For any drive by readers who slightly want to know more background about some stuff: Why Richard Feynman wasn't a great rolemodel.
(more context for the drive by readers, Feynman is often held up as a great man in STEM circles, and even more so in the world of LessWrong Rationalism. (Which is fine if it is about scientific achievements, but it often goes beyond that as here in their page on 'traditional rationality')).
Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance?
Early onset Nobel disease.
This reminds me of a story by somebody I knew who once was a libertarian once told me. He was into heavy metal, as a lot of people I know/knew are, and a libertarian so he was curious about NSBM, so he applied to go to one of those concerts and eventually he got a meeting point where they all gathered, and then they were bussed to the actual location of the concert (which was secret so kafka (our antifascist research group) couldn't identify the location and do something about the fascists. Not many people I know really talk to this guy anymore (he has some 'interesting' opinions on borders now).
Anyway, mostly unrelated to the culty school, I was just reminded of this story of fascists doing reasonably good opsec. (And the failure of me and the metal community at large to not do something about this, can't recall anybody (me included) to react to this enormous red flag in hindsight).
"I know not with what GPT-5 will will reply with, but GPT-6 will reply with 'Unfortunately as an language model I Unfortunately as an language model I I I Unfortunately Unfortunately Unfortunately model model model'" Albert GPTstein.
Roko even said the 'I think agricultural waste products like straw can be substituted for sawdust so maybe you are paid to take it off their hands.[emph mine]' line. which is always a good sign when somebody is trying to the economically feasible math.
Themotte is a spinoff from the slatestarcodex subreddit, they used to have a culture war thread every week, which always filled up with (far) right culture war grievances which they then all pretended to talk neutral about. (The effect was mostly that peoples overton window was drawn right). Eventually the stink of it got so bad that Scott Alexander had to take action (he wrote slatestarcodex before he sold out and now runs a substack), so he told them with his semi blessing to go make their own subreddit.
Which was pretty bad, a place where you could said anything (esp rightwing) as long as you used enough words to explain it. (the 14 words did sneak at times, and I saw (sadly didn't archive it) openly neo-nazi homesteaders try to recruit there. So a lot of 'themotte people didn't think they were on the same side as the far right, but the far right certainly did think that'). Etc etc. Eventually the reddit admins got more and more annoyed with the place, and (this is a bit speculative on my part) after somebody got banned(*) for explaining the triple parenthesis dogwhistle by the admins they freaked out and made their own site.
*: A thing I noticed at the time, which themotte people didn't this guy who got banned was from Germany, which has a little bit stronger rules re antisemitism so the admins banning them for that wouldn't surprise me, esp if it was automated. And for the people who don't know, on reddit every forum has mods who come from the forum(called a subreddit), and the site itself has admins, so that is why there is sometimes some moderation conflict. The mods were afraid the admins were about to ban the subreddit, which would destroy all the past content, so they made a new site.
E: also wow themotte has gotten a lot worse when it went offsite. Jesus some of the comments in that thread. I feel bad for TWG.
TL;DR:
What is this, rat-4chan?
Yes
Austin from Manifest responds that leftist views would obviously much more damaging to EA than racist ones, because reasons.
I can accept racism, but I draw the line at suggesting that self enrichment is bad.
Extra fingers
Took me less than a minute.
Edit: and I guess the card names are also randomly generated:
(not show, but other names: krakapuss, turdie and turdworm, grun bloo and ponk, and these are the dumb names from a long list of generic shit).
"His art is 100% AI generated, yet it has no extra fingers, no generic designs"
"no generic designs"
lol
In come the posters who never posted here before to explain that the leak theory is true!
While I have no real input re the whole lab leak conspiracy theory, I do have a fun anacdote from then. I remember pretty quickly after the lab leak option was dropped somebody came with proof for it saying 'we have the telephone data, and the day virus started all the telephones from the lab stayed in one place clearly manipulated!'. This story has a few holes, note first the whole 'we have the telephone data' which is already weird (esp as china refused to cooperate), then also we don't have just one day, perhaps this behavior of phones in a lab is normal. Almost like people are forced to put their personal phones in storage when they suit up (iirc often standard practice in those kinds of rooms). Of course the person bringing up the phones theory didn't think about this. I knew we were in for a wild ride of conspiracies after that one, as it was 'throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks' contrarian theories land. (a thing you often see after a tragedy happens, extremely common in far right circles when the far right does an atrocity, where it is often sort of ingroup signal and signal of cruelty). Anyway, that is just an interesting thing I remembered which I wanted to share, on the subject at hand my opinion is I doubt it was a lab leak, but I also don't think we will ever know for sure, and also we will never find enough evidence that it wasn't a lab leak to convince the people who convinced themselves it was one.
"Friedrich argued that investor buy-in was the de facto proof that cultivated meat has legs. Major meatpackers, prominent venture capital firms, the government of Singapore: You could trust that these stakeholders had done their due diligence, and they wanted in."
Ow god it is a scam. This was a reaction to researchers saying "we dont see it".