I am still subscribed to slatestarcodex on reddit, and this piece of garbage popped up on my feed. I didn't actually read the whole thing, but basically the author correctly realizes Trump is ruining everything in the process of getting at "DEI" and "wokism", but instead of accepting the blame that rightfully falls on Scott Alexander and the author, deflects and blames the "left" elitists. (I put left in quote marks because the author apparently thinks establishment democrats are actually leftist, I fucking wish).

An illustrative quote (of Scott's that the author agrees with)

We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths or filling in multiple-choice exams about how white people cause earthquakes. Instead we got a thousand scientific studies cancelled because they used the string “trans-” in a sentence on transmembrane proteins.

I don't really follow their subsequent points, they fail to clarify what they mean... In sofar as "left elites" actually refers t

Might unilateral billionaire funding skew priorities?

Should the "epistemically humble" listen to people who disagree with them?

Might it be undemocratic to give some people many times more voting power?

Find out this week on 'Keeping up with the Effective Altruists'

Apparently DOGE isn’t killing enough people (literally or metaphorically)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlrBjeAtJUk - video

A nice and solid mockery of just how badly e/accs derailed their own plans by getting Trump elected. I'll let the subtitle(?) speak for itself:

Effective accelerationists didn’t just accidentally shoot themselves in the foot. They methodically blew off each of their toes with a .50 caliber sniper rifle.

Came across this fuckin disaster on Ye Olde LinkedIn by 'Caroline Jeanmaire at AI Governance at The Future Society'

"I've just reviewed what might be the most important AI forecast of the year: a meticulously researched scenario mapping potential paths to AGI by 2027. Authored by Daniel Kokotajlo (>lel) (OpenAI whistleblower), Scott Alexander (>LMAOU), Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean, it's a quantitatively rigorous analysis beginning with the emergence of true AI agents in mid-2025.

What makes this forecast exceptionally credible:

1. One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed
2. The report received feedback from ~100 AI experts (myself included) and earned endorsement from Yoshua Bengio
3. It makes concrete, testable predictions rather than vague statements that cannot be evaluated

The scenario details a transformation potentially more significant than the Indus

Thinking about how the arsing fuck to explain the rationalists to normal people - especially as they are now a loud public problem along multiple dimensions.

The problem is that it's all deep in the weeds. Every part of it is "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong."

With bitcoin, I have, over the years, simplified it to being a story of crooks and con men. The correct answer to "what is a blockchain and how does it work" is "it's a way to move money around out of the sight of regulators" and maybe "so it's for crooks and con men, and a small number of sincere libertarians" and don't even talk about cryptography or technology.

I dunno what the one sentence explanation is of this shit.

"The purpose of LessWrong rationality is for Yudkowsky to live forever as an emulation running on the mind of the AI God" is completely true, is the purpose of the whole thing, and is also WTF.

Maybe that and "so he started what turned into a cult and a series of cults"? At this p

yeah i'm sure Matt Levine, qntm and Wildbow are gonna be champing at the bit to attend wordy racist fest

I haven't watched it. I don't know how well she will cover the subject or how deep the rabbit hole she will venture.

All I know is she's delightful and I sure as hell won't read that bilge myself, so I'm looking forward to an entertaining summary.

Edit: I watched it. I had a good time.

archive: https://archive.is/kM5hX

A solid piece on AI and ethics (and the general lack of them), featuring a nice sideswipe at our very good friends.

While this linear model's overall predictive accuracy barely outperformed random guessing,

I was tempted to write this up for Pivot but fuck giving that blog any sort of publicity.

the rest of the site is a stupendous assortment of a very small field of focus that made this ideal for sneerclub and not just techtakes

By Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres

Pro-tier sneers by seasoned veterans, get em while they're hot!

Edit: I am reliably informed that it is no longer hot.

some of the sub’s friends are holding a conference although they’re still not totally comfortable to go public:

but buyers are warned that purchases will “require approval”

aww, the poor babies. even with literal nazis in the whitehouse they still feel uncomfortable to spout their weird shit

hopefully if this thing happens at all, someone documents the everliving hell out of every attendee

tweet

lesswrong: How To Make Superbabies

Sneerclubbers may recall a recent encounter with "Tracing Woodgrains", née Jack Despain Zhou, the rationalist-infatuated former producer and researcher for "Blocked and Reported", a podcast featuring prominent transphobes Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog.

It turns out he's started a new venture: a "think-tank" called the "Center for Educational Progress." What's this think-tank's focus? Introducing eugenics into educational policy. Of couse they don't put it in those exact words, but that's the goal. The co-founder of the venture is Lillian Tara, former executive director of Pronatalist.org, the outfit run by creepy Harry Potter look-a-likes (and moderately frequent topic in this forum) Simone and Malcolm Collins. According to the anti-racist activist group Hope Not Hate:

The Collinses enlisted Lillian Tara, a pronatalist graduate student at Harvard University. During a call with