318 Comments

I quite like Mike Solana, for the record.

But I did laugh at Tartaria.

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I didn't realize the first names were supposed to refer to anybody. And I still don't know who the others are.

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Quite funny

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My "what’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?", for the record, is they switched from tinfoil to aluminum foil because tinfoil — as in, foil made out of tin — actually keeps alien mind control devices from working when you make it into a hat.

All that stuff and nonsense about tin leaving metallic residue on food and aluminum being less reactive is a plot by Big Xenopsychica.

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Well, IIRC aluminium is a better conductor than tin, so as a Faraday cage it's superior. I suppose tin would block X-rays better, since it's got a higher atomic number than aluminium (or any normal material for hats).

Of course, the ultimate in protection against ionising radiation would be a uranium helmet.

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Bismuth would be quite good, and much less toxic than uranium. It also has a relatively low melting point, so you can melt it and cast it pretty easily into whatever shape you want. (271.4°C)

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Sep 3·edited Sep 3

If I were home-making it, I'd probably use bismuth or lead, yeah (remember, lead can be cold-worked, and it's not like you're going to be eating it); uranium's pyrophoricity is the big issue.

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How about gold? It's easy to work and non-toxic.

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Sep 3·edited Sep 3

Yes, it is, but it's also over 10,000x the price of lead and, while it can be hammered into extremely-thin sheets, X-ray shields need to be reasonably-thick to work. This is also why I didn't suggest rhenium, iridium or platinum.

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So how about gold-plating the lead helmet, to reduce its potential for poisoning the user through contact contamination?

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So basically, we seem to be leaning towards some kind of pewter, and likely adding back at least a little tin.

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My favorite take on this comes from fantasy author Brandon Sanderson.

In his Mistborn books, people are able to derive magical powers from metal. The first books are set in a pre-industrial setting (it would not be strictly correct to call it medieval fantasy, but... close enough for this discussion) where the exceptionally rare metal aluminum is found to have the power of negating a Mistborn's ability to use magic. (This is a recurring theme throughout his various books: aluminum interferes with magic.)

Later on, the setting time-skips forward to an early-20th-century-equivalent society. Trains, electric lights, and motorcars are all the rage. They're just beginning to invent photography. They understand how to refine aluminum now, and somewhere along the line, someone discovered that lining your hat with it can serve as a shield against emotional-manipulation magic, a thing whose existence was well-established in the first book.

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Yes, I absolutely love this too

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A long time ago I saw a website where someone tested various designs for tinfoil hats, and concluded that they *increase* the amount of radio energy absorbed by the head. Ever since then I've liked the idea that the aliens spread the tinfoil hat meme to make sure that the people most likely to uncover the conspiracy are most exposed to the mind control rays.

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I remember that, too. I think the real solution is to wrap the "birds" in tinfoil.

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*checks over shoulder*

*leans in, whispering*

jews built the pyramids

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Ashkenazi?

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The division of Jews into Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrahi only goes back to the diaspora during the Roman Empire, much more recent than the construction of the Pyramids.

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It's worse than that. The pyramids were (supposedly) built way before Jews even existed as a distinct tribe/culture/religion.

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Yeah, as the Chief Rabbi of Egypt I can confirm that the pyramids predate the Jews by a very very long time.

Judaism IS a rebellion of the hierarchial social pyramid system that was once associated with Egypt and today rules the world entire, but the Jews were not involved in the Pyramids, certainly not the famous ones at Giza, etc.

YADIDYA EGYPT: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20zNTAn_sgeA6LM5efNJv6rAWQeJ-OLa

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I think in this case we have to assume that the Ur-Jews were sufficiently better at operating secretly than their fallen modern descendants; while today's Jews can certainly carry out sinister plots and rewrite small pieces of history, they don't have the capabilities of the ancients, who were able to either conceal their existence entirely or else completely erase any record of themselves.

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Sep 4·edited Sep 4

It seems unlikely that the real Jews would have gone and got themselves enslaved in Egypt or Babylon.

Moses, Abraham, Solomon, Isaiah -- these are fake Jews, manipulated by the real Jews to convince everybody that the Jews were just some random mob of Middle Easterners.

You think the real Jews go round wearing big beards and little hats? You think they go to synagogues that appear on Google Maps? You think they smash glasses at weddings and have names ending in -stein and -berg and have bar-mitzvahs?

You think the real temple got destroyed? Twice?

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founding

What part of "sinister plots" did you not understand? Jacob gets himself enslaved in Egypt, and quickly works his way up to Grand Vizier. Moses was born into slavery, but was living large with the royals until it was time to become God's right-hand-man in Egypt.

Egypt was the first-stage booster that launched the Jews securely into Israel, discarded as soon as it was no longer useful.

Later Babylon kept invading Jerusalem, so the Jews "lost" and were "enslaved", but somehow a bunch of them wound up as the king's counselors and advisers and, oops. fifty years later the Babylonian Empire is destroyed. The Jews get Israel back, as a prosperous nation with a shiny new temple and peaceful relations with Persia for the next five hundred years or so.

It was all going perfectly according to plan until that "Jesus" fellow started mucking things up.

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I had a professor in undergrad who did digs in Egypt. His take was that pyramids weren't built by slave labor. As religious buildings, the Egyptians wouldn't allow lowly slaves to touch them.

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I've heard that the Jews (assuming the whole thing happened) built granaries. Still a great joke.

It all looks too much like work to me, but apparently "Jews", "Egypt", and slavery are all disputable terms.

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Allegedly they even had to make the bricks without straw sometimes!

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They didn't have to make bricks without straw, they had to gather their own straw instead of having it provided.

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... as a Time machine. (Joe Rogan probably believes this)

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A+

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... judging based on the job titles, i would NOT work for "Thiel Capital" if it existed, even though the interview would be fun

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author

It definitely exists! It even has an appropriately sinister website: https://thielcapital.com/

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The funniest part to me about that page is the commented-out Bootstrap css in the header. At some point, the web designer added in the framework, then was like "wait a second..."

