People are still subscribed to the subreddit. When a post gets made, it goes on their reddit feed. Lots of mobile users in particular will just have seen it pop up while doomscrolling.

Smart, funny people create good times

Good times attract unfunny morons

Unfunny morons create bad times

Bad times attract smart, funny people

Well I’m not really critiquing his writing style. I’m using a reasonably complementary analysis of his writing style to sternly criticise his thought. That means I fundamentally disagree with your own paragraph in praise of his thought, whereas I actually disagree with you that his writing is poor - I think he’s an intelligent and effective writer.

Jerking it for hours in an empty hotel room, bathed in the natural understanding that at home your partner is doing the same

The Valley Spirit never dies. / It is called the Mysterious Female.

The entrance to the Mysterious Female / Is called the root of Heaven and Earth

Endless flow / Of inexhaustible energy

(trans. Stephen Aldiss and Stanley Lombardo)

Yes, but that’s not relevant here

Everything is. I don’t need anyone to tell me that the Red Scare ruined philosophy of science, going to America was the original problem.

Ooooh I get it for Yudkowsky now, I thought you were targeting something else in his comment, on Davis I remain a bit confused, because previously you seemed to be saying that his epistemic luck was in having come up with the term - but this cannot be an example of epistemic luck because there is nothing (relevantly) epistemic in coming up with a term

I understand that you’re olive branching me here, but I don’t accept “How much further it’ll go is anybody’s guess”. Trends are analysable, and the sources of projections are equally analysable. A book that’s ten years old is far better than (a) 30-year old (and more) newspaper-level stuff, without citations, about backyard anthrax, (b) nothing, and (c) two links to tangentially related reports, and you’ve brought those three.

I am seriously concerned about the confluence of two things: (1) how closely your comments here mirror, right down to the level of language, press releases and opinion columns paraphrasing press releases, some of them (the anthrax stuff) extremely old hat; (2) the level of outrage and confidence you bring to the table when challenged on this and similar. Phrases like “How much further it’ll go is anybody’s guess” are press release language - they have absolutely no place in serious discussion, but they have a powerful rhetorical effect which allows them to displace serious analysis, and that displacement furthers specific, analysable, interpretable sectoral and political interests.

The same goes for “bio tech revolution” - you are never clear, in any of this, what that actually entails. What you do is cite possibility and unknowability, in a manner innovated precisely by sectoral and political interests from the 1950s onward. You have no detail of any value, and you write off actual detail with speculation and glib remarks about the age of the detail you’re given - that is a political innovation to which you have allowed yourself to be susceptible. You may also try on Naomi Oreskes for size as an author who grapples with this in both directions.

I expressly put “CBRN groups” in scare quotes to tag along with my line at the bottom “I don’t want to be dismissive of genuine attempts…but the scale and scope of this is defined by politics, not by technical possibility”

You, however, have me saying “cbrn is made up to self justify” - of course if I had said any such thing, then one counter-example would have sufficed. Although actually it wouldn’t have sufficed, because in this context we’re talking about terroristic or otherwise chaotic release of a novel weapon. We’re not talking at all about bad powerful people deliberately employing chemical weapons they already have, for which of course CBRN is a worthy use and “genuine attempt at being ready”.

“CBRN groups”, here, operates at the level of rhetoric, and that’s what I tried to draw attention to. The context in which “CBRN groups” the rhetorical and political device emerged was that in which Bill Clinton could become so enthused by a sci-fi novel about bioterrorism that he had its author up in front of the senate testifying as an expert on the subject. So on reflection, I should have deferred to Eisenhower’s original formulation: the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Edit: you could always try Alex Wellerstein for the aggressively obvious historical counter-point to this whole fantasy. In his Restricted Data he provides a useful companion to Barriers to Bioweapons in a chapter discussing the notorious “backyard atomic bomb built from declassified material” cases. But because it’s a work of history we learn the most salient fact of all: the only way anyone believed that the backyard bomb designs were viable was because somebody wanted them to believe it, or because they had some reason to want to believe it themselves.

Without that ingredient it was plain that the actual know-how was just not there, however that fact was fundamentally obscured by the desire to believe, and so people saw viability where there was none: plugging holes in their imaginary with meaningless verbiage about risk and but-what-if?

I think what’s going miss here is that “CBRN groups” is very obviously and primarily shit made up by the military-industrial complex to justify itself after the Cold War

I don’t want to be dismissive of genuine attempts at being ready just in case, but the scale and scope of this is defined by politics, not by technical possibility

There are too many comments in here going for the stringy lean detail and not pointing out magnificent conceptual errors like this