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

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).

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.

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.

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.

Enshittification

Once [a company] can make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job becomes a fait accompli.