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significantly more ads in the header than I'd expect from looking at the page

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Even Thiel isn't even enough to use Bootstrap

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I love it. At first you think you can do something in the face of THIEL. You think scrolling down will help, but it doesn't. So maybe you just need to click somewhere, but you can't. All you can do is sit there and look at THIEL, until you eventually decide to go away. Curse at it, bow down and worship it, or just close the window, Thiel Capital doesn't care. Thiel Capital has nothing to tell you. Thiel Capital asks nothing from you. Thiel Capital does not need to explain itself to you or tell you what it's up to. And finally, Thiel Capital wants you to know that they have thought very carefully about the message they're sending, which is why they've written the word THIEL in an unfamiliar, possibly custom-made, font.

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Sep 3·edited Sep 3

On the font, to save a few people a click: "THIEL" is an SVG living at /images/thiel-capital.svg, not plain text, and from the SVG it appears the shapes are just drawn manually. It might be possible to determine what the font is but that would require more than just a look at the CSS styles. The next step for someone who cared slightly more than I do would be to investigate what fonts Sketch provides (the SVG has a comment saying '<!-- Generator: Sketch 50.2 (55047) - http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch -->').

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I've tried feeding it into several font identifiers and none of them can find a match. I honestly do suspect that it's a custom font that exists only for the purposes of this particular word.

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Thank you for going the extra mile to confirm this, thus adding to the mystique.

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I don't like it. The serifs are too uniform. Sure, that makes kerning a no-brainer, but it makes the font feel uninteresting and lazy.

Sure, it makes a statement, but kind of in the same way fascist architecture makes a statement. "Big, bold, stripped of glamour and ornamentation. You're looking at this because it's too big to ignore, not because you sought it out."

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How appropriate.

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It's Copperplate Gothic Bold with some of the serifs filed off, plus some minor tweaks to stroke widths.

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Very well written.

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There's actually a subtle puzzle hidden in how the word is written that you need to solve to get a job interview with them.

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thonkerium

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A good friend of mine is one of the senior people there, and I regret to inform you that (as far as he will inform me) it is a pretty boring billionaire family office prop shop

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I recently started work as VP of Illiterate And Obnoxious Twitter Posts By Vile Idiots In Support Of Things You Personally Believe and it has its moments. We've had a lot of luck cross-pollinating with the Undermining The Scientific Process By Telling People To Trust It Department.

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This story switches from present tense to past tense and then back to present tense.

This could be a mistake, or it could be something more sinister, like a sinister mistake.

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This is actually a common method in ancient Icelandic litterature. Perhaps Scott caught the habit from Niall's saga

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Personally, I suspect some sort of time travel on the part of the reporter is involved.

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This is such a good bit, I was feeling depressed before reading this and now I’m chuckling to myself in public like a crazy person. 10/10

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I’d like to talk to that Luke guy about my theory that Pinochet’s coup of Allende was a CIA plot.

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Was likely naval intelligence rather than the CIA IRL

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Lots of things can be made to happen if the CIA quietly tells certain people that the US government wouldn't mind certain things happening.

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In the case of the coup against Diem in Vietnam, it appears to have been ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge suggesting that to military officers. He was a Republican appointed to the post by a Democratic president in part to move him away as political competition, but he still managed to cause chaos (admittedly, LBJ's administration had tired of Diem, so Lodge wasn't exactly defying their stance).

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It helps, sure, but the fact is that Allende was running the country to the ground and it's super common for militaries to be a stronghold of anti-communist cadres.

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I'd like to know how project cybersyn would have worked out anyway.

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It wouldn't have because economic planning is difficult. If the Soviets couldn't do it, some tinpot socialist caudillo couldn't.

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Well why not let it "run to the ground" a little and let democracy do its job of removing him instead ?

Cybersin would have probably be an experiment and if it had failed, well, it would have failed. Countries should be able to experiment.

As far as I know Milei is experimenting ultraliberalism and there was no coup to stop his experiment. Would you be in favor of a coup to remove him if it seems like he is "running the country to the ground" ?

Surely a coup could have waited to see if the democratically elected government was taking an authoritarian turn ?

Surely that would have been a better antidote to "socialism"/"communism" to see a failure than years of dictatorial power ?

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Who cares if I approve or I don't? This isn't a morality argument. There happen to be agents, yes even in the third world, with agency and preferences independent of USG's. When they determine that a given government is intolerable and they have enough influence to topple it, they do it. That's what happens, everywhere, always. Think of the is/ought distinction for a second. That's it.

Basic probabilistic reasoning suggests that Cybersin was idiotic vaporwave. If the Soviet Union and China, actually sophisticated and advanced socialist polities, couldn't solve the calculation problem, Chile certainly couldn't. It literally takes some of the most uncontroversial international development assumptions to arrive at the conclusion that Cybersin was just meant to excite gullible Westerners. But hey, present-day China and Russia are perfectly free to try this Chilean economic Wunderwaffe, lol.

Again, the endorsement thing is besides the point, but I obviously think Millei could be unconstitutionally removed from power if a large enough fraction of the elite deems the shock therapy too destabilizing. In fact, some provinces have even started issuing their own currency. Why don't they just let Milleinomics crash and burn? Why weaken the Rule of Law? Lmao.

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That's *exactly* what the US was doing. The US let Allende run the country into the ground.

The Soviet Union (who had put him into power in the first place) pulled support from Allende because Allende was trying to start wars in the region to "spread the revolution", which they realized would pull the US into a war with Chile and by extension, the USSR, and the Soviets didn't want to get in a fight with the US.

Allende's support was crumbling due to his own insane evil policies.

So Allende decided to overthrow the government.

You see, Allende was blatantly violating the law. He was impeached by parliament but had just enough support from his own die-hard supporters to remain in office.

The Supreme Court ruled that Allende was blatantly violating all the laws of the country and condemned him.

So Allende decided to overthrow the government, and called for his supporters to rise up in a revolution against his enemies, making him a dictator.

Turns out, giving a speech calling for the government to be overthrown is, you know, very easily perceived by your enemies.

Pinochet then initiated a counter-coup before Allende's coup could take form. Because Allende was wildly unpopular due to driving the country into the ground, the people supported said counter coup, and Allende, realizing that he was screwed, blew his own brains out rather than be captured.

That's how Pinochet ended up in charge - the democratic system failed to remove Allende, Allende tried to overthrow the government, and then Allende himself was overthrown because he was unpopular.

