alt Hacker NewsI genuinely don't see how those two statements conflict with each other.
Despite not being a serious benchmark (how could it be serious? It's a pelican riding a bicycle!) it still turned out to have some value. You can see that just by scrolling through the archives and watching it improve as the models improved.
If your definition of doublethink is "holding two conflicting ideas in your head at once" then I would say doublethink is a necessary skill for navigating the weird AI era we find ourselves inhabiting.
"some value" is not the same as "a surprisingly good measure of the quality of the model for other tasks".
doublethink does not mean holding two conflicting ideas in your head at once. it means holding two logically inconsistent positions/beliefs at the same time.