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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I wonder what the deleted Roko comment was about

    Are you talking about his -18 karma comment? It says:

    Long post on eugenics, -1 points right now and lots of comments disagreeing. Looks like this is a political battle; I'll skip actually reading it and note that these kinds of issues are not decided rationally but politically, EA is a left-wing movement so eugenics is axiomatically bad. From a right-wing point of view one can even see it as a good thing that the left is irrational about this kind of thing, it means that they will be late adopters of the technology and fall behind.

  • It's also a way for the rich to subvert the democratic will of the people:

    Let's say the people of Examplestan have a large underclass who live paycheck to paycheck and a small upperclass who gets their money from land ownership. The government is thinking of introducing a bill that would make their tax revenue come less from paychecks and more from taxing land value. Democracy advocates want to put it to a vote, but a group of futarchy lobbyists convince the government to run a conditional prediction market instead. The market question is "If we replace the paycheck tax with a land value tax, will welfare increase?". The large underclass has almost no money to bet that it will, while the small upperclass bets a large chunk of their money that it won't. Predictably, more money is betted on it not increasing welfare and when the market closes, everyone gets their money back and the government decides not to implement it.

  • Since refusing a bet is seen as an admission of dishonesty, it's also a way to disadvantage an interlocutor with less money:

    The marginal value of money decreases as you get more of it. A hundred dollars might be a vitally important amount of money for a poor person, and not even noticeable for a rich person. So if you bet against a person with less money you are wagering less of your happiness than they are. If they have health problems (and live in a country with bad healthcare) this bet increases their risk of death, which it doesn't for you. It seems to me that betting against someone who is poorer than you is morally dubious.

  • No mention of the second castle either. And then Jan Kulveit says in this comment section:

    For me, unfortunately, the discourse surrounding Wytham Abbey, seems like a sign of epistemic decline of the community, or at least on the EA forum.

    While lying through his teeth in his comments on the post about the second castle.

  • They are now starting to get favorably cited on the EA Forum too:

    Lynn and Vanhanen collected IQ scores from various studies and made corrections, such as adjusting for the FLynn Effect, , to produce their national estimates.

    When a commenter cites a wikipedia page which shows that Lynn is 1) a self-described scientific racist who systematically picked datasets which gave black people lower IQ, and 2) It's called the Flynn effect, not the FLynn effect, since Lynn didn't discover it, he responds

    A side point, but Wikipedia is politically biased. I intentionally capitalized the L to give credit as Richard Lynn's discovery preceeded Flynn's first publication. Although, his discovery was preceeded by Runquist.

  • The incel apologetics posts at least tend to present themselves as one degree removed by being 'backlash to the backlash' (recent example), it's the comments that tend to get truly unhinged:

    Nearly all of my sexual and relationship success involved an unmistakable element of RPing Neutral Evil.

    But incels are defined by their failure to perform well in these games, and they usually have innate (genetic, personality defects) that make them easy targets for abuse (see what feminists like the ones quoted in this piece have to say about them).