CinnasVerses

Seems like reddit.com is not behind a login wall yet, but give them time.

Officially old.reddit.com is closed to reduce costs from scrapers at chatbot companies. Really so they can collect even more personal information from every visitor.

RiP Old! SneerClub which is now behind a login wall on Reddit. Fortunately we backed up its earliest posts. I don’t plan to check the site regularly.

They have a clause for “Most adult HIA methods (anything involving brain surgery or gene editing) would probably be somewhat hard to scale up a lot; some may be quite easy to scale up (e.g. non-editing brain drugs).” Something something used surgical equipment in Ziz’ van, something something they do like their pills.

Alpha is an investing term (whatever performance you can’t explain by the market cycle and known mathematical properties of specific stocks). I feel so tired.

Montana is legalizing a pet Libertarian project: the right to try any experimental medical treatment a crank will offer technologyreview.com/…/montana-experimental-medic… Rationalists are big on this one because they are such good suckers.

This is an old scam: the Internet has been filled with sites which just exist to boost another site in search results for twenty years. Creating essay-like slop to convince the bot that Burma Shave is great and Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia is the same business as hiring writers in India to convince Google bot that your car dealership is the best car dealership.

Previous thread on plzdontkillus awful.systems/post/8359862 I wonder whether it is Aella or Duleba who is forcing some basic harm-reduction policies (but no enforcement, whereas you can be kicked out if you don’t post fast enough).

On Tuesday 4 August, SpaceX has to release a quarterly financial report. On the second trading day after that, SpaceX insiders are allowed to sell another tranche of shares. So get some popcorn and a cool beverage 🍿 fool.com/…/spacex-earnings-aug-4-heres-why-aug-6-…

That was a deliberate offer from Big Tech: put aside your old convival systems and let us handle the details. Google deliberately deskilled web search, other companies broke systems administration and software packages that users can understand and edit. The point is that once you don’t understand the details and cannot operate on your own, the big company can do what it likes and you have to take it.

Zero Interest Rates Policy from 2008-2022 and lack of antitrust enforcement in the USA lead to two things: incumbent software companies got bigger because they could borrow so much money and buy or crush their competition, and small software companies did not have to make profits now because investors tossed in more money and hoped they would make big profits one day. That world is dead but the industry has not adapted.

The LW insider thinks Aschenbrenner is trying to save a stake in Anthropic. I think that is very likely because the press release stressed “public stock position” and Anthropic is privately owned.

The op-ed writer is Adam Mastroianni who is a regular at Lighthaven. gwern.net/interview-inkhaven He cites Andy Masley who is yet another autodidact with a cushy job in the Effective Altruism grantland. www.andymasley.com and Brian Potter who is an engineer at a think tank called the Institute for Progress ifp.org/author/brian-potter/ (“The overwhelming priority of energy policy must be making it easier to build things” which things angryDuckMeme.png)

The controversy about the 26-year-old with the 16-year-old wonders if the respondents are all in California which has a very high age of consent. More replies say that is rape than say “a client fails to pay a sex worker” is rape. Her audience ranks it equally with the bodice-ripper scenario (handsome top ravages someone who says no and struggles but really wants it in his or her heart).

That link is login-walled, how about summarizing it?

It was Yudkowsky-2008 who was astonished that “these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive,” prompting David Gerard to ask “My dude, have you never heard of cocaine?” I don’t know if he had moved to the Bay Area yet but Yudkowsky-2025 had thoughts on LSD.

“Any Sufficiently Transparent Magic…” by Damien P. Williams talks about chatbots as sorcery …charlotte.edu/…/DPW_Any-Sufficiently-Transparent…

I like to keep my analysis separate from my word-magic (making things happen by saying them). Greer is trying to remake the world and not just work up his courage which is a harmless and consensual form of word-magic.

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) www.hachettebookgroup.com/…/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.

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.

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).

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.

