The model of people as engines which add to or drain state revenues, and social welfare as handouts to inferiors not aid to people in certain life circumstances, reminds me of Kelsey Piper. Just where a CEO who does billions of damage in pollution and evades billions of dollars of taxes fits they don't explain.

I think the author of the second link is part of MAPLE, a Buddhist Rationalist cult.

There is a post somewhere which compares Michael Vassar to plutonium and says that plutonium is not a wicked element you just don't want to put it in the water supply or handle it without protective equipment.

The rats have a weird mix of fear of outsiders, and fearlessness towards insiders no matter how dangerous their behaviour. I should hope that nobody feels like they have only one outlet for taboo desires in Berkeley.

Its not an original observation, but some people can't imagine moral courage. They think everyone is on the make and the only difference is between brave and cautious.

As for who should "run diligence on donors", a random epidemiologist on BlueSky has a "no money from bastards" policy for his lab. This is the sort of thing Yudkowsky could have learned if he got a Master's degree rather than just attending the occasional conference.

This is not the worst academics and pundits in Epstein's network, this virologist named Nathan Wolfe is new to me. If an American academic had their career ended by fraud or misconduct there is a good chance that he or she was trying to make nice with Epstein afterwards.

Since it comes up on one in 216 characters with random stats rolled on 3d6, shouldn't INT 18 be three standard deviations above the norm?

Its a surprisingly modest claim about Marty Stu (Cheeliax with 20 million people, most of them poor given stated infant mortality, has 20 equally bright women available for breeding duty).

I wonder if Yud has biological children? He is mercifully discreet about his home life even if he shares his kinks like he has a five-book contract with Baen Books.

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future by Keach Hagey has potential https://archive.is/22O9z

Two members of the Extropian community, internet entrepreneurs Brian and Sabine Atkins—­who met on an Extropian mailing list in 1998 and were married soon after—­were so taken by this message that in 2000 they bankrolled a think tank for Yudkowsky, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. At 21, Yudkowsky moved to Atlanta and began drawing a nonprofit salary of around $20,000 a year to preach his message of benevolent superintelligence. “I thought very smart things would automatically be good,” he said. Within eight months, however, he began to realize that he was wrong—­way wrong. AI, he decided, could be a catastrophe.

This excerpt on Wired slams down names and dates and social connections without getting distracted by all the things that are wrong with what it describes.

If I was the leader of a community which had to expel someone for plying people with narcotics, having sex with them underage, and pushing them into extreme BDSM scenarios, I would simply not post that each of those acts is OK sometimes and its not my business to investigate them.

Bloomberg names the person I am thinking of and mentions the first and third accusations

HPMOR chapter 88 from 2010 has the line

Harry’s brain flagged this as I’m talking to NPCs again and he spun on his heel and dashed back for the broomstick.

Someone who thinks like that will lose in the long run, but they can do a hell of a lot of damage in the short run.

I know that on the American right, every accusation is a confession, but I never thought I would read a scheming cartoon villain accusing his enemies of being the Antichrist! He is even queer-coded, would do great on TV in the 1990s.

Brunig's argument that Piper is ignorant of the founding arguments for the welfare state and just knows a neoliberal argument for something kind of like a welfare state reminds me of an exchange with someone of her class where I tried a basic Green argument and they fell into it like I was the first guy trying a Judo throw on an American in 1940something. They flailed wildly as if they had never encountered that move and did not have a response ready.