Pinochet had a huge degree of support because Allende had wrecked the country so thoroughly, which is why his coup succeeded.

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Why don't the US Government's powers to effect meaningful change extend to the US?

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They ran out of the catalyst - hope.

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They like things the way they are, for the most part. What changes exactly are you thinking that the powers of DC would like to see, that wouldn't violate fundamental economic or physical constraints, and wouldn't gore their own ox in some other way?

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The US is one of the best places to live in the world, if not THE best.

Socialists hate this because it means that Marx really was just an insane, evil antisemitic cult leader who believed Jews were stealing all the money.

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Have you heard about the part where the Chamber of Deputies resolved to ask the army to d put a stop to the Allende government violating the constitution? At that point, everybody knew the army has only one way of doing that.

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I'm trying to think of similar deliberate trolls.

Technological progress stalled in the 70's for anthropic reasons, but not the ones you think. It isn't that weapons would have gotten better, its that everything would have gotten more complicated.

Tegmark's mathematical universe posits that every mathematically possible universe exists. To explain why our universe is extremely simple compared to all possible universes, it is supposed that simpler universes have more "weight" than complicated universes. This complexity weighing is not a one off process, its evaluated at every instant.

More advanced technology would result in a universe so complex that it would be heavily penalized. Therefore, past a certain point, you are more likely to live in a universe where technology stalled.

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I have a different idea about technological progress. Basically capital found it easier to make profits by pushing electrons or bits around than by pushing atoms around. Look at all the people who got billionaires relatively recently, Gates, Jobs etc. this works, apparently building, I don't know, flying cars is a less reliable way to make money. There are several pretty well working prototypes of that and it is just still not getting off.

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Electric cars and flying skyscrapers are showing promise though!

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Didn't you steal that from... Peter Thiel?

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Technology stalled in 1970 because most of society broke (https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/). That happened because 1970 is when computers got fast enough that a bored engineer executed a brute-force attack against the Names of God and accidentally found the Name to kill God. The universe was built with some redundancies so it didn't immediately shut down, but some of the finer details of society were dynamically unstable without manual divine interventions.

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One of Clarke's best stories.

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The 1970s is when per capita energy consumption started stagnating in the west.

Perhaps solar power will get us out of this draught.

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Or we could have not fallen for Soviet psyops and dumped our nuclear power plants.

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*Waves away smoke from the nearby coal-fired power plant*

No, that would be environmentally irresponsible!

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The more complex the technology the more GPUs the simulation requires. Technological progress has to be blocked before the simulatees start running their own simulations and the cost goes exponential.

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> When you stare at it really hard, it resolves into an imagine of some people in surgical gowns

typo: "image"

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This is hilarious, thank you Scott 🤣💙🙏🏼

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Hiding fascinating original stuff in laugh-out-loud comedy posts.

Thank you Scott !

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Earlier today I spent the afternoon reading up on Bostrom's argument. I heard it before, but for some reason I felt compelled to get a refresher. I'm really trying very hard to believe this is just a coincidence.

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In a couple of days some kind of world-threatening crisis will occur and your understanding of antrohpic arguments will somehow prove essential in preventing the extinction of humanity.

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Or at least in explaining to you why you have observed such an apparently-low-probability near-miss of human extinction....

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I... I don't get the punchline.

But as with all of these short fic-bits, I love it anyway.

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I loved the punchline - quite a long (no, not tedious) text to get to it, I thought (admiringly). Though you are probably joking, MANY are convinced that Peter Thiel (and ThielCapital) is "obviously/as every informed person says and knows": deeply evil - and not just sth. that keeps billionaire Thiel getting ever richer. Yesterday, I read this comment on a Tyler-interview: "Thiel, a person who obviously is as close to evil as one dare call another, and the question arises as to whether the Cowen project is a road to dumb dumb, as Hayek didn’t quite put it. The answer for me is: just skip the Thiel worship" https://aashishreddy.substack.com/p/interview-tyler-cowen-economist/comments#comment-67540239

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"Road to dumb dumb" - frankly these childish insults make me want to put the writer in a gulag. It's Twitter dunk culture masquerading as intellectualism. (To forestall the inevitable objection: yes, put Trump in the gulag too, and Walz can share his cell.)

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MANY people believe dumb stuff. YOU don't have to be one of them.

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If I knew it was dumb, would I have believed it in the first place? (Don't answer that.)

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The last one was a bit too close to home. For instance I often feel like a crazy person for suspecting Oswald really did just kill Kennedy, even though the CIA was certainly real happy about it at the time.

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The second shooter conspiracy stuff was actually made up by the CIA, in order to conceal the existence of magic bullet technology

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I thought it was a group of time-travelers who paused time and switched out JFK for a dead clone?

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Yeah everyone knows that. i just mean it was Oswald who shot the clone.

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It's incredibly frustrating how many people who seem otherwise rational will just casually believe, as if it were the default position, that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK. There's ample evidence that Oswald acted alone, and abundant reasons that a conspiracy is incredibly implausible, and anyone who looks at it would be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt of Oswald's guilt. But if you're the type of person who is otherwise inclined to believe the CIA is hyper-capable and/or malevolent, you somehow end up just taking for granted that they did this and never really examining it. In recent years, due to right-wing distrust of the CIA and FBI growing enormously in the Trump era, I'm seeing the amazing spectacle of a new generation of America First dudes falling all over themselves to exonerate an avowed communist who tried to assassinate General Walker of the John Birch Society.

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Jack Ruby putting down Oswald 3 days later is about as publicly conspiratorial as you get.

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If you read much about Jack Ruby, he pretty clearly would not have been trustworthy to be part of a conspiracy. In fact, it's many of the same bad traits that Oswald had which would've made a horrible conspirator: self-aggrandizing, attention-seeking, unreliable. Ruby had tried to get his strip club to be a cop hangout and alternatively played up local crime figure connections, in each case because he wanted to be seen as important. The local media knew him pretty well due to his constant attempts at publicity and to act like an important local leader. Witnesses report that following the assassination, he acted genuinely distraught, and the obvious conclusion is that he killed Oswald thinking he'd be seen as a hero. In no way is Jack Ruby somebody the CIA or the mafia or anyone else with a shred of competence would have trusted to eliminate a co-conspirator. His character was very well known locally, none of this is a secret.

