in order to dissuade hypothetical agents from blackmailing you

There's also a whole thing with Yud accepting the many worlds interpretation as obvious truth that leads to (some) rationalists believing that getting killed in one timeline helps your surviving parallel selves by bolstering your case of being unblackmailable by said hypothetical agents, who are also from the future, which is why you can't negotiate with them directly.

It's complicated.

It's basically a forum created to venerate the works and ideas of that guy who in the first wave of LLM hype had an editorial published in TIME where he called for a worldwide moratorium on AI research and GPU sales to be enforced with unilateral airstrikes, and whose core audience got there by being groomed by one the most obnoxious Harry Potter fanfictions ever written, by said guy.

Their function these days tends to be to provide an ideological backbone of bad scifi justifications to deregulation and the billionaire takeover of the state, which among other things has made them hugely influential in the AI space.

They are also communicating vessels with Effective Altruism.

If this piques your interest check the links on the sidecard.

The justice of the argument is clear to me. I have already made arrangements for my children to come to not be genetically mine. When the time comes, I will call upon their aid, presuming the sequencing does not tell us there are incompatibilities

I like how that implies that he keeps a running genetic tally of all his acquaintances in case he needs to tap them for genetic material, which is not creepy at all.

(Rorschach voice) Watched them today—parade their genetic blessings like medals earned in some cosmic lottery. Strong jawlines, symmetrical faces, eyes that catch the light just right. Retrieved 23AndMe card from alley behind 41st street. Admins restrained commenter screaming how it's all just eugenics. Is everyone but me going mad?

The interminable length has got to have started out as a gullibility filter before ending up as an unspoken imperative to be taken seriously in those circles, isn't HPATMOR like a million billion chapters as well?

Siskind for sure keeps his wildest quiet-part-out-loud takes until the last possible minute of his posts, when he does decide to surface them.

Alexandros Marinos, whom I read as engaged-with-but-skeptical-of the “Rationalist” community, says:

Seeing as Marinos' whole beef with Siskind was about the latter's dismissal of invermectin as a potent anti-covid concoction, I would hesitate to cite him as an authority on research standards.

Article worth it just for mentioning Scotty hilariously attempting to whitewash phrenology for counter-culture clout, found in another account that seems to be deep in a covid conspiracy rabbit hole at the moment.

Over time FHI faced increasing administrative headwinds within the Faculty of Philosophy (the Institute’s organizational home). Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.

Sound like Oxford increasingly did not want anything to do with them.

edit: Here's a 94 page "final report" that seems more geared towards a rationalist audience.

Wonder what this was about:

Why we failed [...] There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities. When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders is important.

From the comments:

I am someone who takes great interest in scientific findings outside his own area of expertise.

I find it rather disheartening to discover that most of it is rather bunk, and

ChatGPT, write me up an example of a terminal case of engineers disease and post it to acx to see if they'll catch on to it.

I really like how he specifies he only does it when with white people, just to dispel any doubt this happens in the context of discussing Lovecraft's cat.

tvtropes

The reason Keltham wants to have two dozen wives and 144 children, is that he knows Civilization doesn't think someone with his psychological profile is worth much to them, and he wants to prove otherwise. What makes having that many children a particularly forceful argument is that he knows Civilization won't subsidize him to have children, as they would if they thought his neurotype was worth replicating. By succeeding far beyond anyone's wildest expectations in spite of that, he'd be proving they were not just mistaken about how valuable selfishness is, but so mistaken that they need to drastically reevaluate what they thought they knew about the world, because obviously several things were wrong if it led them to such a terrible prediction.

huh

you’re seriously missing the point of what he’s trying to say. He’s just talking about [extremely mundane and self evident motte argument]

Nah, we're just not giving him the benefit of a doubt and also have a lot of context to work with.

Consider the fact that he explicitly writes that you are allowed to reconsider your assumptions on domestic terrorism if a second trans mass shooter incident "happens in a row" but a few paragraphs later Effective Altruists blowing up both FTX and OpenAI in the space of a year the second incident is immediately laundered away as the unfortunate result of them overcorrecting in good faith against unchecked CEO power.

This should stick out even to one approaching this with a blank slate perspective in my opinion.

Not so much a random terf as someone who appears to have been trying to use lesswrong struggle sessions in place of trans conversion therapy for a while now.

Or at least that's my diagonal impression, and I'm also not going over that entire maelstrom just to make sure if they are a rotten egg or not.

Top comment by a large margin is an extensive 'your sources are bad and you should feel bad' by some Bob Jacobs, which would be encouraging, if wasnt for every. single. other. comment.

Not a bad read overall (the BJ comment), especially if like me you didnt remember off the top of your head who Lynn is and why he sucks, even if it suffers from the forced rationalist equanimity that dictates you treat obviously disingenuous bulshit with the utmost respect as long as it is presented in a sufficiently formalistic manner and doesn't call for genocide too overtly (I wonder what the deleted Roko comment was about).