It is with great regret that I must inform you that all this comes with a three-hour podcast featuring Scoot in the flesh: 2027 Intelligence Explosion: Month-by-Month Model — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo

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

"Genetic Enhancement: Prediction Markets for Future People" by Jonathan Anomaly

What a completely cursed presentation title. According to the first youtube transcription service that pops up on google, he means that we should use prediction markets to find out which diseases will be curable/treatable in the next however many years so we can prioritize accordingly when doing polygenetic embryo screening based family planning.

Eugenics enjoyer quotient: Mr Anomaly is an iq enthusiast who goes on to talk about how genetic screening starts at choosing a suitable partner. Also, we should establish something like a polygenic health index that represents an individual's genetic health to better systematize selection. This will be based on the individual's known genetics as well as family history, I'm assuming because getting tricked into marrying someone with a schizophrenic great uncle or an obese cousin is a serious concern for him.

This presentation came up on the subject of how Cremieux/TP0/Lasker got invited to give a talk in Stanford if he's only known for his race science bullshit while otherwise unaffiliated, and the answer is that the school of business faculty who organized the talks was into forecasting markets and almost definitely met him in this event.

So we have the broader rationalist cultic milieu to once again thank for bringing terrible people together, I guess.

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.

Basically their only hope is that an AI under their control takes over the world.

They are pretty dominant in the LLM space and are already having their people fast tracked into positions of influence, while sinking tons of cash into normalizing their views and enforcing their terminology.

Even though they aren't trying to pander to religious americans explicitly, their millenialism with the serial numbers filed off worldview will probably feel familiar and cozy to them.

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.

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.

It's from today's acx, apparently they offered free samples to the siskind household.

edit: this is not sarcasm.

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.

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.