Samo Burja of Leverage Research and Palladium Magazine is trying to pivot to respectability 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 and his highest educational credential is “studied at the University of Ljubljana.” The Long Now Foundation gave him money which is disappointing.

The author characterizes EA as being more “businesslike and professional” than LW, then spends the article talking about how their plans all hinge on getting a rich patron. The image of the beautiful gardens floored with Astroturf is sad.

I don’t know if the prosecution will say the accused talked her friends into this, or her friends talked her into it. Some people think Ziz talked someone else into taking their own life. Either story will be horrid.

The killings of outsiders remind me of the Symbionese Liberation Army because they don’t even follow from the ideology, just young people talking themselves into attacking their parents, their landlord, and the cops. I think the only reason Ziz and friends did not try armed robbery was that it does not pay any more.

On Old! SneerClub, the Zizian whose parents were murdered in their home has been charged with the killing. The story is horrid so I will not link. I just wanted to make fun of cranks not stare at horrors.

And these people know that crypto and GameStop and their friends’ startups did not keep growing rapidly forever. They know that just because donations to EA had been rapidly growing they did not continue to accelerate. They have friends who covered the logistic function / sigmoid at Stanford. Another Californian had a witticism about the trouble getting someone to understand something when he is paid to misunderstand.

Scott Alexander funded a prediction-market startup which uses points not dollars. I think many of our friends lack the ovaries to bet significant numbers of real dollars on Kalshi or Polymarket.

I think magazines like Liberal Currents, for a generally politically and culturally engaged white-collar audience, have been like this since they were printed on rag paper. The only difference between it and fandom drama is that the participants can rationalize it in fancier language.

I don’t understand the American social media and Old Media practice of everyone talking about some representative or candidate for the legislature. The only people who should be talking about a candidate for a district in New York State live in New York State.

The three American ratings agencies all decided that SpaceX bonds meet the minimum standards to be investment grade. reuters.com/…/spacex-gets-investment-grade-rating… I don’t own any American bonds and many people have a ‘government bonds only’ policy for reasons.

The moderators don’t exist. Sole moderator Oliver Habryka hasn’t commented on Reddit in 3 years, and is extremely busy with vastly more important things like AI safety, Lighthaven, and the actual LessWrong. Spammers continue indefinitely for months until, presumably, they earn a site-wide ban. The guy who objects to delegating? I guess he decided that nobody on a forum can handle the responsibility of moderation?

A Liberal Currents article talks about Steven Pinker, Dan Dennet, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and The Edge (a series of talks similar to Thiel’s Dialog).

(sarcasm) I’m saying that just because I get sucked off by guys does not mean I’m one of those queers! I don’t go to pride parades or leather bars or have fashion sense and everyone knows that is what ‘gay’ means. I’m as heterosexual as Ted Haggard. (end sarcasm)

Its like he wrote “many of my friends identify as heterosexual, and they say I might be heterosexual too, but in my work as a forensic psychiatrist my heterosexual patients are accused rapists and sex pests and people who got arrested with a suitcase full of cocaine and a phone full of texts from a 'Brazilian model.” and never tried to reconcile the two or thought through the Bayesian logic.

Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015): I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors. So he can’t be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can’t have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker: But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it. As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And applying those means to him would be bad, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED, appeal to adverse consequences losers.

Scott Alexander literally says this before his story about ‘Henry’ the patient who beat his fifth wife because she objected to him cheating with the ex who had left him after he beat her: I feel obligated to say at this point that the specific details of these patient stories are made up, and several of them are composites of multiple different people, in order to protect confidentiality. I’m preserving the general gist, nothing more) /s And male rationalists would never, ever hang out with an edgy scary person like Yarvin, Sailer, or Vassar for the thrill and bragging rights! Only teh fe-males would do such a thing. /s

Disgraced artist, TTRPG writer, and porn star Zak Sabbath en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zak_Smith tweeted about Brent Dill. Do all the awful Internet celebrities from fifteen years ago know each other? (No links because I delete my xcancel history).