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> In no way is Jack Ruby somebody the CIA or the mafia or anyone else with a shred of competence would have trusted to eliminate a co-conspirator.

Which made him the perfect co-conspirator, no?

Joking aside, and conditional on there being a conspiracy: Neither Oswald nor Ruby had to be in the inner circle of the conspiracy to do their respective hit jobs. All they needed was a target, an opportunity, and some sort of motivation.

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Unstable people in these conspiracies are frequently given nudges and helping hands.

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> In no way is Jack Ruby somebody the CIA or the mafia or anyone else with a shred of competence would have trusted to eliminate a co-conspirator.

Who says he’s a co-conspirator. Ruby is skirting the edge of the mafia. He’s the kind of guy who probably owes debts.

You just don’t kill, or torture him, if he kills Oswald. So he kills Oswald.

In this scenario the cancer could be well known or not prior to the shooting. Doesn’t matter, if he knows he has cancer he’s still avoiding an earlier death, or torture. Ruby is easy to explain if you believe in the conspiracy. Oswald is harder.

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Oswald was an obvious Soviet agent, the FBI did not want to start WW3 over this, so they had the guy killed and this made them look complicit.

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Wasn't Oswald an obvious Soviet agent, even have lived there?

The the FBI/CIA did not want to start WW3 over this, covered this link up, had the guy killed, and then people thought it was them because of this.

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The basic outline of the events makes it virtually impossible for Oswald to have been part of a conspiracy. He was directed to work at the Texas Book Repository by a friend of his wife; another person hired the same day went to work at a completely different building; and the President's route was only decided on after he got the job, much less publicized.

The best you could do is have him as somebody's low-paid asset they convince to take a shot when the opportunity presents itself, but then there's the problem of him not giving up his handler under interrogation while simultaneously claiming to be a patsy, and his handler somehow arranging Jack Ruby to shoot him, and then Ruby deciding to call somebody, but also Oswald asks for a sweater which delays his departure. The sheer level of coincidences reaches "That all just happened by accident" levels of this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Irvuafg5GM

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Lucky he brought the gun to the job then, just in case.

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It's more lucky that, again, while at 11:17, Jack Ruby is sending a money order to his employee, Oswald is complaining that his fingies are cold and asking for a sweater. Four minutes later, Ruby shot Oswald as he was being transported out of the police basement. If this was an actual chosen assassin of an intelligence agency, on threat of being murdered or whatever conspiracy theory you believe in, you'd think he'd prioritize being on-site to kill his target over sending a money order to an employee.

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There is plenty of unsealed Soviet documentation from the period during his defection showing that they didn't think much of Oswald. His info he defected with wasn't that valuable, he was a bad worker at the factory where they set him up, and they noted all of his many character flaws that would make him unreliable. He complained constantly while in Russia, became disenchanted with the Soviets, and began to put all his hopes on Cuba being the "real" communist paradise. Oswald tried to get to Cuba just weeks before the assassination, and the Soviets basically told the Cuban embassy in Mexico that he was a flake they shouldn't get involved with. He was just a guy who thought he was smart and special, but he wasn't, and couldn't figure out why nobody would treat him as the smart special person he thought he was, and gets repeatedly baffled that real life was boring and involved menial tasks no matter where you went. Like a lot of today's communists, he had a grandiose image of himself as a "hunter of fascists" and thought he was part of a huge important conflict over the future of humanity, but he was really just some schmuck that the important people would stick in a factory doing nothing of importance.

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I used to be in the camp that there was no conspiracy, and anyone who thought otherwise probably believed Elvis was still alive. But spending 5 minutes looking at the House Select Committee on Assassinations, I can at least acknowledge that it's not as clear-cut as I once thought. I'm not saying that the CIA was involved--just that if the government can't decide on basic things like how many bullets were fired, how can we be so confident that there was no conspiracy?

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The HSCA report concluded there was an additional shot based on a police microphone that had been left in the "on" position and then later recovered, and they lined up the chatter over the police channels to establish a timeline. The assumption at the time was that this was the mic of some cop in the motorcade or security in the area of the shooting. However, sometime after the HSCA, it was discovered that the microphone was in fact nowhere near Dealey Plaza, and what seems like an extra shot was in fact just a matter of the mic picking up the shot's echo from further away.

Even at the time of the HSCA, this was a pretty dubious basis to conclude there was a 4th shot. The overwhelming majority of earwitnesses at Dealey Plaza described 3 shots, and mostly getting the timing of the shots right also (the first two closer together, longer delay before the killshot). There was some disagreement about where earwitnesses placed the origin of the shots, due to acoustics in the plaza, but the number of shots was never really in doubt until that open mic was discovered, and the HSCA should have been more skeptical about it.

Your priors on anything like this should be "there is no conspiracy", because conspiracies are generally A) unnecessary, and B) nearly impossible to keep secret. Two guys can't rob a gas station without one of them spilling the beans, but somehow people think that a cast of characters including some mix of multiple CIA agents, mafia guys, communists, doctors, KGB agents, anti-communist Russian emigres, local cops, etc, fabricated accounts and kept silent for decades. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the JFK assassination being a conspiracy of powerful actors is an extraordinary claim for which only flimsy evidence and pure speculation has ever been presented. It should not be people's default position before looking into things, but somehow it seems to be.

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> conspiracies are generally... impossible to keep secret

I will note that the set of data points used to conclude this has the mother of all selection biases.

If there were conspiracies that had successfully remained secret, you wouldn't know about them to calibrate your intuitions. (And indeed we know of many conspiracies that successfully did very significant things, and were only exposed after-the-fact.)

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Sep 8·edited Sep 8

There were conspiracies that were only discovered after the fact. We can use those to calibrate our intuitions. And in particular, we can look at them to see the traits that make it possible for a conspiracy to temporarily remain hidden. None of the big "conspiracy theories" are anything like that.

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Yeh, what about Catholic child abuse? Mass cover ups, lots of people involved, lots of police and journalist inactivity.

