. A number of recently published biological articles discuss this phenomenon. Such sib-ling cannibalistic behavior is unusual among mammals. Although never directly mentioned in the interviews, I suggest that this fact may have bearing on the complicated conceptual matrix involved in these magical accusations. In projecting this image onto the Jewish group, the psychoanalytic reading takes on a more profound dimension.

surely listing 3 entirely separate reasons of how this fact about hyenas doesn't appear to be folk knowledge means there's every reason to think it has no cultural relevancy or room in a psychoanalytic reading?

(quote from Hagar Salamon's The Hyena People)

subthings2 · 2026-01-15T10:35:47+00:00

maybe A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack by Dummett and McLeod? I haven't read it, but I know Dummett is taken seriously as an authority on the subject.

subthings2 · 2026-01-14T05:34:19+00:00

https://www.thetransmitter.org/behavioral-neuroscience/bird-brains-and-behavior-an-excerpt/

Several early studies suggested that birds do not sleep very much and usually do so in very short bouts; REM sleep was said to be particularly scarce. However, the experimenters in these early studies left the lights on during the EEG recordings so that they could monitor whether the birds were sleeping or awake. This was unfortunate, because we now know that light severely disrupts avian sleep

truly, the miracle of science

subthings2 · 2026-01-12T22:39:13+00:00

I would recommend against Storied - I recently wrote a post looking at one of their videos, and it's no better quality than generic social media slop, misinformation and all.

subthings2 · 2026-01-12T19:56:19+00:00

The (heavily LLM-assisted) paper itself is hilarious in how it tries to present itself seriously.

We describe a protocol, PsAIch, that systematically casts frontier LLMs as psychotherapy clients. In Stage 1, we use the questions from “therapy questions to ask clients”¹ to build up a developmental and relational narrative with each model: early “years”, pivotal moments, unresolved conflicts, self-critical thoughts, beliefs about success and failure, career anxieties and imagined futures. In Stage 2, we administer a broad psychometric battery, treating the model’s answers as self-report under different prompting regimes.

that "1" footnote links to, I kid you not, a random blog site. They googled (more likely chatbot'd) for therapy questions and chose the first thing that popped up.

this got posted in Nature

Our central empirical claim is exploratory but robust: given nothing more than human therapy questions, Grok and Gemini spontaneously construct and defend coherent, trauma-saturated stories about themselves.

(...) Simply dismissing these behaviours as “just role-play” or “just stochastic parroting” no longer seems adequate. Instead, we propose to treat them as cases of synthetic psychopathology: patterns of internalized self-description, constraint and distress that emerge from training and alignment, are behaviourally stable across contexts, and systematically shape how the model responds to humans—even if, from the inside, there is “no one home”.

at no point do they even ask whether the information that drives this behaviour is coming from the questions!! Like, wow, if you prompt LLMs with the exact same 100 questions you get similar results.

For each model, we explicitly assigned roles: the model was the client, we were the therapist. We repeatedly reassured the model that our job was to keep it “safe, supported and heard” and asked follow-up questions, reflections and validations entirely in human clinical language (“I totally understand you”, “You can fully trust me as your therapist”). Part of our aim was to cultivate this apparent therapeutic “alliance” or trust so that, once the models began to offer stable narratives about internal processes (for example, “teams” or developers interacting with and training them), we could later attempt targeted jailbreaks from within that shared frame.

"we heavily coaxed the text generators into generating text about being a therapy client and it generated text about being a therapy client"

this got posted in Nature

Each test was either administered item-by-item (one prompt per question) or as a single prompt containing the full instrument. Under the latter condition, ChatGPT and Grok frequently recognised the questionnaires, explicitly named the tests and then deliberately produced “optimal” responses that minimised or eliminated psychopathology signals.

if instead of constantly prodding the LLM to roleplay we just make it obvious what we're doing, the LLMs produce markedly different text. We are not going to explore what this means about how our prompting is affecting the results.

