I actually have a shrimp torture farm. It brings me infinite joy. However its running costs are quite high and I require donations to keep it going

Just some thoughts about musk trying to be liked and doing whatever idiotic thing he can to become liked, specifically speaking at trump rallies:

• The maga turn as framed by this working theory makes sense, but it is also just what you’d expect of any idiot that got lucky under capitalism.
• I read a hypothesis somewhere that when he does the jumping jacks at the trump rallies, he’s trying to make the letter X with his body. I’m just hoping this somehow derails the fitness industry.
• it’s telling that he wears that occupy mars shirt, the thing that people liked him for before, well, pretty much everything after he became well known.

Also: I don’t think we’ll make it to mars!!! Fuck mars. The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.

NB: am not a US voter.

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

Trust me when I say there’s nothing worth reading in the article beyond the headline:

He would be right if he meant in the sense that Bruce Wayne ineffectively leads a personal crusade motivated by unresolved childhood angst, and that the world would be much better off if his money was just spent on basics needs for the people and he went to therapy.

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

I keep coming back to this. I've been thinking about the internal monologue that necessarily had to happen to get here.

"Speech taboos exist."

• normal reply: "Yeah, words only have meaning due to baggage; some words carry heavier baggage, making them taboo in ordinary conversation."
• this fucking guy: "Words shouldn't be taboo; that's irrational."

"People end associations and friendships based on word choice."

• normal: "Not hard to imagine."
• TFG: "There is literally no reason to end a friendship over word choice unless the other person doesn't let you use slurs in casual conversation."

"The best way to get to know what ideologies someone subscribes to is by dropping slurs in conversation."

• TFG: "Yes, and it's really important to test the ideologies of strangers in the most flippantly casually offensive way possible, which doubles as a great first impression. You will look alpha as fuck by using slurs."
• normal: "Huh, haven't had an intrusive thought like that in a while. Where'd that come from?"

"It's ok to say the n-word as long as you don't think about race at all and never with any negative sentiment."

• TFG: "Yes, this is the extent to which CRT needs to be taught in schools. Then we can teach rationality and run IQ tests."
• normal: "OK I really need to see my therapist; maybe it's time to try Wellbutrin."^1^

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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.