- 3 Posts
- 46 Comments
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligenceEnglish8·1 month agoget em while they’re hot!
1 April 2024
(also baller move to publish it on april fools)
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•your Bayesian yacht is an outlier adn should not be countedEnglish15·6 months agoWell naive bayesianism, as practiced by the rationalists. Bayesianism itself can be reformed to get rid of most its problems, though I’ve yet to see a good solution for the absent-minded driver problem.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•The video about libertarian charter cities as Effective Altruism akhully is up!English4·6 months agoThis is another example of the dangers of wealth inequality. A lot of EAs tried to start a youtube channel (e.g.), but the only one that could get funded was this one, the one promoting bitcoins and charter cities. Now this is the largest EA channel, attracting more of those types and signalling clearly that if you want to succeed in EA you gotta please the capitalist funders.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is outEnglish3·7 months agoI read the article, not a single mention of things like the research on stereotype threat in chess. I wish rationalists would crack open a sociology book at some point in their lives. They’re so interested in social phenomena, but while Less Wrong has a tag for psychology (with 287 posts), history (245 posts), and economics (462 posts), they seem unwilling to look at sociology for explanations, with it not even having a tag on LW.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•here's the amazing Vibecamp essay where the rationalists talk about "microdosing" meth if they can't take the adderall to become a financial genius like Scoot promised themEnglish21·8 months agoHow do you find these things? How do you read these things? I’m starting to worry about your health David; such a continuous stream of highly concentrated horseshit can’t be good for you.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•The worst person you know: "We bought an island"English8·8 months agoThis could be a sex thing or maybe they want young blood for their blood transfusions. Maybe they saw Marx’s criticism that capitalists were akin to vampires, sucking the metaphorical blood out of the poor, and thought to themselves: he’s right, we should take their literal blood too.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•Rich People Are Freezing Themselves to Stay Wealthy ForeverEnglish17·10 months agoSome EAs have tried to make an “EA case” for cryonics, and I just want someone to comment on it: “But couldn’t you safe many more people by using that money to buy malaria bednets, or vaccines, or almost anything else?”
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•Tech Bros Invented Trains And It Broke MeEnglish6·10 months agoYeah, I didn’t say he only makes those videos, just that he makes a lot of them
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•Tech Bros Invented Trains And It Broke MeEnglish142·10 months agoThis guy has like a billion videos that are just some variation of “Here’s a tech bro startup making a gadgetbahn and here’s why it wouldn’t work and trains are a thousand times better”. Great that it exists, but since these startups never learn from others’ mistakes and thus keep making the same missteps over and over and over again, it makes the videos very samey after a while. Not sure what I would do in his position.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•Yud lettuce know that we just don't get it :(English11·10 months agoHe wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding
That’s a good quote, did you come up with that? I for one would be ecstatic to be the scaffolding of a research field.
Coll@awful.systemsOPto SneerClub@awful.systems•Scott Alexander shares conspiracy theory that COVID didn't happenEnglish20·11 months agoI left a comment that made a similar point with some data:
4: Please stop sharing conspiracy theories
5: Higher wages are useless if your country’s infrastructure and tax system is so piss poor that you need to spend more on basic necessities. We have economic metrics that account for some of this, such as the difference between income and discretionary income. Free-market propagandists always point to the US having high income, but the same can not be said for discretionary income. For example, if we compare the US to the Netherlands, we see that the US median disposable income is 41K while in the Netherlands it’s 36K. But let’s compare how much you have to spend in your day to day life and calculate the discretionary income based on that:
________________________US_______Netherlands
income________________41k_______36k
food___________________5.1k_______3.7k
shelter_________________13.2k______13k
clothing________________1.2k_______1.5k
transport______________6.3k_______3.4k
health__________________3.2k_______1.8k
student debt___________2.1k_______0.8k
discretionary income__9.9k_______11.8k
As we see, the case the free-market capitalist makes falls apart once we look at discretionary income, which collectivist and social policies ensure is higher in the Netherlands.
