maol

I knew some people who lived in Switzerland for a bit and they joked that it was a libertarian paradise because you can drink and smoke when you're a teenager, the age of consent is 16 and everyone is issued a gun as part of their military service. I didn't expect anyone to take it seriously.... Afaik Switzerland does have a unique system of federated democratic governance, one of the oldest democratic systems in Europe. The downside is that women weren't able to vote in some Swiss cantons until the 90s.

Fire accidents seem to have the unique combination of producing extremely strong emotional responses by people in a local community, while also often being traceable to an o-ring like failure that you can over-index on.

Gee, why would people get emotional about friends and family being burnt alive. How bizarre.

Also I am not a fire expert by any means whatsoever and maybe I'm missing this guy's point. But pretty much every account I have ever read of a fire that killed a lot of people is like "the building did not meet fire safety standards and the management had been dodging calls from the fire safety inspectors. Multiple people said the building was unsafe. On the night the fire happened the fire exits were chained shut." Like, read about this horrendous fire that happened near where I live. There is no need to bring up o-rings. Fires in residential buildings and entertainment venues are not the same as fires on NASA spaceships.

Also fire codes do not control the size of fire engines. That's a bad decision made by firefighters.

Thank you, that’s very interesting. To be clear I am not pro-malaria, but sometimes groups are against bad things for weird reasons. Like Scientologists campaigning against abusive psychiatric practices because L. Ron Hubbard was mad at psychologists for not taking him seriously.

I’m sure there’s someone out there!

I dunno, I didn’t get much out of it because I found all the connections hard to follow. That article might actually need a diagram showing all the connections between the people featured, but that probably wouldn’t help with the claims that TESCREAL critics are conspiracy theorists…

Remove one or two of those reward circuits, especially if they’re poorly adapted to the modern environment, and the human becomes more generally capable. I suspect that my own inability to feel love is one example, the amygdalectomy is another, and the general pattern of high-IQ people being somewhat autistic is a third. I managed not to click on the linked blog post about the author’s inability to feel love.

From that post about Nonlinear: I reached out to some references Kat listed, which were positive to strongly positive. However I also got a strongly negative reference — someone else who I informed about the decision told me they knew former employees who felt taken advantage of around things like salary. However the former employees reportedly didn’t want to come forward due to fear of retaliation and generally wanting to get away from the whole thing, and the reports felt very vague and hard for me to concretely visualize, but nonetheless the person strongly recommended against inviting Kat and Drew. I didn’t feel like this was a strong enough reason to bar someone from a space — or rather, I did, but vague anonymous descriptions of very bad behavior being sufficient to ban someone is a system that can be straightforwardly abused, so I don’t want to use such a system. This pretty much explains how and why the workplace culture in so many TESCREAL orgs is so, so bad.

If someone is scared that if they criticize someone they will be “retaliated against”, that seems like a sign that something is really bad. I’ve had to deal with some situations like this myself while organizing events (and I haven’t always done a good job) but surely you should at least ask some more questions and err on the side of caution.

They’re tarnishing the Alpha course’s¹ hard-won cult branding. ¹ They might not seem too culty based on that Wikipedia page but if I remember correctly Private Eye printed some very critical stuff about the courses and people associated with them in recent years. Details not forthcoming until I flick through my big stack of old magazines…

What does he think all the suddenly unemployed and angry masses are gonna do in this scenario? Twiddle their thumbs? Or does he think there’s gonna be some sort of mass killing of the surplus labour?

Nope, different degree. This guy is brought in as a guest lecturer about the field he works in: most of the actual lecturers are nowhere near this AI-pilled.

“the overtone window” would be a good name for the amount of racist dogwhistling that’s acceptable in the mainstream media

I’m already thinking about complaining about some of the stuff he’s said¹, so that might be a good idea. However I think my university’s policy for students is that you can use AI to start research, summarise notes etc. so he might not be breaking any rules. ¹ Inappropriate questions to students. Not sexually inappropriate, just inappropriate.

Émile Torres writing last year: […] Nick Beckstead, a noted EA, argued in 2013 that, given the “overwhelming” moral importance of the far future — “millions, billions, and trillions” of years from now — we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, other things being equal. The reason is that people in rich countries are better positioned to influence the far future. And that about sums it up. They don’t care. They simply don’t care. Beckstead explains that it’s better to focus on the rich countries because “rich countries have substantially more innovation” and “their workers are more economically productive”. He apparently presented these ideas in a graduate thesis: I hope he got a bad grade.

#3 suggests that people in tech have gotten way wayyy too comfortable with saying “hey, I know that company’s evil, but it’s a really good job” about companies that make software for arms manufacturers or ICE or surveillance.

This NY newspaper still makes slop the old fashioned way

Watching this online economic lecture thing for college and it just got mentioned that repeated bouts of malaria in children can cause mental disability (wikipedia says “brain damage” and “increased risk of neurological and cognitive deficits”). I have to admit I did not know this. …is the only reason EAs we’re ever into “malaria nets” because of their obsession with g and their conviction that increasing it is a panacea?

Hell is a university lecturer who not only hands out AI-generated summaries of his lecture to the class, but uses AI to generate diagrams and infographics for his lecture slides.

And he still works there! I guess it might be hard to get a new job with “presided over largest theft of labor in human history” on your CV.