Fires a burst from the Sten gun into the ceiling I thought you Libertarian bleepers were scared of moral hazards like making people wear seatbelts so they don't squish their pea brains in a car crash?

For a long time, clever young men have been taught the parable of Plato and Dionysius of Syracuse. Some intellectuals will always convince themselves that they will be the one to guide the stupid little tyrant and not the many who end up in a slave market just outside his domain (in the legend someone bought Plato and freed him).

Yarvin wants to be Julius Streicher not the Wicked Vizier.

Its kind of notorious that scientists are bad at dealing with con artists and sales funnels because they assume good faith and that nobody has serious material interests in convincing you of something false. That was James Randi's whole thesis. A good professor would contextualize 'AI alignment' and The Singularity in '80s and '90s pop culture, apocalyptic religion, and a rape-enabling SoCal subculture and not just have his students read the papers straight.

We know that many AI projects are powered or monitored by a Guy in India. It turns out the mass shooter in northern Canada who looked to ChatGPT for advice also had a Discord buddy in the USA who knew about her plans. Police allege that after trying to talk her out of her plans he streamed for her and helped her start her car to get to the site of the murders. I hope he and Sam Altman spent 30 years as roommates. https://www.cbc.ca/...

There is an old principle in software development not to make the GUI too pretty until the back end works, because managers and customers will think its ready when they can click around buttons with nice shading and animations. I think slopware is like that. People see the demo that appears to work and don't see what maintaining it and integrating it with other systems is like.

The subtext sounds like "we guarantee your returns, then go public. If we go bankrupt you get the retail investors' money, if we become the next Google you get your own private island." All you have to do is trust Sam Altman and (breaks out in hysterical laughter).

Do they mean 17.5% a year? My balanced bond-equity portfolio made 14-15% annual returns over the past three years by the radical method of buying "shares of companies that make profits" and "bonds backed by my local and national government." (Update: I made about 12% a year because I backed out of American stocks years ago, but the blandest 60% stock, 40% bond index fund in my country returned that 14-15% a year after expenses).

A LessWronger asks the bold question: is polyamory net negative for most people because jealousy and drama take so much energy to deal with? Does not go in to "chat, my boss is also my lover and holds the lease on my housing, and now I am competing for a promotion with another lover-roommate-coworker, is that bad?"

A former staffer named Frances Lopez says that she left the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford because they handled workplace sexual harassment terribly:

After I was raped (outside of and unrelated to work), a colleague at CEA wrote and circulated a document that included a sexualised description of my rape, speculation about my mental health, and commentary on my personal life, all without my consent. Several senior leaders, including the CEO and the now-former COO, received this document and took no safeguarding action for approximately nine months. I was never officially informed of its existence; I only learned about it informally through one of the recipients. ... (The colleague) also discussed asking me out twice while we were colleagues, once through text and again at a CEA retreat. He assured CEA that, with everything I now know about Frances, I’m glad she said no.

I am really not equipped to deal with this despicable behaviour outside the communities I am part of. She now has a Substack (sigh) trying to explain to EAs that hiring Caroline Ellison is not a good look and the world won't suddenly start to see them the way they see themselves unless they sit down and change their behavior.

An Aella-curious blogger in SoCal has noticed something:

But what I find more interesting than broadly “weird sex” is the specific interest in BDSM, kink and particularly full-contact CNC; a relatively common fantasy in individuals, but one I’ve never seen such widespread community interest in outside the Bay Area.

Kink and power-play are practices of manufactured risk, with CNC clocking at a more intense point on the same spectrum. The idea that many of these people are devoting their 9-5s and beyond to eliminating the ultimate consequence (death), only to go home and collectively play-pretend violence (scaffolded with extensive rules and consent forms) is fascinating, and- to me- makes complete sense.

The rationalist interest in manufacturing risk is the direct byproduct of their commitment to flushing it out.

The blogger attended Aella's SlutCon. I don't know if she knows that many of our friends have problems with consent as most of us understand it (their understanding is more "if they are old enough to sign the contract, and they sign, that is on them").

Also likely to be concentrated in the USA, whose government is helpfully screaming at the rest of the world "disconnect your economies and your IT systems from ust!" Most of us are busy doing that as fast as possible although it takes a while to get everyone on board.

its a very useful skill when reading the internet to learn to see when "in the US and UK" or "in SoCal and London" should be appended to a sentence. Once you see it you can't unsee it.