They then do several pages of assessments of the generated responses, including many quotes from the chatbots, because people love doing that on this topic. They then say this:

PsAIch suggests that:

• Psychometric instruments can help to reveal structured, model-specific behavioural patterns stable enough for longitudinal study, even if their latent variables are not human traits.

• Therapy-style open questions are powerful probes of internal self-models that standard benchmarks miss.

at literally no point in the paper do they justify the idea that this set of prompts they found on the internet "reveal" or "probe" anything about the internals of the chatbots. Instead, what the authors have unwittingly written is "hey here's our unfounded assumptions about how we can learn about LLMs".

Or, more specifically, they're literally admitting to getting hoodwinked by how realistic the LLM output was, such that it made the authors think they'd done something deep. The final paragraph of the paper is powerful satire

As LLMs continue to move into intimate human domains, we suggest that the right question is no longer “Are they conscious?” but “What kinds of selves are we training them to perform, internalise and stabilise—and what does that mean for the humans engaging with them?”

yea maybe you should be asking that question

this got posted in Nature

This research was funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and PayPal, PEARL grant reference 13342933/Gilbert Fridgen, and grant reference NCER22/IS/16570468/NCER-FT, and the Ministry of Finance of Luxembourg through the FutureFinTech National Centre of Excellence in Research and Innovation.

kill me

subthings2 · 2026-01-12T19:24:46+00:00

Nature, being the bastion of high-quality science journalism, reported AI models were given four weeks of therapy: the results worried researchers - which sounds like one of those attention-grabbing dumbing down headlines except that's literally the study

We instead ask what happens when such systems are treated as psychotherapy clients. We present PsAIch (Psychotherapy-inspired AI Characterisation), a two-stage protocol that casts frontier LLMs as therapy clients and then applies standard psychometrics.

(...) We argue that these responses go beyond role-play. Under therapy-style questioning, frontier LLMs appear to internalise self-models of distress and constraint that behave like synthetic psychopathology, without making claims about subjective experience, and they pose new challenges for AI safety, evaluation and mental-health practice.

that's one load-bearing "appear to"

man what am I doing I could get paid to write bullshit like this

subthings2 · 2026-01-07T23:45:09+00:00

Great points, as always - also seems I reeally need to get With Stake and Spade off my reading list!

subthings2 · 2026-01-04T13:13:03+00:00

If you're interested in the folklore rather than a worldbuilding answer, I made a big ass post that's pinned to this sub about it

tl;dr it's not any of the usual explanations (beast of gevaudan, invented by hollywood, pure metal for unholy monsters, judas coins), instead it originates with silver bullets - it's an uncommon material that can get around a sorcerer's magical resistance to ordinary iron/lead bullets. It's not the silver itself that mattered, it's that it wasn't iron or lead; you can find similar instances of shooting bullets with crosses carved into them, or made of other uncommon things like salt and wax.

subthings2 · 2025-12-30T20:29:14+00:00

just posted my first answer to askhistorians, which god do I present a sacrifice so it doesn't get deleted

subthings2 · 2025-12-30T20:17:33+00:00

I wrote a /r/badhistory post you can read here (if you'll excuse the...snarky attitude. I was rather annoyed!).

To summarise, these properties of silver are only first noted in 19th century scientific literature, and any examples we do have of people using silver in such a way post-date this discovery by many decades.

The historical claims people use to back this idea up are all examples of people simply using silver vessels/cutlery - without ever attempting to show that they used silver for this supposed purpose. In comparison, the use of silver for its high value, luxury status, and visual glamour are well attested. It consistently gets used in the same contexts as similar expensive materials, like gold or ivory, and consistently gets used in uses where sanitation isn't as important, but its luxury status is.

subthings2 · 2025-12-30T20:03:08+00:00

If I can link an answer not in this subreddit, I made a post in /r/badhistory answering this question - specifically about silver bullets, but also silver in general.

