(No spoiler tags because it's just background lore for Dune that's very tangential to the main plot)

Dune - after catastrophic wars between humans and AIs, computers are forbidden.

That's a retcon from the incredibly shit Dune-quel books from like 15 years after the original author had died. The first Dune was written well before computers as we know them would come in vogue, and the Butlerian Jihad was meant to be a sweeping cultural revolution against the stranglehold that automated decision-making had achieved over society, fought not against off-brand terminators but the entrenched elites that monopolized access to the setting's equivalent to AI.

The inciting incident semi-canonically (via the Dune Encyclopedia) I think was some sort of robo-nurse casually euthanizing Serena Butler's newborn baby, because of some algorithmic verdict that keeping it alive didn't square with optimal utilitarian calculus.

tl;dr: The Butlerian Jihad originally seemed to be way more about against-the-walling the altmans and the nadellas and undoing the societal damage done by the proliferation of sfba rationalism, than it was about fighting epic battles against AI controlled mechs.

He claims he was explaining what others believe not what he believes

Others as in specifically his co-writer for AI2027 Daniel Kokotlajo, the actual ex-OpenAI researcher.

I'm pretty annoyed at having this clip spammed to several different subreddits, with the most inflammatory possible title, out of context, where the context is me saying "I disagree that this is a likely timescale but I'm going to try to explain Daniel's position" immediately before. The reason I feel able to explain Daniel's position is that I argued with him about it for ~2 hours until I finally had to admit it wasn't completely insane and I couldn't find further holes in it.

Pay no attention to this thing we just spent two hours exhaustively discussing that I totally wasn't into, it's not really relevant context.

Also the title is inflammatory only in the context of already knowing him for a ridiculous AI doomer, otherwise it's fine. Inflammatory would be calling the video economically illiterate bald person thinks evaluations force-buy car factories, China having biomedicine research is like Elon running SpaceX .

In a completely unexpected turn of events this new experiment in mainstreaming eugenics is being currently boosted by siskind.

The whole article is sneertastic. Nothing to add, will be sharing.

What you’re dealing with here is a cult. These tech billionaires are building a religion. They believe they’re creating something with AI that’s going to be the most powerful thing that’s ever existed — this omniscient, all-knowing God-like entity — and they see themselves as the prophets of that future.

eugenic TESCREAL screed (an acronym for … oh, never mind).

“Immortality is a key part of this belief system. In that way, it’s very much like a religion. That’s why some people are calling it the Scientology of Silicon Valley.”

Others in San Francisco are calling it “The Nerd Reich.”

“I think these guys see Trump as an empty vessel,” says the well-known exec who’s supporting Harris. “They see him as a way to pursue their political agenda, which is survival of the fittest, no regulation, burn-the-house-down nihilism that lacks any empathy or nuance.”

There's also the Julian Assange connection, so we can probably blame him for Trump being president as well.

"Manifest is open minded about eugenics and securing the existence of our people and a future for high IQ children."

Yeah, a lot of these TESCREAL exposés seem to lean on the perceived quirkiness while completely failing to convey how deeply unserious their purported scientific and philosophical footing is, like virgin tzatziki with impossible gyros unserious.

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.

Last behind the bastards episode is this article expanded. Robert Evans is always very listenable and the more detailed CES reporting is interesting, but if you are a member here you probably won't be adding anything new to your TREACLES lore.

I wish journalists referencing the basilisk would go a in a bit more in depth, it's so much dumber than than it seems at a brief glance. Like, a lot of people immediately assume the alleged scary part is that we might already be living in the simulation and thus be eligible for permanent residence in basilisk Hell should we commit the cardinal sin of shit-talking AI, but no; the reason you can go to AI hell is because of transhumanist cope.

As in, if your last hope for immortality is brain uploads, you are kinda cornered into believing your sense of self gets shared between the physical and the digital instance, otherwise what's the point? EY appears to be in this boat, he's claimed something like there's no real difference between instances of You existing in different moments in time sharing a self and you sharing a self with a perfect digital copy, so yeah, it's obviously possible, unavoidable even.

As to how the basilisk will get your digital copy in the first place, eh, it'll just extrapolate it perfectly from whatever impression's left of you in the timeline by the time it comes into being, because as we all now, the S in ASI stands for Fucking Magical, Does Whatever It Wants. Remember, ASI can conjure up the entirety of modern physics just by seeing three frames of an apple falling, according to Yud.

I didn’t know the “eu” in “eugenics” came from greek.

Further fun facts: Eugene (the name) is greek for noble born, but since like most people we did away with nobles a long time ago now eugenic just means to have good manners, so when the modern term 'eugenics' came to Greece it was regreekified into eugonics (ευγονική).

Did he always show his ass so much when tweeting or is this a recent development?

I love how what if LLM but it makes your DNA mine bitcoin is the culmination of untold amounts of dollars in MIRI research grant money. Real effective altruism is when you tithe 80% of your income in perpetuity just so sneerclub can have more content.

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.