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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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 -->').
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.
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."
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
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.
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 ?
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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?)
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[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.
[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.
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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!
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.
> 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?
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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
Serious discussion about how your favored faction is "more attractive, accomplished, and charismatic" while the side you disfavor is responsible for SBF.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
> 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)".
> 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*
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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."?
The point was to list things that are obviously true. There's no way he intended to write "Epstein didn’t kill himself." because that's a stock conspiracy meme, not an obvious fact.
That's how I understood it at first, too - and well enough . But as I wrote, IMS/demost comments made me see: there is a reason Scott chose "Einstein" instead of "name of any other famous scientist who did NOT kill himself". As Einstein's name alludes to Epstein. Who may or may not have killed himself, but sure has become a stock conspiracy meme.
I thought the CIA did. ;) Probably the same thing, lol.
Also: "I thought that was obvious" that "The point was to list things that are obviously true." Indeed, all that was obvious. So, I do not really get the intent of your comments. Have a wonderful day, anyway.
I think it was Einstein. The joke is they're conspiracy theories that everyone believes and aren't denied, i.e. conventional wisdom--the Cuban Missile Crisis was, in fact, a Communist plot by the Communist government of Cuba to undermine the US, the 9/11 hijacking was indeed carried out by Muslims, and Joe Biden is indeed President, though I imagine he's a figurehead at this point. And nobody thinks Einstein killed himself, and as far as we can tell he didn't.
He has small babas in the house who are at the babbling stage now. He may be trying to ingrain the habit of self-censorship before they learn words they shouldn't be saying at that age 😁
My mother was *astounded* when we, around age eight or so, demonstrated that we knew the word beginning with "c" and ending in the letters n, t and u (not in that order) because she had no idea where we picked it up. Neither did we know it was a bad no-no word you shouldn't be saying, because we'd heard adults using it so it must be fine, yeah? Little pitchers have big ears.
"D'oh! Merriam-Webster surprised fans of “The Simpsons” by adding the word “cromulent” to the dictionary as part of the most recent update, making it official with the made-up term that first appeared in a 1996 episode of the game-changing animated show.29 Sept 2023" Also: Germans write Cnut as 'Knut' while "Kante" (cvnt-a) means 'corner' (of a table/book/stone - not a street corner).
Also Blatt (as in "'blood') means sheet/leave in German while it is "cvnt" in Russian. Took me some time to understand why German teachers in Russia said "Liste" when it was obviously just a sheet of paper, ein Blatt. 80% of Russian guys use blad/bladnoi as often as British soldiers use fvck: thrice per sentence.
"What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”
I believe that Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan is likely the site of Alexandria Oxiana, also called Alexandria on the Oxus, but that historians won't admit this since the Taliban makes excavation there impossible and historians want to get grant money to excavate other sites.
The last one is interesting, because I think there is something in actually "staring mentally" at the facts like that. Usually these facts come with the defense/explanation, in such a way that I'm not sure how many people actually agree on those facts. That even applies to "Thiel Capital is just another tool of the billionaire elites".
Maybe it's the difference between knowing something, and acting as if you truly believe in something. When you act on something as if you truly believed in it but don't really know the truth we sometimes call that faith. The opposite seems to be cognitive dissonance? And maybe by asking that question about beliefs the actual goal is to see if people actually act on their unusual beliefs.
Love it. Will also (mis)use the occasion to express my linguistic disapproval at the word "preventative". Unless we're trying to preventate bad things from happening...
I kind of feel this should have ended differently, with one last section of someone coming in to fire the interviewer for dismissing so many talented and well-qualified candidates. The interviewer objects, of course, but then the firer uses these as examples of "just the kind of people we're looking for" or something.
An alternative view for the first one about how you can get lots of explicit sex embedded in a long period of time without it, is it's a sexually-explicit simulation that puts the sex in the content of a story. Effectively, the descendant of the romance novel.
Thiel, being gay, naturally assumed it was a porno for *men*...
I believe: the gov budget should not be allowed to be over 10% of GDP in peace-times. State schools are a mix of day-care and day-prison. Trump is an ok fellow who would love to be a good/great POTUS.
