Also more than the president of the US.

I honestly don't know, and if anyone tries to find out he might delete his blog again. If he is on a Thiel sinecure or running his own business, he shouldn't be using the first person

I happened to be at mass today. There was a little explanation in the missalette that not only did Jesus's death redeem the sins of everyone today, he also redeemed all the sinners who lived and died before Christ came. I dunno, it reminded me of the Roko's Basilisk eternal judgment computer simulation....

"AI gore, smug and pretentiousness" is a good summary of the sneer-subject of this server.

Great to hear that. I did hear about the recent election but wasn't sure where things were, what Tusk's views are etc.

Ah, shameless propaganda.

Is this the "flying saucer fails to land" moment for him? AIs (large language models, ai-generated images, etc etc) are now within the experience or understanding of more and more people, and he can't just make stuff up about it anymore?

Think you're right, sorry

The False Memory Foundation did a lot of damage by convincing people that you can't forget and then remember traumatic events. Yes, some people were coerced by memory regression therapists into recalling increasingly unlikely and spurious memories. But many people avoid thinking about traumatic events because it's painful, or use distractions to avoid remembering them. Traumatic memories from childhood can be particularly difficult to understand and deal with because the trauma occurred at an early stage of psychological development.

Whenever I see some new pearl of wisdom from Mr Yudkowsky, I think, "Surely it can't be that plainly, baldly wrong. Surely he can't have it that twisted, but still speak with so much authority...." I'm no expert, but I know slightly more about trauma than I do about computer science, maths or formal logic and this seems so incorrect.

Surely trauma is defined as something that you learn from in your body, not your mind; from your subconscious, not your conscious. By their nature, people cannot understand the meaning of a traumatic experience the same way they can understand an abstract idea.

Does Yudkowsky think traumatic memories aren't different from other memories - but psychiatrists are just too self interested to expose this? That people could get over their traumatic memories - but they're just too dopey to do so without a helpful tweet from Eliezer Y? And while it's fairly trivial really, does he actually think that the general public are impressed and intimidated by X and Y variables, a concept most of us were introduced to when we were 12 or 13?

Another good comment:

sounds like the officers didn't know that the amount taken was so small. From the post:

After many more attempts to intimidate me, I was finally informed of the charge: “that smoothie place over there says you the stole cash from their tip jar.” Huh? How much? One of the officers returned from the smoothie bar, and said, a bit sheepishly: “they say it was $4.”

So the most likely scenario was a comedy of errors. All the cops know is that the manager of the smoothie place ran up to them and said "that guy just robbed our tip jar!" They interpret this to mean he emptied out the entire tip jar, which would be a pretty brazen thing to do, so they roll up on him hard out of disgust that anyone would do such a thing. Then they talk to him and discover that what actually happened is that he absent-mindedly took $4. That's a very different class of violation, but it's not like they can take back the aggressiveness of their initial approach. The damage was done.

In theory, the officers could have avoided the mistake by questioning the manager for more details before making the stop. Look at it from their perspective, though -- one of the people you're employed to protect is telling you that he's just been robbed, and if you futz around too long, the perpetrator gets on his plane and gets away with it. It's not surprising they would decide to stop the guy first and work out the details once they could be confident he wasn't going anywhere.

But no, it's just that the world is against Scott. It's not just feminist bloggers from the early 2010s, it's the cops, it's everyone.

What? I was describing how cults/high-control groups react to criticism. I wasn't trying to assess how accurate their beliefs are. Cults rely on having some beliefs which reasonable people might agree with. Those are the beliefs they present to the public. Cult literature often sounds plausible or benign even if it's not factually accurate.

Before there was greater awareness of what cults are and how they work, it wasn't uncommon for early press about cult groups to conclude that while some of the cult's beliefs were strange, they had good values and were doing good things for their communities so they were probably harmless. It was only later that stories begin to emerge about the extreme levels of control that cults were exercising over their members, how that control led to the exploitation and abuse of members, and how limited and transactional their "good works" were.

If a group with that model of control and exploitation claimed to have access to a source of genuinely new and scientifically significant knowledge, they are the worst people to be in control of it, because: a) Cults keep back the larger part of their beliefs from the public in order to extract as much in money, volunteer time and other resources from their members. If a cult did have a direct line to Xenu, it would be directly in their interests to strictly limit how much other people can know about Xenu without paying exorbitant fees and submitting to cult authority. b) Cults are run by people whose ethics are compromised. Cult leaders believe above all else in their right to power and/or wealth and everything else including the health and safety of others comes second. They bully and indoctrinate their subordinates until cult members believe that there is no good and bad so much as there are things that are good for the cult and things that are bad for the cult. If people with such compromised ethics gain access to Xenu's special information (why are we assuming Xenu will be wise and helpful anyway? In Scientology mythos, Xenu is evil. And also dead.) they will use it to improve the position of the cult and impose their beliefs on as many people as possible. c) due to the above mentioned, it will be extremely difficult for non-members to assess the accuracy of information provided by the cult.