get em while they’re hot!

1 April 2024

(also baller move to publish it on april fools)

Well 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.

This 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.

I 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.

Remember this: Sam Bankman-Fried encouraged Adderall use says ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison in bid to avoid prison

How 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.

This 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.

Some 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?”

Yeah, I didn’t say he only makes those videos, just that he makes a lot of them

This 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.

He 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.

I 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/

Wasn’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.

Wytham 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?

Reaction on the EA forum:

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.

I 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.

It 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.

I 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.

I 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

embrace the narrative that “SBF died for our sins”

Huh? This is so absurdly self-aggrandizing that I struggle to comprehend what he’s even saying. What did he imagine “our sins” were, and how did getting imprisoned absolve them?