"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."

Nah, they all consider themselves justified in sociopathic behavior.

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.

"Rationalism" is to normal logical thinking what blindfolded multi-board speed chess is to tic-tac-toe: you can only see in retrospect how anyone could get there from here. The things which occupy a Rationalist's mind are completely divorced from ordinary concerns like ethics. Nobody would or could have predicted this quantity or quality of lunacy.

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.

This is just shit.

Charlie Stross called the Singularity "the rapture for nerds".

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

Shorter: "Let's assume that I'm a godling. I will definitely be an evil god. Here's how."

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!"

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.