Association Opposing Greed and Idiocy.

Doesn't lend itself to snickering. Gets the point across. Hard to turn into "well actually the real greed is sharing".

Ah, one of those "good news" bits that means the opposite.

This inspires the feeling of hating both sides of a fight and hoping that they do as much damage to each other as possible before it ends.

There's the kind of regular who's been thinking seriously about AI safety and alignment since pre-2022, who have passing to intimate familiarity with the funding ecosystem, the Sequences, and various conferences that happen at Lighthaven. Let's call them rationalists.

... Let's not, because a bunch of us here fit all those descriptions, yet are clearly not "rationalists". The way that they use that term makes it synonymous with Orthodox ("right practices/thinking").

Genetically altering IQ is more or less about flipping a sufficient number of IQ-decreasing variants to their IQ-increasing counterparts. This sounds overly simplified, but it’s surprisingly accurate; most of the variance in the genome is linear in nature, by which I mean the effect of a gene doesn’t usually depend on which other genes are present

Contradicted by previous text in the same article (diabetes), not to mention have you even opened a college-level genetics text in the last decade?

Anyway, I would encourage these people to flip their own genome a lot, except that they probably won't take the minimum necessary precautions of doing so under observation in isolation. "Science is whatever people in white coats say it is, and I bought a nice white coat off Amazon!"

Since nobody else has mentioned it:

The (fictional) Ringworld is an immensely old mega-engineering project, requiring super-strength materials to put a habitable ring around a sunlike-star; a day-night cycle is provided by solar-collecting shadow squares in a smaller (thus faster-moving) orbit, connected by super-strength wire.

This is an unstable arrangement, and requires repeated adjustments every century or so. Naturally, that system broke down (via capitalists grabbing the expensive fusion power plants for their own purposes) and the backup system was destroyed by a bioengineered weapon.

The resolution to all this depends on psychic luck produced by evolutionary processes over the course of a handful of generations on Earth.

Truly, "hard SF" means that enough details have been given that you can be sure it won't work.

This article has an astonishing amount of almost-self-awareness, where only one vital step is missing in order to answer all their questions.

"When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."

I suspect that he is incapable of admitting to himself that he is in a hole, much less that he dug it himself.

Good luck with that -- I'm a pzombie this year for tax purposes.

As long as it isn't where he is, why should he care? He's retiring on Mars, anyway.

(Please, deities, send Musk and Thiel to Mars soon. Together, if possible.)

The history of technology teaches us that every non-trivial problem -- and a large fraction of trivial problems -- require specification beyond the bounds of conversational language.

Greek geometers may have invented the idea of formalizing language with specific definitions, and inventing new symbols to represent special meanings. When important consequences accrue from getting things wrong, people develop jargon: knitters and sailors and shepherds and farmers; engineers and lawyers and plumbers. If you want to convey your knowledge and intentions, you can't chat informally and expect a human to really understand what you want.

For about a century now we've had devices that turn instructions into actions. Everyone who uses these becomes an expert in the particular form of instructions that the device needs, or else they don't get what they want.

It's not just going to return quotes! It will return distorted quotes! I suspect you can get it to totally reverse a Singer position within five or six interactions.

With luck, you can then show it to Singer and cause him to die of shame.

We don't have that much luck, though.

Grew up in fairly rural upstate New York, where you can expect lots of snow and you can unironically envy neighbors who have working Franklin stoves when the power goes out.

I can confirm all of the above, plus: if you are lucky enough to have an Army-Navy surplus store around, one of your handmedowns is likely to be an N3B parka. Definitely not Russian or German or stylish. But it will keep everything above your thighs warm, except your hands. The pockets are uninsulated.

That's the downside of the XKCD unlucky ten thousand.

"Do you want to have a good time?" said a voice from a doorway.

"As far as I can tell," said Ford, "I'm having one. Thanks."

"Are you rich?" said another.

This made Ford laugh.

He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture. "Do I look rich?" he said.

"Don't know," said the girl. "Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you'll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people..."

"Oh yes?" said Ford, intrigued but careful. "And what's that?"

"I tell them it's OK to be rich."

Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only a bass player getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.

Ford stopped and peered into the dark doorway.

"You what?" he said.

The girl laughed and stepped forward a little out of the shadow. She was tall, and had that kind of self-possessed shyness which is a great trick if you can do it.

"It's my big number," she said. "I have a Master's degree in Social Economics and can be very convincing. People love it. Especially in this city."

This is just shit.

Every competent apocalyptic cult leader knows that committing to hard dates is wrong because if the grift survives that long, you'll need to come up with a new story.

Luckily, these folks have spicy autocomplete to do their thinking!

I was going to make a comparison to Elron, but... oh, too late.

Nah, they all consider themselves justified in sociopathic behavior.

The thing about rationalists is that they are fully invested in irrational beliefs, which they prefer not to examine. In other words, just like most people, but with a specific terminology that, if they use it properly, identifies them as one of the elect.

I suggest that whenever your relative talks about EA, you talk about kindness. When they bring up longtermism, point out that you have to survive in the short term to reach the long term, so working on better policies now is rather important. If they start in on life extension, note that until quite recently, all the major advances in improving average human lifespan come from improving infant mortality, and be prepared to explain the demographic transition.

When they go extropian, say that it's a nice vision of the future but your kids are unlikely to see it unless we fix the world we're currently in.

But most of all, point out that multiplying infinitesimals by infinities to justify any course of action (a) is Pascal's Wager and (b) justifies every course of action -- so it can't justify any.

Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you’re about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Upvote.