"Ban women from universities, higher education and most white-collar jobs."

"Allow people to privately borrow against the taxable part of the future incomes or other economic activities of their children."

So many execrable takes in one tweet, and that's only two of them. I'm tempted to think he's cynically outrage-farming, but then I remember who he is.

Nate Soares and Big Yud have a book coming out. It's called "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies". From the names of the authors and the title of the book, you already know everything you need to know about its contents without having to read it. (In fact, given the signature prolixity of the rationalists, you can be sure that it says in 50,000 words what could just as easily have been said in 20.)

In this LessWrong post, Nate identifies the real reason the rationalists have been unsuccessful at convincing people in power to take the idea of existential risk seriously. The rationalists simply don't speak with enough conviction. They hide the strength of their beliefs. They aren't bold enough.

As if rationalists have ever been shy about stating their kooky beliefs.

But more importantly, buy his book. Buy so many copies of the book that it shows up on all the best-seller lists. Buy so many copies that he gets invited to speak on fancy talk shows that will sell even more books. Basical

The tech bro hive mind on HN is furiously flagging (i.e., voting into invisibility) any submissions dealing with Tesla, Elon Musk or the kafkaesque US immigration detention situation. Add "/active" to the URL to see.

The site's moderator says it's fine because users are "tired of the repetition". Repetition of what exactly? Attempts to get through the censorship wall?

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

In a recent Hard Fork (Hard Hork?) episode, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose described attending the recent "The Curve" conference -- a conference in Berkeley organized and attended mostly by our very best friends. When asked about the most memorable session he attended at this conference, Casey said:

That would have been a session called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which was hosted by Eliezer Yudkowski. Eliezer is sort of the original doomer. For a couple of decades now, he has been warning about the prospects of super intelligent AI.

His view is that there is almost no scenario in which we could build a super intelligence that wouldn't either enslave us or hurt us, kill all of us, right? So he's been telling people from the beginning, we should probably just not build this. And so you and I had a chance to sit in with him.

Peopl

Excerpt:

A new study published on Thursday in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that dosage may play a role. It found that among people who took high doses of prescription amphetamines such as Vyvanse and Adderall, there was a fivefold increased risk of developing psychosis or mania for the first time compared with those who weren’t taking stimulants.

Perhaps this explains some of what goes on at LessWrong and in other rationalist circles.

Maybe she was there to give Moldbug some relationship advice.

The New Yorker has a piece on the Bay Area AI doomer and e/acc scenes.

Excerpts:

[Katja] Grace used to work for Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bearded guy with a fedora, a petulant demeanor, and a p(doom) of ninety-nine per cent. Raised in Chicago as an Orthodox Jew, he dropped out of school after eighth grade, taught himself calculus and atheism, started blogging, and, in the early two-thousands, made his way to the Bay Area. His best-known works include “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” a piece of fan fiction running to more than six hundred thousand words, and “The Sequences,” a gargantuan series of essays about how to sharpen one’s thinking.

[...]

A guest brought up Scott Alexander, one of the scene’s microcelebrities, who is often invoked mononymically. “I assume you read Scott’s post yesterday?” the guest asked [Katja] Grace, referring to an essay about “major AI safety advances,” among other things. “He was truly in top form.”

Grace looked sheepish. “Scott and I are d

In her sentencing submission to the judge in the FTX trial, Barbara Fried argues that her son is just a misunderstood altruist, who doesn't deserve to go to prison for very long.

Excerpt:

One day, when he was about twelve, he popped out of his room to ask me a question about an argument made by Derik Parfit, a well-known moral philosopher. As it happens, | am quite familiar with the academic literature Parfi’s article is a part of, having written extensively on related questions myself. His question revealed a depth of understanding and critical thinking that is not all that common even among people who think about these issues for a living. ‘What on earth are you reading?” I asked. The answer, it turned out, was he was working his way through the vast literature on utiitarianism, a strain of moral philosophy that argues that each of us has a strong ethical obligation to live so as to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves. The premises of utilitarianism obvio

Pass the popcorn, please.

(nitter link)

They've been pumping this bio-hacking startup on the Orange Site (TM) for the past few months. Now they've got Siskind shilling for them.

Molly White is best known for shining a light on the silliness and fraud that are cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web3. This essay may be a sign that she's shifting her focus to our sneerworthy friends in the extended rationalism universe. If so, that's an excellent development. Molly's great.

Not 7.5% or 8%. 8.5%. Numbers are important.

Non-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/9Hihf

In his latest NYT column, Ezra Klein identifies the neoreactionary philosophy at the core of Marc Andreessen's recent excrescence on so-called "techno-optimism". It wasn't exactly a difficult analysis, given the way Andreessen outright lists a gaggle of neoreactionaries as the inspiration for his screed.

But when Andreessen included "existential risk" and transhumanism on his list of enemy ideas, I'm sure the rationalists and EAs were feeling at least a little bit offended. Klein, as the founder of Vox media and Vox's EA-promoting "Future Perfect" vertical, was probably among those who felt targeted. He has certainly bought into the rationalist AI doomer bullshit, so you know where he stands.

So have at at, Marc and Ezra. Fight. And maybe take each other out.

Rationalist check-list:

1. Incorrect use of analogy? Check.
2. Pseudoscientific nonsense used to make your point seem more profound? Check.
3. Tortured use of probability estimates? Check.
4. Over-long description of a point that could just have easily been made in 1 sentence? Check.

This email by SBF is basically one big malapropism.

Representative take:

If you ask Stable Diffusion for a picture of a cat it always seems to produce images of healthy looking domestic cats. For the prompt "cat" to be unbiased Stable Diffusion would need to occasionally generate images of dead white tigers since this would also fit under the label of "cat".

[All non-sneerclub links below are archive.today links]

Diego Caleiro, who popped up on my radar after he commiserated with Roko's latest in a never-ending stream of denials that he's a sex pest, is worthy of a few sneers.

For example, he thinks Yud is the bestest, most awesomest, coolest person to ever breathe:

Yudkwosky is a genius and one of the best people in history. Not only he tried to save us by writing things unimaginably ahead of their time like LOGI. But he kind of invented Lesswrong. Wrote the sequences to train all of us mere mortals with 140-160IQs to think better. Then, not satisfied, he wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to get the new generation to come play. And he founded the Singularity Institute, which became Miri. It is no overstatement that if we had pulled this off Eliezer could have been THE most important person in the history of the un

Excerpt:

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

He's also a big eugenics supporter:

“There doesn’t seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn’t include coercion,” he wrote in a 2010 article for AlternativeRight .com. “Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can’t even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population? In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in t

When she's not busy fantasizing about libertarian crypto-based UBI schemes or propping up the patriarchy, she's writing wearying odes to transhumanism and longtermism. Truly the voice of a generation.