EDIT: Scott has edited the post to make 4 seem less like an endorsement and more an ironic share. This is better, but I still prefer it if these things aren’t spread at all.
EDIT 2: Source for the 2021 US-Dutch disposable income vs discretionary income (as well as a lot of other comparisons between median US and Dutch expenditure): https://www.moneymacro.rocks/2021-07-02-dutch-vs-america-middle-class/
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•here's a great and useful rundown of Scott Alexander Siskind's actual awful beliefs, from a centrist who found it difficult to accept until that email leakedEnglish7·11 months agoWasn’t phrenology about skull shape and its influence on mental traits in general? Otherwise it’s not really a field of study, it’s just one claim: larger skull = more intelligence (which is just a less precise version of more childhood nutrition = taller = larger skull = more intelligence), but phrenologists also claimed they could explain all sorts of traits like criminality and personality with things like bumps in the skull.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•Inside Wytham Abbey, the £15 Million Castle Effective Altruism Must Sell - Effective Ventures is giving $26.8m in stolen money back to FTX creditors, so they gotta sell their not-a-castleEnglish7·1 year agoWytham Abbey is being listed on the open market for £15 million […] Adjusted for inflation, the purchase price of the house two years ago now equals £16.2 million.
Remember when one of their justifications was that it’s also an investment?
It’s not necessarily a loss of a million pounds if many of the events that happened there would have spent money to organise events elsewhere (renting event spaces and accommodation for event attendees can get quite pricey) and would have spent additional time on organising the events, finding venues, setting them up etc (compared to having them at Wytham). For comparison, EA Global events cost in the ballpark of a million pounds per event.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•Why are our enemies so pathetic and stupid when we're so handsome and smart?English7·1 year agoI actually don’t find this a bad post, but I do want to point out that it got way more karma than any of titotals more critical posts, even though I find many of them better. This once again points to how the EA Forum’s voting-power-by-popularity karma system creates groupthink; being critical nets you less voting power than being lauditory, and it disincentivizes calling out bullshit in general.
When Ives Parr of “Effective Altruism is when you want to spend money on genetic engineering for race-and-IQ theories” fame, made a seperate post complaining that that post got downvoted despite nobody giving a good counterargument, I wanted to comment and call him out on his bullshit, but why bother with a karma system that allows him and his buddies to downvote it out of the frontpage while leaving you with less voting power? A lot of EA’s missteps are just one off blunders, but what makes the EA forum’s “”“epistocratic”“” voting system so much worse is that it’s systematic, every post and comment is now affected by this calculus of how much you can criticize the people with a lot of power on the forum without losing power of your own, making groupthink almost inevitable. Given the fact that people who are on the forum longer have on average more voting power than newer voices, I can’t help but wonder if this is by design.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•Why are our enemies so pathetic and stupid when we're so handsome and smart?English10·1 year agoIt was a chateau in the Czech Republic
It wasn’t CEA/EV like with the other ‘castle’, but it was an organization that had its own tag on the EA forum, so at the very least EA-aligned.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•testosterone and IQ: from the LessWrong School of Taking 4chan Memes and Just Running With ThemEnglish25·1 year agoI have a tremendously large skull (like XXL hats) - maybe that’s why I can still do some basic math after the testosterone brain poison during puberty? […] Now I’m looking at tech billionaires. Mostly lo-T looking men. Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos were big & bald but seem to have pretty big skulls to compensate
Mark phrenology off your bingo cards, Foppington’s law strikes again:
Once bigotry or self-loathing permeate a given community, it is only a matter of time before deep metaphysical significance is assigned to the shape of human skulls.
Coll@awful.systemsto SneerClub@awful.systems•oh no, the organisation founded by a Swedish EA with a racism scandal is defunct! No, not that one, the other oneEnglish9·1 year agoI would’ve suggested that we call ourselves the megaforecasters to one-up them, but then they might start calling themselves the überforecasters.
They have to call it Arya, because No-one takes them seriously
The article does say/link:
As for
In the footnote it does say:
Although there’s likely still an overestimation of how much it would help