Wired has a story about Peter Thiel’s Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, “sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!).” The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.

Did you see the Brent Dill stuff today? No, it seems to be on the Nazi bar? So Brent Dill now has a YouTube channel and gave a talk about sasquatch. Some Vibecamp organizer tweeted that he organized a weekend event with young women and Brent Dill. He agrees with Scott Alexander that figures like Curtis Yarvin are sexy and attract women to your events! (ProTip: if you aren’t getting enough feminine energy at your events, advertising it as an opportunity to meet a reputedly DANGEROUS man is a fantastic way to fix that … Like wait…this guy who’s rumored to be is the same guy holding space generously and openly with no ‘grabby’ or fearful / aversive energy towards anyone? When was the last time a rationalist guy showed aptitude at THAT?! (For those who don’t know, rat-adjacent women tolerate --or, darkly, cultivate-- bizarre behavior from men as a matter of course, so it was startling that the supposed exemplar of rat-man badness was so far from that energy). … I love my friends, of course. But many live in this bubble, have never meaningfully connected outside the bubble, and don’t know how: highly unskilled at basic normie relational skills. In a way that reads as very rude if you’re not accustomed to the norms (rather, the lack thereof) in the ffgk bubble. And they have better visibility into the OUTRAGEOUS behavior of the truly danger characters in the scene --the sexual violence, the fraud, the lying, more lying…so much lying. … AND TO BE ABUNDANTLY CLEAR: sometimes Brent still says he needs outrageous amounts of power and control that no sane person should ever give a person so wounded. To which I say…DON’T DO THAT. THAT WAS REALLY STUPID WHEN BLACK LOTUS DID IT, AND IT WOULD BE BEYOND PROFOUNDLY STUPID TO REPEAT. A vibecamp peson replied with screenshots of a chat with with Dill where he claimed that during 2014-2018 he was living in a rationalist group home and had his expenses paid in exchange for serving as an “emotional support dom” for a barely-legal person who had had sex with housemates while under 18, and that drama inside the house lead to the accusations against him (reminder, Dill confessed to doing some very disturbing things to much younger partners on his blog). Yuan tweeted in response: i was heavily involved with brent dill for a substantial chunk of 2018, when he was embedded in the bay area rationality community. based on those experiences i never want to get involved with him ever again and i highly recommend none of you ever do so either. please note that this is the strongest condemnation i have ever written publicly about anybody … when this is happening to you, from the inside it feels like finally you’ve found someone who’s saying things that make sense, that matter, who’s bravely pointing out the elephants in the room nobody else is willing to, who is being unfairly persecuted by the popular monkeys, who’s showing you all the social rot and promising in so many words that maybe, just maybe, you and him can fix it together, because you get it, right? you’re not like the others. you see the truth. you’re so special. or whatever. he will tailor different versions of this pitch to different people based on what he’s figured out about you. the pitch includes, among other things, a sophisticated defense against any attempts to warn you about him, which look like confirmation of his persecution thesis Can we just take off and drop a small asteroid on Oakland?

Geoffrey Miller could do with a RationalWiki entry www.primalpoly.com en.wikipedia.org/…/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)

Qiaochu Yuan (no relationship to the man accused of soliciting a child) left his PhD program to become an “emotional coach.” If his old tweets are any guide then Doctor, heal thyself. G. Duleba and Ozy picked similar careers rather than coaching a soccer team or teaching freshman English like most people who want to be teachers and mentors.

When I emailed Denecke, he told me Bootstrap Bio had ceased operations due to lack of funding. (The company’s former chief science officer, Qichen Yuan, was indicted for attempted sex trafficking of a child in September 2025. His case is ongoing.) But before the company unraveled, its early investors included Malcolm and Simone Collins, whom you may have heard of.