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Conspiracy theory humor was plentiful for more than a decade after, here’s one of the best bit from a 1977 John Landis movie:

https://youtu.be/L7e3RK

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I can believe that he acted alone and that there was a possible conspiracy. In that sense he would be a “patsy” which is what he said. Then he was killed. Then the guy who killed him died, and pretty soon.

I am only 50-50 on this or even less but it’s a strange set of circumstances. I’m sure that if a liberal Russian president comes to power, is killed by a lone gunman, that gunman is himself killed by a guy with possible connections to the Russian mafia, who then dies of cancer - and the successor is more amenable to Russia military adventurism we’d all be a little bit suspicious.

None of this involves multiple shooters, or magic bullets or anything else, and none of it is from reading any book on the subject.

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> In that sense he would be a “patsy” which is what he said. Then he was killed. Then the guy who killed him died, and pretty soon.

If the *only* information you knew was just the sentence you listed, that would make sense. But there is a lot of contradictory information.

In particular, both Oswald and Ruby were basically just there by coincidence. This is not the pattern you would expect to see in a planned hit. Furthermore, Oswald and Ruby had character traits that would make them unreliable conspirators.

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For us non-native speakers, non-US based (no pun intended), what’s “based” mean here? And any recent context on Peter Thiel I should be aware of?

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You know how in Breaking Bad they dissolved some bodies in hydrofluoric acid? Well, people who know chemistry will tell you that this bit is fiction, strong bases are much better at dissolving tissues. So "based" means someone who understands that and would use NaOH instead.

It's either that or derived from "all your base are belong to us".

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That’s a fun one to ponder in relation to Thiel :)

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Wittgenstein tells us that words and phrases are defined by how they are used. Therefore "Based", in this context, means "according to *our* facts, not *theirs*, where reality is defined by the distribution of power.

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Don't lye to us!

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Where did this usage of the term come from? (I mean, I hear you that it's maybe a Breaking Bad reference, but does anyone happen to know who started using the reference this way and how/where did it gain traction?)

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If it wasn't clear from my comment, I was joking.

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aw man, I was really hoping this was a legit weird thing! Crazier things have been real. Bummer!

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I like the definition this site gives: https://www.etymologynerd.com/blog/a-based-etymology

> A little over a decade ago, the slang term based emerged to refer to a quality of not caring about what others think of you

> In the present, based has simultaneously been appropriated by online meme communities to serve as an antonym of cringe and by the alt-right to serve as an antonym of woke.

"Based", when said in general, has broadened to the point of something close to a synonym to "cool". However, as quoted, on the right in america, it means the opposite of "woke", as in "holding socially conservative ideas, especially with regards to gender etc, but really anything that might make a stereotypical leftist mad".

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Some communities use it to refer to edgy tongue-in-cheek political positions, regardless of direction or agreement. Going through a left-leaning discord I'm in, the following have all been described as based in the past year:

- Naming a swim centre after Harold Holt

- Hanging everyone involved in Jan 6 for treason

- Shooting Donald Trump in the ear

- The Chinese economy's struggles

- Flying a version of the confederate battle flag modified to have the gay flag in the background

- Wanting Russia to nuke the EU in order to avoid going to work on Friday

- Bernie Sanders findom

- The Russian government removing opposition candidates before an election

- The 1999 Luttwak essay "Give War a Chance"

- The claimed inability of the Pakistani government to stop one member from fish reacting

I think this is reasonably common usage among the communities where the term naturally spread, and the association with the alt-right is by people outside those communities who do not themselves use it.

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At the centre of all thing, there is a lotus. Upon it sits a great Buddha. He sees all things, comprehending their based-nature. His third eye alights upon your comment, and he speaks:

Based, cringe, cringe but Chad, cringe, cringe, based but virgin, based, cringe, cringe, touch grass.

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There's a reason he's referred to as "the based one" in the suttas.

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Bernie is no longer asking, he's ordering you to send him $6

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Urban Dictionary has you covered on the first question: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=based.

To the second question, Thiel has had an on-again off-again relationship with Trump and it’s currently believed he was a key reason in getting JD Vance into the VP slot.

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Thanks for the news cycle context!

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The irony is, of course, that calling someone/thing "based" is actually cringe.

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The absolute worst is when people call themselves based or preface their usernames with it. It's difficult to devise a stronger form of cringe.

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Which brings us right back to it being a synonym of "cool". Part of being cool is not having to say or show that you're cool. "Based" carries the same genetics.

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It is an internet meme and as that, had a strange career with many mutations. The most common version would be someone rooted to the ground, someone who is not pushed around easily. Alt-righters meant it in the sense of someone who will not be intimidated into agreeing with liberal stuff, but then it escaped the alt-right, became a generally used term, and now means something like... a free-thinker? Someone who bravely dares to disagree with popular ideas? But it mights just mean agreeing with someone, basically saying the are right, or that they know a rare truth few people know.

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The recent Nietzsche piece got me thinking that there’s a pretty big overlap between the term based plus the associated gigachad meme and the concept of master morality, and that the term exploded in popularity recently precisely because it reintroduced master morality into the mainstream of a slave morality-dominated culture.

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Oh man. That had a wild history. It all started with pick-up artistry. While it was just a bunch of tricks, eventually it evolved into the concept of the alpha male, which centered less and less around seducing women and more around preserving traditional masculine norms. It expanded into becoming the manosphere and redpillery, which was a while apolitical, although opposing feminism.

In 2016 this all changed. the mods of /r/theredpill started /r/TheDonald, took up alt-right posture and now associated with this sense of masculinity all right-wing positions

then the I am a cuck song was published, which strongly implied white men who are not right-wing enjoy watching black men fuck their wives

this was probably the lowest point, as it took the political discourse down to a very animal level, who is the big dog who gets to fuck?

the recent Nietzschean thing is that those guys largely calmed down a bit now and seeing the whole thing more intellectually

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I thought that song was by one of the Tim & Eric guys (can't remember if it was Tim or Eric).

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based on oneself

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[fake derivation] It's a back-formation from the insult "basic": "basic" implies that someone or something is simple and unexceptional and boring, so "based" implies the opposite, that someone or something is surprising and exceptional and interesting.

