Model City Mondays is thing in siskind's substack, and Prospera is featured constantly.
It's seasteading that's the strictly libertarian thing where you fuck off to the ends of the earth to do drugs and marry twelve-year-olds. Despite the considerable overlap charter cities seem more of a rat/stembrained thing were you decide you're going to be the one to do a polis from first principles but get it right this time.
In yet another part of the article:
She had found herself in both an intellectual community and a demimonde, with a running list of inside jokes and in-group norms. Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.
More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.
Judge 1 says they, just, uh, decided some past disease outbreaks were lab leaks and never looked to see if that’s actually scientifically debated or just weird Rat Accepted Truths.
Yes but see, an anthrax environment containment breach almost five decades ago at a sprawling soviet weapons facility with biosecurity protocols that consisted of a wink and a handshake totally strengthens our claim that in 2019 some chinese intern accidentally shot up a gm bat virus and wandered off. Bayesian inference is unintuitive like that, you plebs wouldn't understand.
Absolutely, you can't keep pandering to the so called anti-woke and not end up with a lot of incel-adjacent people in your spaces, and the eugenics undercurrent feeds directly into manosphere perceptions about optimizing dating and tying your self worth to your splachnocranium/neurocranium ratio.
More specifically Scott Alexander has pandered pretty aggressively to the Dogged Good Guy demographic, and is also on the hook for being all about the 'merits' of neoreaction, and people like Moldbug and Emil Kirkegaard are semi-regulars in his comment sections.
Also worth noting that before the infamous EY editorial in TIME that called for airstrikes against foreign datacenters to prevent clippy from going rogue, the previous time they covered ea/rat was to report that they appear to have a serious sexual exploitation problem.
On a more speculative note, some staples of the movement like effective polyamory may have come about directly from early rationalist inability to get any on the regular. Apparently if you go reddit spelunking it appears they also went through a phase of trying to ~~brainwash each other~~ optimize into bisexuality to stave off sexual frustration.
Galton Ehrlich Buck
The concentrated smarm in this bullshit JAQ off piece gave me psychic damage.
Fun to see him using the "IQ is mostly genetic [because heredity]" line, which is exactly what the schizophrenia literature he takes issue with claims is a woefully inadequate descriptor if we're going to usefully evaluate what is actually happening.
The way they always try to motte and bailey eugenics gives me the shits. No, eugenics isn't screening embryos for terrible incurable conditions, it's the whole deal of gatekeeping society according to arbitrary geneological norms, and the fact that they keep trying to rehabilitate the term instead of rebranding to something less awful, is certainly food for thought.
Don't know about the actual literature, but confusing heritability to mean 'concrete chance to inherit' instead of "broad measure of influence of unspecified genetic factors on a population wrt developing a condition, once environmental influences are modeled out according to our paper's methodology" is extremely common in the wild even by people who should know better.
Siskind seems ticked off because recent papers on the genetics of schizophrenia are increasingly pointing out that at current miniscule levels of prevalence, even with the commonly accepted 80% heritability, actually developing the disorder is all but impossible unless at least some of the environmental factors are also in play, which is very worrisome since it indicates that even high heritability issues might be solvable without immediately employing eugenics.
clicked one of the livejournal links at random:
Personally, I'd have liked to see him touch on some of the more interesting heresies in our culture, like:
- Children are sexual creatures
aaaand I'm out.
I thought this looked kind of interesting and not especially grifty apart from the usual anti-FDA narrative up until
The plan is:
Phase 1: (January 2024) Sell to biohackers in Prospera for $20,000.
By good luck, Prospera will soon be hosting a two month super-conference of biotech and crypto entrepreneurs/enthusiasts.
whence my eyes did an uzumaki. And also Aela is somehow involved, apparently.
Give them the benefit of a doubt, sure, maybe they are pandering this hard to an audience that self selects for gullibility and cultbrain and against consumer protections strictly for the greater good, merely accelerating what should have already happened if it weren't for those meddlin' kids at the FDA.
Yeah, once you get past the compsci word salad things like this start to turn up:
Student: But I can't be racist, I'm black! Can't I just show the compiler a selfie to prove I've got the wrong skin color to be racist?
Truly incisive social commentary, and probably one of those things you claim it's satire as soon as you get called on it.
There's technobabble as a legitimate literary device, and then there's having randomly picked up that comments and compilers are a thing in computer programming and proceeding to write an entire ~~parable~~ ~~anti-wokism screed~~ interminable goddamn manifesto around them without ever bothering to check what they actually are or do beyond your immediate big brain assumptions.
Once [a company] can make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job becomes a fait accompli.
Well done.