Over the course of my research, it has come to my attention that Jordan Lasker was invited to give a talk titled "The Academic and Career Trajectories of Underqualified College Admits" at Stanford University's Classical Liberalism Initiative seminar series. The series of talks, run by Iván Marinovic out of the School of Business whose goal is to invite professors to "debate ideas and policy issues with rigor, even when doing so may challenge orthodoxy".

These challenges to "orthodoxy" never seem to include ideas like paying reparations for slavery. (Deadpan Daria voice) It's so strange.

second warning: an xcancel search for "zizians" turns up so much transphobia that you'll feel like it's a late night on the Nebuchadnezzar and Tank accidentally loaded your brain with JK Rowling instead of kung fu.

Wait, the splinter group from the cult whose leader wants to bomb datacenters might be violent?

Among the leadership of the biggest AI capability companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Deepmind, xAI), at least 4/5 have clearly been heavily influenced by ideas from LessWrong.

I'm trying, but I can't not donate any harder!

The most popular LessWrong posts, SSC posts or books like HPMoR are usually people's first exposure to core rationality ideas and concerns about AI existential risk.

Unironically the better choice: https://archiveofourown.org/donate

I love the "uh, you know we can see what you've done" reply.

"Pronouns" with a hard R

Shit, does that mean I have to date Grimes now

I wandered over somehow from RationalWiki, which I had known of since the science-blogging days of yore, and found it more congenial to my tastes than other subreddits. E.g., it was friendlier to excursions into the wonky and erudite than r/badphilosophy, and generally had a justifiably low tolerance for superficial politeness while maintaining a level of empathy for serious matters.

(thinks)

Cum Jabbar

And here's Ben Goertzel, formerly MIRI's director of research:

I find myself mentally comparing Langan to Eliezer Yudkowsky, another high-IQ maverick who has personally avoided the academic establishment, while developing his own deep and idiosyncratic view of the universe. Both Langan and Yudkowsky have the habit of introducing a lot of novel vocabulary for describing their ideas, though they have different styles of doing so (Langan likes inventing new words; Yudkowsky prefers assigning new meanings to commonplace phrases, e.g. “Friendly AI” or any of the zillion other “defined terms” commonplace on the Less Wrong blog/network he founded). [...] Langan’s style is very clear and elegant, in some places beautiful, but doesn’t do the reader any favors — you really have to read each sentence and absorb it fully before going on to the next.

zoom and enhance

Langan’s style is very clear and elegant

Typical Langan, for reference:

In the CTMU, the self-inclusion process is known as conspansion and occurs at the distributed, Lorentz-invariant conspansion rate c, a time-space conversion factor already familiar as the speed of light in vacuo (conspansion consists of two alternative phases accounting for the wave and particle properties of matter and affording a logical explanation for accelerating cosmic expansion).

Goertzel is also co-editor of a book called Evidence for Psi — he's a Cosmist who believes in psychic powers.

Oh look, a clarification:

It didn't even occur to me that anyone would read the tweet as being about "25% more general market value" rather than "25% more value to me personally". Who thinks like that??!?

Yud is just a uwu neuro-atypical smol bean who is ignorant of generations of cultural context about people rating each other and cannot be blamed for people reading his words in the wrong way instead of the correct, equally repellent way.

Wouldn't a Hallmark movie be about a young woman from the big city who finds love and fulfillment when she has to return to her small hometown and manage the local bakery, including the wacky antics of its mixed-sex staff?