A very simple strategy is buying less US assets and more international assets than you would hold if the US stock market was not weighted so heavily towards Friend Computer. If 60% of my stocks were in the US in 2015, I might hold 30% today (this is not financial advice).

Contra Doctorow there are lots of strategies someone can chose if they think the US stock market is likely to collapse in the next three years. Eg. there are people in the USA who bought some chickens and seeds last winter, or who started new jobs or new education outside the USA. Deciding to act is the hardest.

"You know, I never defrauded anyone,” says Sam Bankman-Fried

“You know, I never sent the boys across the Isonzo without believing we could win,” said Luigi Cadorna

This also shows problems with the “effective altruist” approach. Donating to the local theater or “to raise awareness of $badThing” might not be the best way of using funds, but when a friend needs help now, you have the resources to help them, and you say “no, that might not be as efficient as creating a giant charity to help strangers one day” something is wrong.

Soyweiser

Its even worse when I read the whole thread, Atwood claims to have $140 million, and the best he can do for “a friend” who is homeless is handing out some printouts with a few sections highlighted? And he thinks this makes him look good because he promises to give away half his wealth one day?

“Provide an overview of local homeless services” sounds like a standard task for a volunteer or a search engine, but yes “you can use my address for mail and store some things in my garage and I will email some contacts about setting you up with contract work” would be a better answer than just handing out secondhand information! Many “amazing things AI can do” are things the Internet + search engines could do ten years ago.

I would also like to hear from the friend “was this actually helpful?”

I also don’t understand why he objects to that story given that it gets people talking about him as weird but able to get what he wants? But the claim that he dated women at MIRI and wanted them to provide free labour attacks the narrative that MIRI is nothing like Leverage Research or the Zizians.

Missionary voice Have you tried Mastodon? That is where you find people like DeadSimpleTech and Baldur Bjarnason who think that corporate social media was always messed up and current web-development practices are a joke.

TvTropes says that the Yudkowsky-insert protagonist of Project Lawful/Planecrash! is driven by desire to have 144 children (and prove his society wrong for not paying him to have 144) which sounds like Scott Aaaronson? Did they know each other in those days?

I am glad that all I knew about Yud in 2022 was “wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that I did not finish, and runs a website where people pretend to be experts.”

He does not admit “I was wrong” very often does he? And if I were a kinky polyamorist, I would be much quicker to respond to “have you dated staff at the organization that funds your life?” than “did you play a specific scene?”

Planecrash seems to be the 1.8 million word Pathfinder fic with tumblr’s UnitOfCaring

And how the eff does someone claim to love Pterry in his dating profile but see people as things? Greg Egan is basilisk-unfriendly too.

From RationalWiki: Yud claims that the only women he gave orgasms for completing math homework was his future wife. If he ever denied dating / playing with people from his foundation or making people who wanted to play with him fill out an IQ test I can’t find it.

The commentator who thinks that USD 120k / year is a poor income for someone with a PhD makes me sad. That is what you earn if you become a professor of physics at a research university or get a good postdoc, but she aged out of all of those jobs and was stuck on poorly paid short-term contracts. There are lots of well-paid things that someone with a PhD in physics can do if she is willing to network and work for it, but she chose “rogue intellectual.”

AFAIK the USA is the only country where programmers make very high wages compared to other college-educated people in a profession anyone can enter. Its a myth that so-called STEM majors earn much more than others, although people with a professional degree often launch their careers quicker than people without (but if you really want to launch your career quickly, learn a trade or work in an extractive industry somewhere remote). So I think for a long time programmers in the USA made peace with FAANG because they got a share of the booty.

Piper’s self-described many unpopular beliefs that the rest of society considers loathsome

If Piper ever starts to publish essays on what goals and policy positions she thinks make her or SlateScott “sincere centre-leftists” they are going to be a trip. Just the explanation why she feels more comfortable saying what she believes under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Big Balls than under Biden’s centrist technocrats would require a few doses of my favourite substance to get through.

Edit: I would also love to hear “so you agree that the talking head on Fox News who suggested executing the homeless is despicable, what about your friend Scott Alexander proposing to sterilize the poor and substance users before they receive help?”

When you are running a con like crypto or chatbot companies, it helps to know someone who is utterly naive and can’t stop talking about whatever line you feed him. If this were the middle ages Kevin Roose would have an excellent collection of pigges bones and scraps of linen that the nice friar promised were relics of St Margaret of Antioch.

So Hanson is dissing one of the few movements that supports his pet contrarian policy? After the Defence Department lost interest the only people who like prediction markets seem to be LessWrongers / EAs / tech libertarians / crypto bros / worshippers of Friend Computer.

The Manifest networking event in Berkeley combines prediction markets, race cranks, EA, and LessWrong. Scott Alexander likes prediction markets, does Yud?

We have some threads of Vaccinations in Book/Article Form which try to share good pop science and textbooks without the cult shit and Dunning-Kruger. People who think they know everything and are mysteriously underemployed tend to have the most time to post though.

When it started in ’06, this blog was near the center of the origin of a “rationalist” movement, wherein idealistic youths tried to adapt rational styles and methods. While these habits did often impress, and bond this community together, they alas came to trust that their leaders had in fact achieved unusual rationality, and on that basis embraced many contrarian but not especially rational conclusions of those leaders. - Robin Hanson, 2025

I hear that even though Yud started blogging on his site, and even though George Mason University type economics is trendy with EA and LessWrong, he never identified himself with EA or LessWrong as movements.

The Independent has yet another profile of the Collinses which finally starts to map their network (a brother is in DOGE). Just who is their PR person would be good to know. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-musk-ai-pronatalists-collins-b2777577.html

There’s a Collins Rotunda at Harvard, a physical testament to the amount of money Malcolm’s family has donated over the years. His uncle was the former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. In fact, pretty much every relative has been to an elite Ivy League institution and runs a successful startup or works in government.

Larry Niven had a fixed idea about cetacean intelligence, and it showed up in mass-audience SF like Star Trek IV.

The story below is another example of really creepy things being done in the name of science in the postwar era.