Baldur Bjarnason has a whole book on the business risks of LLM use https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/

bad at epistemology

Gwern once denied chaos theory in a way that Freeman Dyson called out in 1985, and as LessWrongers go he is a pretty clear thinker!

It can help to think of the current US administration as less the Third Reich, more a postcolonial dictatorship. That is also a description not a value judgement: POTUS is a reality-TV star who dreams of being a Mafia boss.

Many liked the idea in theory (the Führer was Austrian after all). They pretty quickly found that a Tiroler was not the same as a Prussian at all. Its easier to feel part of an imagined community than to actually work with people all over that community.

How the frigg does anyone in the SF Bay Area in 2026 still believe that most of what big American web service companies do is driven by the profit motive? They are more like big-talking Geniuses getting a king to give them some money and promising they will make something cool (with Google’s and Facebook’s advertising and AWS and Amazon retail standing in for taxing millions of peasants). Arms like Google ads and Amazon Web Services fund billions of dollars of money-losing nonsense.

Ngo does not seem to have been invited to speak at Hereticon 1 or 2

I have bad news for them about how German Austrians felt when suddenly their bosses were all Preuße.

/s The United Kingdom of England and Scotland, the Principality of Wales, the subject territory of Ireland (Let alone Normandy and Gascony) were famously lacking in linguistic, religious, and cultural differences back when they were a great power. /s

I feel like the answer to the first is “name one”. He can’t mean any Chinese dynasty, the Mongols, any of the Islamic caliphates, the UK, France. Maybe he means Bronze Age Egypt? They kept hiring all the Nubians they could get though.

That depends, remember that you are losing five years of growth and dividends and if you are are a wise investor every year or so you sell some of what is doing best and buy some of what has been doing worst to lock in your gains. Also remember that you have to buy back in to gain anything from that crash, and its really hard to buy stocks when the market has just lost half its value. Most people who ‘successfully predict a recession’ sell too early and buy back too late so are not very far ahead.

But if you really believe that the US economy will crash by say the end of 2027, you think other assets will do better, and there are ways to buy them.

The USA is about 60% of the global stock market by market capitalization. Right now its much less than 60% of my stock holdings.

Investing is all about relative performance. If you think ‘AI’ stocks are a bubble. you think that some other stocks will do better than them over the next five years, and you can allocate your assets accordingly.

Usually AI boosters are claiming that soon most humans will be economically useless, not that it would be terrible if there were fewer white people. One reason people avoid having children is that they feel economically insecure and doubt there will be respected places in society for their offspring.

Dwarkesh Patel is the only other Indian American I have seen who is friends with our friends.

Someone in the comments used an ?AI-powered? fact-checking tool to push back on some of the claims that inheriting an old house in Japan is a burden. I especially doubt that the land the house is on is worth nothing.

It is miserable to live in a dying town or village and many people talk about this problem in Italy, Moldova, Canada, and other countries.

It is a viable business and it fuels the spread of disinformation. Have you noticed that Old Media magazines have online wings that are full of random advertorials? That is because Google declared that they are Good Domains and upranked them so all the sleazy online marketing migrated to them.

That is also why people buy formerly respected domains and put casinos, propaganda, or virus-laden porn on them.

gutter racist and eugenicist beliefs

The Sam Kriss article in Harpers above focuses on “these people don’t know how to be happy” and never gets around to saying “Scott Alexander is gentle in person but wants to get rid of or sterilize poor brown people and helped people like Curtis Yarvin rise to power.”

Note that SlateScott’s group home is named after a Lord of the Rings location

Jessica Taylor wrote a whole other post rebutting Scott Alexander’s take on events (she seemed more friendly to Michael Vassar than he was by 2021) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards Fortunately, we can just say that both mainstream LessWrong and the splinter movements sound unsafe and avoid them both.

Emily M. Bender says its framed around doomers, boosters, “a third way,” and CEOs, “The fact that many of his interviewees are singing from the same hymnal is underscored by edits wherein he splices together clips from multiple (3? more?) speakers into one sentence.”

I have mixed feelings about her pop book.

Hippie culture had elements of entrepreneurship and self-improvement, and that was definitely a time in the USA when the boss might invite you for drinks or to a strip club while you were candidate for promotion

I think if you are comfortable saying “I use substances to turn my brain off / experiment with other ways of seeing the world / because its fun” you tend to drift away from orthodox LW

I don’t know much about Michael Vassar’s career after MetaMed went bankrupt in 2015. It sounds like he remained close to CFAR after it pivoted from rationality training to AI doom, but I don’t know much about them after 2016 either. I don’t know a long profile of him like the RationalWiki articles and podcasts on other leading figures.

A characteristic of rationalist groups is that leaders refuse to state clear norms around everyday human frailties like substance use, hiring friends and lovers, and dating people you have power over. The Leverage staffer defended her boss by saying that they had no policy around senior staff dating employees, Yudkowsky is really uncomfortable telling other leading rationalists not to encourage their fans to use psychedelics.

Substance use, intense sexual play, tangled relationship chains, narcissists with reality distortion fields, and mental illness make it hard to establish facts.

Some of the woo-curious LessWrongers get grouped under postrationalism.

I doubt they have read “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” and subsequent debates because it was written by a feminist.

Its prudent to be skeptical of anonymous Internet posts, but its also prudent to read a Leverage staffer on how her boss “had three long-term consensual relationships with women employed by Leverage Research or affiliated organizations”, close the tab, and make a note to never have anything to do with anyone from that organization in the future.

Posting for archival and indexing purposes: u/GorillasAreForEating found an Urbit post titled “Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores?” which complains that Aella takes it on herself to exclude people and movements from the broader LessWrong/Effective Altruist community. The poster says that Aella was the anonymous person who pushed CFAR to finally do something about Brent Dill, because she was roommates with “Persephone.” He or she does not quite say that any of the accusations were untrue, just that “an anonymous, unverified report” says that some details were changed by an editor, and that her Medium post was of “dramatically lower fidelity, but higher memetic virulence” than Brent’s buddies investigating him behind closed doors (Dill posted about domming a 16-year-old who he met when she was 15 and he was ~27). The poster accuses Aella of using substances and BDSM games to blur the line of consent.

The post names Joscha Bach as someone Aella tried to exclude. We recently talked abut Bach’s attempt to get Jeffrey Epstein to fund an event where our friends would speak.

Often, people in messed-up situations point at a very similar situation and say “at least we are not like that.” I hope that all of these people find friends who can give them perspective that none of these communities are healthy or just. Whether you are in to bull sessions or polyamory, there are healthy communities to explore in any medium-sized city!