I feel like a subset of sci-fi and philosophical meandering really is just increasingly convoluted paths of trying to avoid or come to terms with death as a possibly necessary component of life.

Given rationalism's intellectual heritage, this is absolutely transhumanist cope for people who were counting on some sort of digital personhood upload as a last resort to immortality in their lifetimes.

This feels like someone setting up a novel-length strawman.

Assange becomes a Russian asset because him being a low key sex pest somehow gives some European authorities cause to want to send him packing to the US where he is wanted for espionage should probably be one of the steps but in general yes.

To be really precise it was about measuring the size and distribution of all sorts of skull irregularities (the proverbial 'bumps') and mapping them to various traits, it's basically palm reading for the head.

Siskind is just being his usual disingenuous self, i.e. 'everyone always uses skull shape' (to indicate that my intellectual precursors were clowns) is obviously referencing phrenology, then immediately motte-and-baiieys it to a claim of correlation of cranial capacity and IQ.

Except for M&B sleight of hand to work the claim shift shouldn't happen in the same sentence, otherwise it's extremely obvious that you are claiming one thing while carrying water for the other thing (phrenology), which is probably why he ended up deleting the post.

Greece has no groups focused on improving fish welfare however, Charity Entrepreneurship is possibly starting a charity focused on advocating for fish welfare improvements Greece.

EAs advocating for fish welfare is about the only thing yet to be seen in this country, awesome.

If you want to influence Greece just use some of the fabled EA obsquatumatillions to buy out the left part of our two party system, they're currently in such shambles they'd barely notice, and it's not like they could do much worse with shrimp rights as a flagship issue.

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:

1. Children are sexual creatures

aaaand I'm out.

Siskind's always been pretty explicit about it, you get banned if you broach so-called culture war topics in the open threads. They ended up with two subreddits for similar reasons.

Between this and EY seemingly being a huge fan of employing gullibility filters, one might argue that many of the most prominent rationalists aren't necessarily the most candid of characters.

I can somewhat sympathize, in the sense that there are currently multiple frameworks where Python code is intermixed with magic comments which are replaced with more code by ChatGPT during a compilation step. However, this is clearly a party trick which lacks the sheer reproducibility and predictability required for programming.

He probably just saw a github copilot demo on tiktok and took it personally.

Seeing as incel apologetics occasionally appear even in mainstream rat/ea outlets like slate star or shetl (nerds are an oppressed people unfairly stigmatized by the fairer sex, and other Good Guy grievances), one has to wander what the e/a calculus is in regards to doing the most good with your genitals.

Like, keeping your effective altruist higher-ups in peak effectiveness by shielding them from sexual frustration has got to be worth a few million billion far future simulated lives, at the trifling cost of a little of your time and some lube, right?

I can't imagine the peer pressure dynamics in such a dating environment to be too healthy.

How did Sam and Caroline get into taking high doses of ADHD medication? We think it was via Scott Alexander Siskind, the psychiatrist behind the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex.

Siskind occasionally writes up particular psychiatric drugs as public education. One popular piece was “Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know” from December 28, 2017.

Not to cast further aspersions or anything, but siskind did write a sort of follow up (titled psychopharmacology of ftx or something like that if you feel like googling it) where he explicitly denies ever having met the FTX psychiatrist/dealer, even though a) he admits they actually worked in the same hospital for a time and, perhaps more tellingly, b) no one asked.

Also according to the birdsite the ftx psychiatrist may have in fact been a huge creep.

Seriously, the mandatory forced equanimity of the text went from merely off-putting to pretty gross actually as it was becoming increasingly apparent the nonlinear people are basically sociopaths who make it a point of pride to flagrantly abuse anyone who finds themselves at the other end of a business arrangement with them, not to mention that their employment model and accounting practices as described seem wildly illegal anywhere not a libertarian dystopia, even without going into the allegations about workplace romance.

Except they are EAs doing unspecified x-risk work, aka literally God's work, so they are afforded every lenience and every benefit of a doubt, I guess.