It's bizarre and pathetic how Scott disabled comments on his blog post but is now using Peter Woit's blog to carry on a debate with all the people horrified by his views.

I'm probably not saying anything you didn't already know, but Vox's "Future Perfect" section, of which this article is a part, was explicitly founded as a booster for effective altruism. They've also memory-holed the fact that it was funded in large part by FTX. Anything by one of its regular writers (particularly Dylan Matthews or Kelsey Piper) should be mentally filed into the rationalist propaganda folder. I mean, this article throws in an off-hand remark by Scott Alexander as if it's just taken for granted that he's some kind of visionary genius.

Non-paywall link.

She seems to do this kind of thing a lot.

According to a comment, she apparently claimed on Facebook that, due to her post, "around 75% of people changed their minds based on the evidence!"

After someone questioned how she knew it was 75%:

Update: I changed the wording of the post to now state: 𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟳𝟓% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘂𝗽𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻*

And the * at the bottom says: Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio. And of course this is not proof that everybody changed their mind. There's a lot of reasons to upvote the post or down vote it. However, I do think it's a good indicator.

She then goes on to talk about how she made the Facebook post private because she didn't think it should be reposted in places where it's not appropriate to lie and make things up.

Clown. Car.

People who use the term "race realism" unironically are telling on themselves.

Reading his timeline since the revelation is weird and creepy. It's full of SV investors robotically pledging their money (and fealty) to his future efforts. If anyone still needs evidence that SV is a hive mind of distorted and dangerous group-think, this is it.

The first comment and Yud's response.

One of the easiest ways to get downvoted on the orange site is to say anything even mildly critical of Scott Alexander Siskind. It's really amusing how much respect there is for him there.

Some nice sneer:

I can understand Aella wanting to fund a project so she never has to brush her teeth again

Probably also heavily interested in Never Take a Shower Again research

https://nitter.net/nunyabeeswaxfed/status/1705695595413790814

I wonder if he's ever applied this advice to himself. Because one could argue that trauma was a significant factor in his obsession with transhumanism and the singularity.

When Yud's younger brother died tragically at age 19, it clearly traumatized him. In this case, X was "the death of my little brother". From this he learned Y: to be angry and fearful of death ("You do not make peace with Death!"). His fascination with the singularity can be seen in this light as a wish to cheat death, while his more recent AI doomerism is the singularity's fatalistic counterpart: an eschatological distortion and acceleration of the reality that death comes for us all.

This part of the first comment got an audible guffaw out of me:

I think that there's been a failure to inhabit the least convenient possible world°, and the general distribution over possible outcomes, and correspondingly attempt to move to the pareto-frontier of outcomes assuming that distribution.

Unintentional self-parody of the highest order.

If brevity is the soul of wit, then Yud is witless.