His commenters really didn't like the 'white' part.

The follow up article where normally he retreats to the motte and cherry picks comments from the previous one is somehow worse, we're now treating Lynn as obviously correct as "has been confirmed by later research which is harder to bias."

Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake.

There's also the communal living, the workplace polyamory along with the prominence of the consensual non-consensual kink, the tithing of the bulk of your earnings and the extreme goals-justify-the-means moralising, the emphasis on psychedelics and prescription amphetamines, and so on and so forth.

Meaning, while calling them a cult incubator is actually really insightful and well put, I have a feeling that the closer you get to TESCREAL epicenters like the SFB the more explicitly culty things start to get.

EA started as an offshoot of LessWrong, and LW-style rationalism is still the main gateway into EA as it's pushed relentlessly in those circles, and EA contributes vast amounts of money back into LW goals. Air strikes against datacenters guy is basically bankrolled by Effective Altruism and is also the reason EA considers magic AIs (so called Artificial Super Intelligences) by far the most important risk to humanity's existence; they consider climate change mostly survivable and thus of far less importance, for instance.

Needless to say, LLM peddlers loved that (when they aren't already LW/EAs or adjacent themselves, like the previous OpenAI administrative board before Altman and Microsoft took over). edit: also the founders of Anthropic.

Basically you can't discuss one without referencing the other.

debate pervert in a reply-guy world

Well done.

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.

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:

1. 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.