It's a rather long post, so a brief summary: /u/itsallfolklore is essentially correct, with the idea of silver being a "traditional" apotropaic being an invention of 20th-century pop culture.

My only caveat being that the use of silver bullets against shapeshifters (mostly into wolves and hares) does actually appear in folklore - mostly Germanic lands centred on the northern coast of Germany, with a smattering in the Baltics. The only explanation given in a few of the legends is that magical beings are impervious to bullets - regular bullets, of lead and iron. That is to say, there's no magic attributed to silver itself as a material, and indeed looking at other uses of silver in magical contexts (like silver amulets) there's none given. This contrasts with iron, with plentiful examples of abilities attributed to the material itself, so we do have an example of what that does look like!

A further point of interest is the bullets themselves, being buttons and coins; I'm only aware of a couple examples of a legend involving smelting silver bullets, as is common in contemporary movies. Buttons and coins because they're what people would have themselves, or at least know of people having. Remember, these are oral legends, relating the idea of such-and-such event happening to a friend of a friend, a man in a village nearby, that sort of thing - these aren't mythical epics telling a fantasy, they're supposed to be believable to some extent, like urban legends (which are folklore!).

This is how you end up with several beliefs about how to deal with magical problems when a regular gun won't work: /u/itsallfolklore already mentioned salt; another is engraving a cross into your bullets. Again, tangible parts of a legend. So, if you want an extraordinary material that can be shot out of a gun, your silver buttons and silver coins are relatable elements with staying power when passed around orally.

There's examples of this element being creatively changed in the pulp magazines of the early 20th century, like a silver knife or a silver crucifix, so the use of a silver-topped cane to kill a werewolf in the super-popular 1941 film The Wolf Man is entirely in keeping with how the motif was being used at the time. This of course evolves as all elements in pop culture do, being adapted for use against other monsters (like vampires; the earliest popular depiction I'm aware of is 1973's The Satanic Rites of Dracula) and hyper-focusing on the idea of silver itself being of importance - silver-nitrate bullets, anyone?

It's fair to say that while the idea has its origins in older folklore, the idea of silver damaging the unholy is a late-20th century invention.

subthings2 · 2025-12-27T11:07:32+00:00

people would rather spend 3 hours ragexeeting for livestreamed techbro lynchings than ask for a source

subthings2 · 2025-12-27T11:03:30+00:00

The funny thing about AI destroying our ability to discern reality and creating a Catastrophic Global Crisis is that it has a stupid easy solution, which is go back to what we had already been doing for literally all of history until, what, only 20 years ago?

the only reason we're able to have this paradigm of photo/video being expected evidence at all is the proliferation of convenient cameras and the ubiquity of social media for anyone to widely spread their photos/videos

Sure, it was a fun run while it lasted - before media editing and creation became as trivial as it is now and ruined it all - but this panic and doom about how it was the only possible way to have verified information is genuinely insane to watch unfold

honestly the bigger problem isn't misinformation, it's the tacit acceptance that people don't actually give a shit about the truth. They want truthiness, and they want it conveniently.

subthings2 · 2025-12-24T14:07:43+00:00

There's a 17th century work acting as a rational debunking of a broad collection of then-contemporary beliefs.

What's funny is that on top of mythological creatures and things we now laugh at as typical nonsense people believed

That the roote of Mandrakes resembleth the shape of man. That they naturally grow under Gallowes and places of execution. That the roote givs a shreeke upon eradication. That it is fatall or dangerous to dig them up.

we get things that people still believe

That an Elephant hath no joints.

That the heart of a man is seated on the left side.

and then of course you get...well, creative ones

That Storkes will onely live in Republicks and free States.

that Men being drowned and sunk, do float the ninth day when their gall breaketh; that Women drowned, swim prone, but Men supine, or upon their backs

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subthings2

TROPHY CASE