Since Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is apparently still a thing, I figured I'd spend a few minutes before fediverse monster-movie night to collect relevant links:

• Archive of su3su2u1 review
• Spacebattles.com forum thread: The Wizard of Woah and Irrational Methods of Irrationality
• HPRick and Morty
• "If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within [HPMoR], go ahead and try."
• Sneering at Yudkowsky's advice about writing "awesome" characters
• Sneering at Yudkowsky's retrospective interview (August 2025)

And a question dug up from one of those old threads: OK, so, Yud poured a lot of himself into writing HPMoR. It took time, he obviously believed he was doing something important — and he was writing autobiography, in big ways and small. This leads me to wonder: Has he said anything about Rowling, you know, turning out to be a garbage human?

Mother Jones has a new report about Jordan Lasker:

A Reddit account named Faliceer, which posted highly specific biographical details that overlapped with Lasker’s offline life and which a childhood friend of Lasker’s believes he was behind, wrote in 2016, “I actually am a Jewish White Supremacist Nazi.” The Reddit comment, which has not been previously reported, is one of thousands of now-deleted posts from the Faliceer account obtained by Mother Jones in February. In other posts written between 2014 and 2016, Faliceer endorses Nazism, eugenics, and racism. He wishes happy birthday to Adolf Hitler, says that “I support eugenics,” and uses a racial slur when saying those who are attracted to Black people should kill themselves.

"TheFutureIsDesigned" bluechecks thusly:

You: takes 2 hours to read 1 book

Me: take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need, write a well-structured query, tell my agent AI to distribute it to the 17 models I've selected to help me with research, who then traverse approximately 1 million books, extract 17 different versions of the information I'm looking for, which my overseer agent then reviews, eliminates duplicate points, highlights purely conflicting ones for my review, and creates a 3-level summary.

And then I drink coffee for 58 minutes.

We are not the same.

For bonus points:

I want to live in the world of Hyperion, Ringworld, Foundation, and Dune.

You know, Dune.

(Via)

The UCLA news office boasts, "Comparative lit class will be first in Humanities Division to use UCLA-developed AI system".

The logic the professor gives completely baffles me:

"Normally, I would spend lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content. But now all of that is in the textbook we generated, and I can actually work with students to read the primary sources and walk them through what it means to analyze and think critically."

I'm trying to parse that. Really and truly I am. But it just sounds like this: "Normally, I would [do work]. But now, I can actually [do the same work]."

I mean, was this person somehow teaching comparative literature in a way that didn't involve reading the primary sources and, I'unno, comparing them?

The sales talk in the news release is really going all in selling that undercoat.

Now that her teaching materials are organized into a coherent text, another instructor could lead the course during the quarters when Stahuljak isn’t teaching — and offer students a very similar experience. And with AI-generated lesson plans and writing exercises for TAs, students in each discussion section can be assured they’re receiving comparable instruction to those in other sections.

Back in my day, we called that "having a book" and "writing a lesson plan".

Yeah, going from lecture notes and slides to something shaped like a book is hard. I know because I've fuckin' done it. And because I put in the work, I got the benefit of improving my own understanding by refining my presentation. As the old saying goes, "Want to learn a subject? Teach it." Moreover, doing the work means that I can take a little pride in the result. Serving slop is the cafeteria's job.

(Hat tip.)

So, here I am, listening to the Cosmos soundtrack and strangely not stoned. And I realize that it's been a while since we've had a random music recommendation thread. What's the musical haps in your worlds, friends?

a lesswrong: 47-minute read extolling the ambition and insights of Christopher Langan's "CTMU"

a science blogger back in the day: not so impressed

[I]t’s sort of like saying “I’m going to fix the sink in my bathroom by replacing the leaky washer with the color blue”, or “I’m going to fly to the moon by correctly spelling my left leg.”

Langan, incidentally, is a 9/11 truther, a believer in the "white genocide" conspiracy theory and much more besides.

In which a man disappearing up his own asshole somehow fails to be interesting.

Flashback time:

One of the most important and beneficial trainings I ever underwent as a young writer was trying to script a comic. I had to cut down all of my dialogue to fit into speech bubbles. I was staring closely at each sentence and striking out any word I could.

"But then I paid for Twitter!"

AI doctors will revolutionize medicine! You'll go to a service hosted in Thailand that can't take credit cards, and pay in crypto, to get a correct diagnosis. Then another VISA-blocked AI will train you in following a script that will get a human doctor to give you the right diagnosis, without tipping that doctor off that you're following a script; so you can get the prescription the first AI told you to get.

Can't get mifepristone or puberty blockers? Just have a chatbot teach you how to cast Persuasion!

Yudkowsky writes,

How can Effective Altruism solve the meta-level problem where almost all of the talented executives and ops people were in 1950 and now they're dead and there's fewer and fewer surviving descendants of their heritage every year and no blog post I can figure out how to write could even come close to making more people being good executives?

Because what EA was really missing is collusion to hide the health effects of tobacco smoking.

Aella:

Maybe catcalling isn't that bad? Maybe the demonizing of catcalling is actually racist, since most men who catcall are black

Quarantine Goth Ms. Frizzle (@spookperson):

your skull is full of wet cat food

Last summer, he announced the Stanford AI Alignment group (SAIA) in a blog post with a diagram of a tree representing his plan. He’d recruit a broad group of students (the soil) and then “funnel” the most promising candidates (the roots) up through the pipeline (the trunk).

See, it's like marketing the idea, in a multilevel way