Until a month ago, TW was the long-time researcher for “Blocked and Reported”, the podcast hosted by Katie ‘TERF’ Herzog and relentless sealion Jesse Singal.

I wouldn’t know anything about the thread, as it’s impossible for me to read without a twitter account. Yet another reason why the site is trash.

But by all means, go on generating content for a bigoted fascist who will use everything you write to increase engagement with his platform and give it undeserved credibility and $$$.

(And no, I won’t block you.)

Sorry for the off-topic rant, but WTF is Emile Torres doing on twitter? Anytime I see someone creating content for that Nazi hellsite, I start looking at them differently.

I’d really like to know the back story on this interview too. I realize weirdness isn’t exactly distinctive when it comes to rationalists, but Zack is in a league of his own.

I’ve been using DigitalOcean for years as a personal VPS box, and I’ve had no complaints. Not sure how well they’d scale (in terms of cost) for a site like this.

Anthropic’s Claude confidently and incorrectly diagnoses brain cancer based on an MRI.

Strange man posts strange thing.

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This linked interview of Brian Merchant by Adam Conover is great. I highly recommend watching the whole thing.

For example, here is Adam, decribing the actual reasons why striking writers were concerned about AI, followed by Brian explaining how Sam Altman et al hype up the existential risk they themselves claim to be creating, just so they can sell themselves as the solution. Lots of really edifying stuff in this interview.

I wonder what percentage of fraudulent AI-generated papers would be discovered simply by searching for sentences that begin with “Certainly, …”

I’m probably not saying anything you didn’t already know, but Vox’s “Future Perfect” section, of which this article is a part, was explicitly founded as a booster for effective altruism. They’ve also memory-holed the fact that it was funded in large part by FTX. Anything by one of its regular writers (particularly Dylan Matthews or Kelsey Piper) should be mentally filed into the rationalist propaganda folder. I mean, this article throws in an off-hand remark by Scott Alexander as if it’s just taken for granted that he’s some kind of visionary genius.

You know the doom cult is having an effect when it starts popping up in previously unlikely places. Last month the socialist magazine Jacobin had an extremely long cover feature on AI doom, which it bought into completely. The author is an effective altruist who interviewed and took seriously people like Katja Grace, Dan Hendrycks and Eliezer Yudkosky.

I used to be more sanguine about people’s ability to see through this bullshit, but eschatological nonsense seems to tickle something fundamentally flawed in the human psyche. This LessWrong post is a perfect example.

Eats the same bland meal every day of his life. Takes an ungodly number of pills every morning. Uses his son as his own personal blood boy. Has given himself a physical appearance that can only be described as “uncanny valley”.

I’ll never understand the extremes some of these tech bros will go to deny the inevitability of death.

It’s kind of fascinating how rotten the “New Atheist” movement turned out to be. Whether it’s Richard Dawkins revealing his inner racist-misogynist, Michael Shermer being rapey AF, or James Lindsay turning into a Christofascist, the movement seems to have spawned and/or revealed a lot of really problematic people. I guess it’s no surprise that the rationalist scene had such a membership overlap.

Glowfic feels like a writing format designed in a lab to be the perfect channel for Eliezer’s literary diarrhea.

My P(harrassment scandal) for EA is 0.98.

I think in their minds, there is this magical threshold below which all the brown and disabled people live, and once you get rid of all the people residing below that threshold all you have left is smart people who want to make the world better.

What a bunch of monochromatic, hyper-privileged, rich-kid grifters. It’s like a nonstop frat party for rich nerds. The photographs and captions make it obvious:

The gang going for a hiking adventure with AI safety leaders. Alice/Chloe were surrounded by a mix of uplifting, ambitious entrepreneurs and a steady influx of top people in the AI safety space.

The gang doing pool yoga. Later, we did pool karaoke. Iguanas everywhere.

Alice and Kat meeting in “The Nest” in our jungle Airbnb.

Alice using her surfboard as a desk, co-working with Chloe’s boyfriend.

The gang celebrating… something. I don’t know what. We celebrated everything.

Alice and Chloe working in a hot tub. Hot tub meetings are a thing at Nonlinear. We try to have meetings in the most exciting places. Kat’s favorite: a cave waterfall.

Alice’s “desk” even comes with a beach doggo friend!

Working by the villa pool. Watch for monkeys!

Sunset dinner with friends… every day!

These are not serious people. Effective altruism in a nutshell.

People who use the term “race realism” unironically are telling on themselves.

Reading his timeline since the revelation is weird and creepy. It’s full of SV investors robotically pledging their money (and fealty) to his future efforts. If anyone still needs evidence that SV is a hive mind of distorted and dangerous group-think, this is it.