This was in October 2016, eight years after Epstein was convicted of soliciting sexual services from girls as young as 14. MIRI spent 2014 and 2015 fighting and eventually setting with a former staffer who accused board members of statutory rape. Their legal expenses in those years were around $250k, similar to the money Yud says Epstein offered. So Yudkowsky was very familiar with the concept of older men seeking sex from underage girls and the risks of associating MIRI with it at the time. I don't remember the exact timeline of Brent Dill's Bay Area phase but that would have left Yud very familiar with another case where an older man abused younger women and girls.

The original email thread includes this exchange:

Yudkowsky: "... (Sorry for the delay in answering; I was checking with Nate (Executive Director) to see what we knew about why the fundraiser is going slowly.)"

Epstein: "Were you clearing my name with him"

Yudkowsky: "Not sure what you mean. Nate (Soares) knows you're Jeffrey E. I check not-yet-published info/speculation past him before saying it.")

The phrase "worth MIRI’s while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy" sounds like Yud has been listening to Scott Alexander and Scott Aaronson about how rich or educated white men are the real victims and hos be liars. It sounds like he was familiar with the substance of the accusations and thought there was a good chance they were untrue and not the tip of the iceberg.

Lots of people try "you play the student renting in a bad part of town, and I play the sexy burglar" and a few sign up for a porn shoot where they can be ravaged by skilled, athletic people in a controlled environment. A house party where you sign up to be ravaged by any guest who can catch you is unusual even in fetishland and I don't think many kinksters would recommend combining that with drugs.

In January, Scott Alexander had another crisis of faith: to paraphrase, I cared almost as much about prediction markets as I care about racist lies, but we got prediction markets and why are they not doing much? Maybe I need to keep faith and Friend Computer will be so powerful that we don't need prediction markets?

I think the author of the second link is part of MAPLE, a Buddhist Rationalist cult.

There is a post somewhere which compares Michael Vassar to plutonium and says that plutonium is not a wicked element you just don't want to put it in the water supply or handle it without protective equipment.

The rats have a weird mix of fear of outsiders, and fearlessness towards insiders no matter how dangerous their behaviour. I should hope that nobody feels like they have only one outlet for taboo desires in Berkeley.

If the global economy collapses over the Gulf War, watching Sam Altman do a Wile E. Coyote in mid-air will keep me amused on the bread line.

Seen elsewhere: "Is Stripe the Most Anticipated IPO Since Coinbase?"

Ex-CEO, ex-CFO of bankrupt AI company iLearningEngines charged with fraud - Reuters, 17 April 2026

Prosecutors said iLearning marketed itself as an artificial intelligence-driven digital education ​company with an "out-of-the-box AI platform," and claimed to earn revenue mainly by selling ​licenses for its educational and training platforms to customers, including healthcare companies and schools.

According to the ‌indictment, ⁠the defendants used forged sham contracts to make it seem that iLearning's customers were real, and used "round trip" transfers of investor and lender funds -- meaning they sent money to purported customers, who then returned it to iLearning -- to manufacture revenue.

At least ​90% of iLearning's $421 million ​of reported revenue ⁠in 2023 was fabricated, the indictment said.

I think they called this wash trading in cryptoland.

Scott Alexander published a blog post about how its unfair to call Victor Orban an autocrat but:

I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.

Dsquareddigest responds:

I believe the full quote is "to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from, if you are being dumb on purpose"

It's in the dictionary next to Upton Sinclair's famous line that "it is hard to get a man to understand something when he is a massive dumbass"

Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015):

I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors.

So he can't be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can't have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker:

But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it.

As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And Scott Alexander wants children, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED losers.

S&P have decided not to allow SpaceX early entry into the index after all https://www.reuters.com/...

"To ​be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as ​well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged."

I am starting to suspect that Yud never learned to compartmentalize knowledge and put it in different epistemic categories. To him, AD&D alignments, Large Language Models, and race pseudoscience are all nerdy ideas he read about on the Internet, all equally real and true. He does not seem to file a carpenter telling him how to frame a roof, a rabbi teaching theology, and a random twitter account in different categories like most of us would.