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[fake derivation] It's a back-formation from "abased", the way "tonal" is the opposite of "atonal". To be "abased" is to be low, humble, and groveling for others' approval. Therefore, to be "based" is to be high, proud, and uncaring of others' approval. To "abase oneself" is to view ones' own opinions, no matter how good, as unworthy of others' time; therefore, to "base oneself" is to view ones' own opinions, no matter how bad, as worthy of others' time.

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Sep 3·edited Sep 3

> “I don’t know, I still think it doesn’t make sense to have a porno with so little sexual activity, as weighted by experience-moments.”

I have never been in porn production, but I would imagine there are a lot of non-sex activities going on there too: contract negotiation, location, prop procurement, camera work, lighting, scene planning, distribution, copyright enforcement, etc.

The point is that the user experience is a selected sexy subset of all activities -- the same could be true of our porn simulation. There's always /someone/ getting frisky around the world, and perhaps that is the experience most transhumans are aware of.

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Yeah, this was the most plausible sounding one to me, for exactly the reason you state.

Also, you *hear* about lots of people not having sex, but you know, *I* have lots, the friends I'm close with have a good amount, my parents and siblings all have a lot (I mean, just judging from the number of kids). So obviously "incels" and similar things are just something intentionally inserted into the sim to make sex more valued and higher status and whatever within the sim. That bit of contrast and FOMO to make it sweeter and more prevalent overall.

I mean, entire global communication mediums were created just to propagate and multiply sex! Entire technology pyramids!! That have substantially changed and altered society in many ways, and in directly contrary ways to the ~2B-year *built-in* motivations and ends!

After all, the rollout of high speed internet has largely correlated with *drops* in fertility everywhere.

Tell me that's not a sign it's given unnatural primacy.

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My problem with the porn idea is that he's assuming everyone in the future would make porn because we're so obsessed with porn. But we're so obsessed with porn because we're in porn from the future. He just explained away the premise.

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No, no, that's simply the Anthropornmorphic Principle at work!

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Also - how many exact moments do you specifically remember in full vivid detail from the entirety of your life when you *weren't* having wild, kinky sex, vs. how many of the moments that you were having wild, kinky sex do you vividly remember?

The non-porn parts have to exist for backstory and worldbuilding, but they're either simulated in very low detail or just filled in very roughly.

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Right, most of our lives are the "story" part of porn that gets skipped over, except for a few "key plot points" that have meme text posted on top of them.

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The plot parts of seventies porn movies ar a form of art that still needs to be academically appreciated.

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The decline of those scenes mirrors the decline of romance! Now we don't even have to say "nice boots".

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Even if multiple observers can join to a single experience, we can probably use statistics about the distribution of sexual experiences to determine the nature of the demand that's shaping the world. Although maybe "vanilla cis het missionary style" is popular among a small subgroup who fetishize variety, and the median and modal observer just goes straight to this one guy who is really into feet, and replays his best moment over and over again.

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The weirder thing is that the interviewer never mentioned that people are having less sex over time. Admittedly, that's linked to the decline in marriage and rise in single people, and porn usually isn't about married couples.

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Perhaps the amount of sex decreased, but the amount of distinct partner matches and the variety of sex has increased?

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What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?

"Existence exists" is a plausible translation of the Tetragrammaton.

Ecologically speaking, humans are plants. When there are more of a species of animal there is less of what that animal eats. When there are more of a species of plant, the resources the plant needs either increase or stay the same.

Warren Harding and Jimmy Carter are the two most under-rated US Presidents of the 20th century.

The Power-Set Axiom is the most dubious part of ZFC.

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How is that the definition of plants? Resources plants need are things like sunlight, minerals, and water, which they definitely reduce. Id say plants get their energy from non-organic sources, and humans still partially count.

And whats wrong with the powerset axiom?

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I'm curious about the last one. What is dubious about the power-set axiom, in your opinion?

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Power sets give rise to higher infinities, the reals, etc. But you can do a lot of math with lower infinities, computable reals, and so on.

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The one about alien abduction sounds almost plausible. (I have heard that theory before),

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Would be interesting to see whether those who report abduction are disproportionately likely to have had at least one colonoscopy

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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18834282/

Forrest, David V. Alien abduction: a medical hypothesis

... someone even got an academic paper out of it.

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I am scheduled to have a cardioversion procedure next month, and I believe I'll be sedated for it, so ... alien abduction experience coming right up.

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I've actually heard it hypothesized as being scrambled memories from birth, specifically shift of birth from done at home to being done in hospitals

-newborns have poor vision but a visual preference for eyes="greys with big eyes"

-bright lights of delivery room="bright clean space"

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Sep 4·edited Sep 4

What newborn experience does the rectum probing come from?

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The theory didn't explain that one (rectal temperature checks, maybe?)

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such a good start of the day!

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Ah, I always wondered what the Bay Area Houseparty protagonist did for a living...(but what division does our hero work in? resourcing humans seems so...square...)

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"resourcing humans seems so...square.."

Aha! Plainly the "Forcing Square Pegs Into Round Holes HR Department"! That's why the interviewer is dismissing all the candidates, they *would* be wonderful fits for the jobs which is why he can't hire them!

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I thought I read "division by zero", that would be an odd thing for the Houseparty Protagonist to work in. I guess I need new glasses.

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This was objectively very funny. But also I'm curious; why does Scott/Rationalists seem to be wary of Thiel and everyone associated with him?

My hypothesis is Thiel and Co are stealing/creating all the "post-rats" from the rationalist movement, causing the regular rats to stagnate on various goals. This was made worse after events like the very public SBF/EA implosion, or the weird leadership shakeups at OpenAI. I understand why the rats are wary of post-rats, they seem directly contradictory at times. But many of them are like me, where I read and enjoy all of the LW/ACX/adjacent literature, but still believe in many "woo woo" things y'all would probably laugh at.

Once again, I think Scott is very clever and I was grinning the whole time reading this. But also I do think the divide between rats and post rats needs to be talked about a bit more because it feels like the some people here are judgmental and increasingly discouraging from digging deep into weird esoteric topics.

Also anecdotally re all the rationalist and post-rationalist irl meetups I've been to; the latter had generally much more attractive, accomplished, and charismatic people on average. I did feel some contempt from the rats that felt more inspired by envy than rationalism. I mention this because I do believe the people Scott is poking fun at (I know he is doing it lightheartedly!) fall into this postrat camp.

