My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, "okay, in a world where the rationalists weren't closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren't known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people's money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut..."

First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard

Man, you invite one Nazi to speak at your conference and suddenly you're "the guys who invited a Nazi to speak at their conference." How is that fair? :-(

Except it's not really being automated out of our lives, is it? I find it hard to imagine how increasing the rate at which bullshit can be produced leads to a world with less bullshit in it.

Not gonna lie, the world would probably be better off if guys like Roko just started having sex with sexbots instead of real women

RationalWiki is an index maintained by the Rationalist community

Lies and slander! I get why he'd assume this based on the name, but it would be pretty funny if the rationalists were responsible for the rational wiki articles on Yudkowsky et al, since iirc they're pretty scathing

Look, you gotta forgive this guy for coming up with an insane theory that doesn't make sense. After all, his brain was poisoned by testosterone, so his thinking skills have atrophied. An XXL hat size can only do so much, you know.

Like, seriously, get a hobby or something.

For real. I don't even necessarily disagree with the broad-strokes idea of "if you're comfortable, it's good to take on challenges and get outside of your comfort zone because that's how you grow as a person," but why can't he just apply this energy to writing a terrible novel or learning to paint watercolors or something, like a normal person? Why does the fact his life is comfortable mean he has to become a Nazi? :/

I love this unhinged Yudkowsky quote buried in here:

This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.

Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[...]

Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say... "Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven't actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I'm confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say."

It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the 'right side' politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.

The problem is... well, Zack correctly recognizes Yudkowsky is maybe not as world-changingly smart as he presents himself, and may be engaging in motivated reasoning rather than disinterested truth-seeking, but then his solution (a) doesn't involve questioning his belief in the rest of the robot apocalypse mythos, and (b) does involve running crying directly into the arms of Moldbug and a bunch of TERFs, which like, dude. Maybe consider critically interrogating those people's arguments too??

Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No one's gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, that's for darn sure.

And who doesn’t want to be younger for longer?

Oh, of course it's about this. Is it ever not about this with Thiel?

The whole idea of "IQ correlates with income, so we can eliminate poverty by genetically increasing people's IQ" seems particularly stupid to me. Like, what do you think is the actual reason that IQ correlates with income? Is it because the magical money fairies give you more money the smarter you are? Also, IQ is a normed measure anyway, so the average is always 100 and there's always the same number of people with each score... agh, it's dumb for so many reasons

edit: wait, sorry, it's actually stupider than I thought:

Elites play a disproportionate role in the economic productivity of nations because they occupy important roles in government and business. If one is interested in increasing economic output and creating better institutions, it would be wise to drastically improve the size and abilities of the elite.... In an effort to empirically investigate this question, Carl and Kirkegaard (2022)investigated the benefit of the top 5% independent of the average national IQ level and found additional benefits beyond the benefit from the average IQ. This is fortunate, considering the most likely scenario is that elites adopt the technology more rapidly than the population at large. Government subsidies and low costs would ameliorate the issue of inequality.

Literally just trickle down IQnomics

Feel like the very beginning of this is not completely crazy (I've also thought in the past that straight people often perform "attractiveness" more for the approval of their same-sex friends) but it seems to kind of jump off the evo-psych deep end after that, lol

Also you can't build a bunch of assumptions about "we should organize society this way" while ignoring the existence of LGBT people, and then go "yeah I know I ignored them but it simplified my analysis." Like yeah it simplifies the analysis to ignore a bunch of stuff that actually exists in reality, but... then that means maybe your conclusions about how to structure society are wrong??

edit: also this quote is choice:

I don't know if this really happens. But even if not, the fiction does a great job of highlighting the dynamic I'm thinking of.