I feel this used to get linked a lot when yud came up.

The author certainly wants you to know that finding yourself as the head of a revolutionary movement means very little with regards to your abilities to steer it, but I don't remember.

I think it's more like you'll have a rat commissar deciding which papers get published and which get memory-holed while diverting funds from cancer research and epidemiology to research on which designer mouth bacteria can boost their intern's polygenic score by 0.023%

if one person came out and spilled the beans, it’d suggest that there might be more people who didn’t

I mean, after his full throated defense of Lynn's IQ map (featuring disgraced nazi college dropout Cremieux/TP0 as a subject matter expert) what other beans might be interesting enough to spill? Did he lie about becoming a kidney donor?

I think the emails are important because a) they make a case that for all his performative high-mindedness and deference to science and whinging about polygenic selection he came to his current views through the same white supremacist/great replacement milieu as every other pretentious gutter racist out there and b) he is so consistently disingenuous that the previous statement might not even matter much... he might honestly believe that priming impressionable well-off techies towards blood and soil fascism precursors was worth it if we end up allowing unchecked human genetic experimentation to come up with 260IQ babies that might have a fighting chance against shAItan.

I guess it could come out that despite his habit of including conflict of interest disclosures, his public views may be way more for sale than is generally perceived.

Edward Teach is supposedly the pen name of The Last Psychiatrist who was sort of a precursor blog to slatestar, if only in the sense that it was a psychiatrist who was also a good writer, blogging about the human condition. He was doing parable-style short-form fiction way before slatescott, for instance.

While I don't remember there being any particular ideological overlap, both him and siskind seem to scratch the same itch for a lot of people, and siskind claims to be a fan.

I mean, that was definitely a thing when I was at school, only it was mostly about teaching undergrads graph search algorithms and the least math possible in order to understand backpropagation.

As an aside, weird that we don't hear much about genetic algorithms anymore, but it's probably just me.

There's a bit in the beginning where he talks about how actors handling and drinking from obviously weightless empty cups ruins suspension of disbelief, so I'm assuming it's a callback.

HBD is a legit line of scientific inquiry you guys, it's not just eugenics obsessed weirdoes and fascists trying to bring back birthright as the primary path to privilege.

Also there was a whole thing about how CGTP tends to use 'delve' a lot because it's been RLHF'd by speakers of nigerian english, so yeah.

I read

Most of it was exactly like the example above: Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it’s OK, when he’s actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it’s absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.

and immediately thought someone should introduce PZ Meyers to rat/EA as soon as possible.

Turns out he's aware of them since at least 2016:

Are these people for real?

I’m afraid they are. Google sponsored a conference on “Effective Altruism”, which seems to be a code phrase designed to attract technoloons who think science fiction is reality, so the big worries we ought to have aren’t poverty or climate change or pandemics now, but rather, the danger of killer robots in the 25th century. They are very concerned about something they’ve labeled “existential risk”, which means we should be more concerned about they hypothetical existence of gigantic numbers of potential humans than about mere billions of people now. You have to believe them! They use math!

More recently, it seems that as an evolutionary biologist he apparently has thoughts on the rat concept of genetics: The eugenicists are always oozing out of the woodwork

FWiW I used to read PZM quite a bit before he pivoted to doing youtube videos which I don't have the patience for, and he checked out of the new atheist movement (such as it was) pretty much as soon as it became evident that it was gradually turning into a safe space for islamophobia and misogyny.

Maybe he's the guy who goes to the orgy just to hold hands.

I wonder how much of that family fortune has found its way into EA coffers by now.