ok so couple stub sneers I thought of when reading this:

1. One way to look at EA is as an extension of the middle-manager's syndrome of injecting metrics everywhere to allow them to spin up narratives of growth and improvement to justify their existence. I can't decide who I hate more!
2. following on from 1, it's kind of funny that the EAs, who you could pattern match to a "high school nerd" stereotype, are intellectually beaten out by an analog of the "jock" stereotype of sports fans: fantasy league participants who understand the concept of "intangibles" that EAs apparently cannot grasp.
3. it absolutely tracks that EAs, who see charities that spend money on administrating themselves as inefficient and incompetent, are dumbfounded and bereft of answers when any of their organisations implode

E: linking 1 and 3: together: EAs are self hating middle managers.

Also: note that it is centred around her sister. Note to self: do not direct LLM to write erotica about a sibling, because that is not a normal thing to do for someone turning over a new leaf.

I guarantee that they are even more stupid than that

We are looking for extremely talented aerospace engineers to help bring our prototypes to fruition. If you know any aerodynamics, propulsion, or GNC engineers who are interested in building something incredibly cool and want to make a positive difference in geopolitics, please send them our way!

interested in building something incredibly cool and want to make a positive difference in geopolitics

That is certainly one way of putting it, jesus fucking christ.

Society could replace like 50-90% of men in leadership positions with answering machines that record what women say and play it back at a lower pitch to simulate a male voice claiming women’s ideas as their own. Also the answering machine has a strapon equipped

Yeah sure, just learn university courses before puberty. And then again after.

It’s called learnmaxxing and it’s only for alpha males

If I were the judge handing out the sentence:

“Well, if your son is a strict utilitarian, let it be known that I am a utility monster and would derive infinite utilcoins from him being in jail for a million forevers.”

I would not make a good judge.

Shit like this is why I hate nerds. (Note: am nerd, by any sensible measure.)

Scott is saying essentially that "one data point doesn't influence the data as a whole that much" (usually true)... "so therefore you don't need to change your opinions when something happens" which is just so profoundly stupid. Just so wrong on so many levels. It's not even correct Bayesianism!

(if it happens twice in a row, yeah, that’s weird, I would update some stuff)

???????? Motherfucker have you heard of the paradox of the heap? What about all that other shit you just said?

What is this really about, Scott???

Do I sound defensive about this? I’m not. This next one is defensive. [line break] I’m part of the effective altruist movement.

OH ok. I see now. I mean I've always seen, really, that you and your friends work really hard to come up with ad hoc mental models to excuse every bit of wrongdoing that pops up in any of the communities you're in.

You definitely don’t get this virtue by updating maximally hard in response to a single case of things going wrong. [...] The solution is not to update much on single events, even if those events are really big deals.

Again, this isn't correct Bayesian updating. The formula is the formula. Biasing against recency is not in it. And that's just within Bayesian reasoning!

In a perfect world, people would predict distributions beforehand, update a few percent on a dramatic event, but otherwise continue pursuing the policy they had agreed upon long before.

YEAH BECAUSE IT'S A PERFECT WORLD YOU DINGUS.

I really do want to participate in this snark and agree, but unfortunately there are at least two kinds of nazis: credulous folk (like grimes) that lack the wherewithal to critically assess fascist ideology, and people ideologically motivated to be nazis (e.g. rich capitalists), who can be “smart”, for many definitions/synonyms of smart.

We need more stories that disillusion us not just about Musk but in general about these kind of antics. Since I feel like a big icon of this kind of trope is Richard Feynman, I will henceforth in this comment refer to the protagonist of any such story as Richard Brainman.

There are too many stories about how Brainman goes around ignoring rules and reasonable concerns and uses his nerd powers to prove a point. I’ll admit that sometimes these stories are fun capers but I think we’ve glorified them too much. Brainman only wins sometimes! Usually he gets crushed under the server racks, which is hard to make a movie about.