More broadly speaking; it feels like the most prominent "rationalist" writers have felt very tribally leftist lately. But that's a whole nother can of worms.

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> Also anecdotally re all the rationalist and post-rationalist irl meetups I've been to; the latter had generally much more attractive, accomplished, and charismatic people on average.

Ooh, where do we find the post-rat meetups? I don't think I've ever met a post-rat in real life. Is there a blogger or online Schelling point like SSC?

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vibecamp

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https://stayhappening.com/e/rat-fest-2024-E3LV2PVFTSRR

I'm not sure whether it's post-rat or variant-rat. They respect David Deutsch a lot.

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Generally lots of smaller events promoted on X and things like Hereticon and Vibecamp

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Post Rat here.

I’m involved with the regenerative, metamodern and integral communities. There’s a wider network sometimes referred to as the liminal web which is somewhat adjacent to or inclusive of rationalist branches like EA and ACX.

On this page is a dope map that includes the above and the main bastions of the wider liminal web. Most of the people I read are on “Integral Island” lol. The linked resources are great too:

https://secondrenaissance.net/ecosystem

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I don't know exactly what a post-rationalist is, but I've always considered myself to be far too attractive, accomplished and charismatic to be a rationalist, and also I want Thielbucks, so count me in. Do I get a badge or something?

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This kind of comment only confirms my belief that as sneer club died, the screechy HR types it attracted moved back into the Rat movement unfortunately.

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I thought sneer club hated rationalists?

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Yes but more specifically they hated rationalists who had any center or right leaning beliefs. They saw a lot of rat discourse as pathways to fascism with the genetics discourse and such. I personally believe they crept back into the rat movement and shifted the whole thing left.

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Why this comment in particular? It rather sounds like a joke.

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I know it was a joke. But its like the vast majority of leftist on X; they do the joke/dunk thing in response to authentically earnest commentary and see it as a proxy for real criticism. Not saying there isnt room for comedy; eg this Scott post is fantastic. Its the low effort stuff like that comment after I clearly make a shift towards serious discussion that confirms my beliefs.

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Serious discussion about how your favored faction is "more attractive, accomplished, and charismatic" while the side you disfavor is responsible for SBF.

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I've gone to dozens of rat and post rat events in multiple countries. Those aligning with postrat positions are overwhelming more attractive and charismatic. I've heard others confirm this belief. Also SBF was very evidently involved with EA/Rats and a collapse in public opinion of that "faction" (your choice of word). Complain about these positions however you like, my experience confirms they are true. You are doing the weirdo leftist dunk thing where you are not providing any evidence to the contrary.

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Some of us just like joking around (while smoking cigars)... :-(

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Hah, I've been accused of being many things, but being a screechy HR type Sneerclub refugee is definitely a first.

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Your theories fascinate me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

But seriously... I feel like there's a lot of info here, probably gleaned from some sites/orgs somewhere, but no references to them and no obvious way to find them from what you've written.

What is post-rat? Who are some examples? Is there actually a newsletter?

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Looking into vibecamp (thanks Matt!), it appears the most prominent ones are Jacob Falkovich at putanomit.com and Aella, but that the primary discourse and group are mostly active on Twitter.

And honestly, I'm sold. I'm down for in person meetups with them and their intellectual confreres and readers. Next one is June 19-22, 2025, sort of near Philly: https://vibe.camp/vibecamp-4-faq/

Sounds pretty Burning Man-esque, tbh.

Here's one description of the first one, so you have the vibe:

> "vibe camp" was an ultra-realistic collective hoax conducted simultaneously by about 400 people on Twitter. the idea was to convince everyone that a big fun 3-day meetup was occuring. due to the scale and complexity, coordinating this on the internet proved infeasible, so they all met up in Texas to more efficiently organize.

the plan was to take photos and make tweets suggesting participants were engaged in a variety of recreational activities. in order to minimize contradictions and maximize verisimilitude, participants actually did engage in those activities, like a method actor. so for instance, if somebody was going to (e.g.) pretend to have been in the pool at 5pm, they actually did go swim in the pool at 5pm, so that when they pretended online to swim in the pool at 5pm, they would be able to lie convincingly

the motive for all of this, of course, was Mischief

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I take this as proof then when you get too wrapped up in being ironic, you end up in serious danger of being accidently sincere.

Actually swimming in order to pretend to be swimming? But what if you don't know how to swim?

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Pretend to drown, obvs!

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This reminds me of that time when Americans realized that to convincingly fake the moon landing, they'd have to built a massive rocket anyway (otherwise people would ask "how did you get to the moon?"), so they might as well pop over to the moon and fake the footage there.

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Post-rats are a subtype of wharf-rats, who hang around the underside and supports of wharves, and are therefore considered more "based".

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Nah, it's because Thiel is sort of pro-Trump. Some rats in good standing can be contrarian enough to earn scorn from the likes of NYT (but, like you say, nowadays there's even less of this), but having anything to do with Trump is crossing the event horizon.

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Hahaha “anything to do with Trump is crossing the event horizon”

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> why does Scott/Rationalists seem to be wary of Thiel and everyone associated with him?

I tend to associate Scott with the EA wing of rationalism, and I think they tend to be fairly left? I don't know where Thiel stands on rationalism and EA, but he seems to fit into that outgroup slot of "we know how we differ, but outsiders might not be able to tell the difference, so we have to make it very clear that we are separate".

> it feels like the most prominent "rationalist" writers have felt very tribally leftist lately.

I mentally translate some of that to "of course you're right, honey (please don't hit me again)".

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I'm judgemental of post-rat woo nonsense and am fine with them leaving.

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This only confirms my beliefs

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> Also anecdotally re all the rationalist and post-rationalist irl meetups I've been to; the latter had generally much more attractive, accomplished, and charismatic people on average

IMO, there's always been a tension in "rationalism" between "seeking truth" and "winning". Being charismatic and attractive doesn't help with truth. *looks away*

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I don't think Rationalists really dislike Thiel that much, most of the Thiel hating is a joke, I think. But the reasons are probably just the very normal reasons e.g. not liking Trump and Thiel endorsing Trump.

