Also, Bostrom is an academic writing for serious publications. The standards are higher than when Yudkowsky was rewriting pop-science books without sufficient attribution on his private blog, because Yudkowsky is a self-published autodidact.

I did not know that Bostrom boasts of being an undergraduate prodigy like Yudkowsky and Geoff Anders boast of being child prodigies. Doing impressive things is not enough, they have to rank themselves against the vulgar masses.

The idea that industrial civilizations tend to destroy themselves was a commonplace during the Cold War. The Paperclip Maximizer is a lot like the magic broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and bureaucracies in the literature of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Some far-right culture warrior is writing a book blaming the Zizian killings on their being trans rather than classic cult dynamics and apocalyptic ideas (The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult) https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andy-ngo/the-zizians/9780316599030/

Yes, skeptics classed Alcor and cryonics with homeopathy and Bigfoot. American skeptics had a Libertariam wing but I have not heard of Michael Shermer visiting Lighthaven.

The biggest crossover between skeptics and rationalists I can think of is Julia Galef, and she podcasted with a philosopher who debated Yud once then decided it was infra dignitatem. She also dropped out of CFAR when it became more open that the rationality workshops were for finding Sarah Connor.

I don’t think that the Rats are an offshoot of the Skeptics and New Atheists just a space which competed for the same young, male, educated, Autistic Anglo audience. They deliberately removed the parts of the skeptic curriculum which involve introspection and ethnography, because they all wanted to run some grift on their audiences so the audiences needed poor epistemic hygiene.

I also don’t get it because they already hate pre-social-media institutions, so why are they still angry that American journalists were bad at transmitting public health science at the beginning of COVID? Even if you believe in a COVID lab leak, the United States broke the global public health response while countries in East Asia and the South Pacific showed what to do. There are lab-leakers who blame a partnership between traitorous American scientists and sinister Chinese labs to conduct research that was illegal in the USA.

Edit / this guy just comes out and uses COVID lab leak theories as an analogy for AI-box fantasies, but these people don’t just cite it as a parallel, they are MAD about what they think happened and want you to be mad too.

That was the party line in the American foreign-policy crowd since winter 2021/2022. They thought that if the ‘great power’ Russia invaded, Ukraine would fall. So Burja’s tweet was not even original, just the same thing any 23-year-old staffer in a new suit was writing.

Lining up by IQ and number of sex partners is another example of our friends obsessing about ranking each other numerically. Remember Caroline Ellison’s Chinese harem fantasy? Its all very adolescent.

Can imagine the computer heaven, can’t imagine things to do with someone eager and delicious that are hard to describe as “sex” or “not sex.” Berkeley should glitter-and-lube them and ride them out of town on a very phallic rail.

Edit / One of the men at Aella’s gangbang realized that he had more fun making out with a beautiful naked woman than in two minutes tussling with the birthday girl. That guy has a lesson that many inexperienced male rationalists should heed.

Decker is a GMU Econ PhD student getting distracted by Twitter and Aella. I don’t think he has figured out that for a nerdy dude, “economist/quant” is a much better career path than “social media provocateur” (so delete X, get your PhD, sign on with a financial-services company, and frolic with sex workers on your own time).

Edit / he dropped out of his PhD program but wants to start a new one at Cambridge. I would not bet that he becomes Dr. Decker. He also has a date-me Google Doc.

Good for him mentioning Caroline Ellison, the proscription amphetamines, and the ketamine. The icebreaker exercise is from one of Aella’s blog posts “This practice made men arouse me.”

Ajeya Cotra

RationalWiki says that Kelsey Piper helped Cotra launch her Substack blog https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kelsey_Piper There are not many Indian-American rationalists, Dwarkesh Patel and his GF come to mind and Venkatesh Rao is adjacent.

He is a successful pulp writer and pop nonfiction writer and fundraiser, and women like him, but he does not seem like a riveting speaker. In some ways his withdrawal to Twitter and Washington State makes it easier for fans to imagine that he is whatever they need.

He cites Samo Burja and Nicholas Decker? And Cremieux is the twitter account he cites second most often, with Richard Hanania in 4th place?

Samo Burja (“How Roman Emperors Handled the Succession Problem”), SlateScott, and POTUS have all expressed interest in Herbert Hoover. Is this part of a broader online right thing in the USA?

I think Yud does not want the responsibility. LessWrong and Effective Altruism attracted so many people, and he discovered that trying to manage the communities was too much work, so he just tweets and publishes fanfic. This is convenient for his fans because they can pick and chose which of his ideas are the Real Yud Thought.

In a quick DuckDuckGo I can’t find any site that claims Samo Burja has a degree.

His concept of live player is just another way of saying that most people are NPCs. The manuscript appears to call Elon Musk an engineer which is like calling Cheops an architect (alternatively, Musk must “fundamentally understand engineering”).

Samo Burja of Leverage Research and Palladium Magazine is trying to pivot to respectability https://samoburja.com/ He also has a Substack blog. People call him a sociologist and a political scirentist but he seems (echo me) entirely self-published except for a few opinion pieces and his highest educational credential is “studied at the University of Ljubljana.” The Long Now Foundation gave him money which is disappointing.