The whole, Thiel stealing people thing seems very unlikely to me. How would Scott even know about this, he's been described to me as being introverted, probably doesn't go to that many parties, is busy with his Wife and children. If Thiel is somehow recruiting lots of people away from the rats he probably wouldn't even notice.

Regarding rats v. post-rats, I'd guess rats are mostly just nerdier. If I go to a Maths and a Biology party I won't be surprised if the Maths party features fewer women, and less charismatic people than the Bio party. Post rationalism is (to a large extent) just rationalism but less nerdy.

I can think of some theories why rats might be less accomplished but there I'm less sure.

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Rationalist communities tend to be full of weird nerds (t. weird nerd) and charismatic and attractive people on average don't want to hang out with weird nerds when they could hang out with other charismatic and attractive people instead.

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Sep 3·edited Sep 3

All right, let me take a crack at this. I believe the prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him, banned his physical depictions because he was an anthropomorphic rhinoceros.

First, let's establish the base facts: rhinos become holier the more they're distanced from Africa. Everybody knows that in Britain there's the legend of the unicorn, a wise divine beast that blesses kings, and in China there's the qilin, a wise divine beast that blesses kings. But in the Turkic world there's the kat, a ferocious one-horned creature that kidnaps princesses and must be slain by heroes, almost like a dragon. In Russia there's the indrik, a gargantuan horned beast that shakes the earth as it walks, but is still a mundane creature and can be hunted. In Persia and Greece, the places closest to Africa, there's the kargadan and the monoceros, which are barely a step above exotic wild animals. And of course in Africa a rhino is just a rhino.

You may think it's just stories getting wilder as they're removed from their origin, a game of Chinese whispers going all the way to China, but that is not the case. I believe the Western black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis longipes) becomes more powerful and intelligent the more it is removed from its point of origin. While most individuals were limited to becoming local legends, one was involved in a unique rafting event about 5.3 kya ago that sent it from the Atlantic Coast of Africa to South America, as has happened to smaller animals like mud turtles, geckos, skinks, monkeys, and the ancestors of capybaras and guinea pigs. This specimen is now known in popular culture as God.

This is the reason Moses developed his "horns of splendor" after his meeting with his boss. In Islam it is believed that, because all living things are emanations of the one God, meeting Him face-to-face would cause you to be contact-welded into Him, absorbed like a cosmic amoeba. As a result, even during Mohammad's own meeting with Allah, a veil was put between the two to ensure there would be a prophet left to return after the talk. Because Moses had direct but limited exposure, he was only partially transformed into a rhinoceros, hence the horns of light.

Now, if I were applying for Tesla's secret Wunderwaffe Division, I'd end my pitch here: clone the now-extinct D. b. longipes and send it to Mars instead of Elon's cars to get ourselves a new, more powerful super-god. Alternatively, we could build the Plotz & Linklater Rhino Relay Array (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.03.015, Fig. 2b shows that every oxpecker in the vicinity of a rhino increases its ability to detect humans by nine meters but does not specify upper limit on range, per D&D rules you can use 1.2 million oxpeckers to create a rhinopticon that simultaneously surveys every person on the planet). But I think my skills would be put to better use in your Profaning Whichever Religion You Follow while Praising the Others Division, so let me finish up by justifying my true belief: Have you seen the Sandals of Mohammad at the Topkapı Palace?

They're massive. Whatever size you were thinking, double it, then double it again. You could drown a child in those things, they're not fit to be worn by a man. They are, however, very fit for a man halfway through his transformation into a full-blown rhinoceros due to the divine rhino-power invested into him (clearly the veil stuff did not work as intended). But God knows about niche partition - He uplifted a bunch of dumb primates out of bicamerality instead of His fellow rhinos, because He is a jealous God and wants all the juicy grass to Himself. His plan is to empower the persistence hunters that love murdering competing megafauna, not for His prophets to transform into rival rhinos themselves. So He decreed that all images of Mohammad (and specifically Mohammad) are verboten, canceled the prophet project, and now rules us as the only divinity in town.

Anyway, if I am accepted for the job, I would like to request a budget for a movie tentatively called Raptor Jesus vs. Rhinohammad: Dawn of Mammals.

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Exquisite. Phenomenal. Stupendous.

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Seconded. Get this person early Sora access, stat! This is the Passion / jurassic park / zootopia crossover movie we want and need, the sure blockbuster event of the christmas season.

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> In Islam it is believed that, because all living things are emanations of the one God, meeting Him face-to-face would cause you to be contact-welded into Him, absorbed like a cosmic amoeba.

I’d love to know if this is true, because afaik neither does Islam consider humans emanations of God (they’re lowly clay at best) nor does it consider that anything can weld itself to The One God (then He wouldn’t be The One, and that’s shirk, the highest form of sin).

Also, “jealous god” is an expressly Christian concept, if I’m not wrong, although one could argue that the qualities still apply to the Muslim God.

Apart from that, 5/7 would condemn.

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Recently, I was at a Simpsons exhibition in a museum where it was mentioned that the characters are yellow because a woman in charge of color selection chose it, believing it could plausibly represent both skin and hair

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I thought the story was that Matt Groening choose it to be distinctive, so you'ld immediateky know it was The Simpsons when you switched on the TV.

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There hadn't been a cartoon in primetime for over 20 years when The Simpsons went on the air. You knew it was The Simpsons when you switched on the TV because it was a cartoon.

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I'm trying to figure out how the Tracey Ullman show fits into this timeline.

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The story is that the colorist, Georgie Gyorgyi Kovacs Peluce, chose yellow, then everyone else signed on. I haven't seen an interview with Peluce, but other people involved in the originals show believe it was because Peluce liked eye catching colors and so that Bart and Lisa wouldn't look weird given that they don't have a hairline separating their faces from their hair.

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I still can't believe that no one has mentioned Legos yet!

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I believe "Einstein didn’t kill himself." should read "Epstein didn’t kill himself."

Also, I find it ironic how in our ostensibly sexually liberated society "you can f@&k a different partner every week" but apparently you cannot write "fuck".

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I believe that Scott fully intended to write "Einstein".

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I believe you are both correct. And thank you for deepen my understanding of the sentence. Scott fully intended to write "Einstein", and fully intended to make us wonder: should it read "Epstein didn’t kill himself."?

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