(Also, he is not really up for that task, I doubt K.H. is. Oh, and Obama is a Christian mulatto + was the best looking POTUS ever.) Germany's far-right AfD should not be banned - though I also believe it is an instrument of the Kremlin, too. As is Sahra Wagenknecht and her brand new, far-left, xenophobic party: BSW. Humans are not blank slates. Autobahnen should have a speed limit. There should be less parking reserved for handicapped (and none for women). Nowadays, "Trans" (with an y-chromosome) are mostly gays who want to stand out or guys with a fetish. AI is not a good long-term investment for retail investors.
I am convinced, SAS is the best essayist ever. Blogger, as they call it now. (I know Sam Kriss, I know Erik Hoel.)
If there was a speed limit on all Autobahnen, there'd be no roads left to ride absurdly fast legally, would there? I'd miss that. Anyway, most Autobahnen are either falling apart or congested most of the daytime.
Some of that is very German specific. Russia might be funding some of those parties, however lightly, but if I were a conspiracist I’d go a bit further and have a theory about Merkel being a sleeper. Instructed to “Leave in all the Syrians” and “close down all the nuclear plants”. She was born in east Germany after all.
This may well be continuing with the “destroy German industry by making energy prices as expensive as possible directive.
That was hard to parse and I don’t understand the reference to Kennedy. I don’t believe the Merkel as a spy. Never ascribe to malice what you can more easily ascribe to incompetence.
My bad. 1. The "challenge" in the "job-interview" was: "what’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on? For example, just as a prompt, something like ‘maybe racism is actually good’ "
2. "Very few people" refers implicitly to people of "your circle": your country / your education-level / people you communicate with. If it were about literally all humans on earth, one might be surprised how many are e.g. openly racist. In Russia, I heard many tell anti-semitic stuff; in my youth there were brutal jokes about Turkish "Guestworkers/Gastarbeiter" ("what is the difference between Jews and Turks: For the Jews, it's in the past."), Saudi Arabia is the most openly racist society I've ever worked in. As I was not yet in China ("Ok, racism is bad, we know. But does racism really apply to Blacks? I mean, they are not really humans, are they?" - reported by colleagues).
3. Thus, among ACX readers, a Milton Friedman statement: "10% GDP is about the right level of state expenditure" may not even raise eyebrows. David Friedman and Bryan Caplan may well dream of 0%. But in Germany: even 20% are never even considered. Wishing for 40% makes you are heartless capitalist monster. - But then again, among anarcho-capitalists, a speed-limit may not be a popular idea.
4. "Kennedy" is John F. Kennedy. Hardly any German knows any other Kennedy (RFK Jr.? Who's that?). And most people alive on this planet outside NATO never heard of JFK even (Because they are too young and too poor.). So, they can not have any opinion about his death.
5. The ONE believe I have, but a majority of the 8 billion probably disagree with: "I believe astrology, spirits and witchcraft are all utter nonsense".
- All that said, I tried to come up with genuine believes of mine, some of those might be controversial, nay "unheard of", in my country/my circles. NOT with conspiracy theories. I do not believe that leaders of AfD/BSW are only motivated by Kremlin-money. I do believe it plays a role, and a more important one than most acknowledge. Wolf Biermann: "Die blaue AfD und die falschen Roten von Wagenknecht stehen beide aufseiten von Putin in diesem blutigen Ukrainekrieg." paywalled, but: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/wolf-biermann-sieht-viele-gemeinsamkeiten-zwischen-afd-und-bsw-100.html
> “It’s when something retains a design that no longer makes sense in context. The classic example is the floppy disk icon meaning ‘save’ on a computer program. Zoomers don’t even know what a floppy disk is, but they still click the weird-looking black square every time they want to save something. One day the meaning will be completely forgotten.”
You think that's weird? I once had a coworker, about 20 years ago, who didn't know what the New Document icon was. You know, the one that's clearly a piece of paper with the top-right corner folded down? She called it "the Utah button."
In an office that still kept a lot of records on paper, to boot!
Emoji color is so obvious; yellow is the only usable color to represent all people (that's still legible as a background for features in a saturated shade) that doesn't denote anything else: red = angry, pink = blushing, blue = suffocating, green = ill/"green around the gills", gray = dead. Yellow could indicate cowardice (or jaundice), but that's not a cast skin usually ever takes.
Very annoying! You've stolen a couple of ideas that I thought were all my own (but the racist twists you added are all your own)!
re how we survived the Cold War etc: this is just the Domesday Argument on steriods. Of course one day we'll populate the galaxy but that's such a skinny time-line that we're more likely to find ourselves here at peak Earth population. (FWIW: Fine Tuning can be extrapolated to show that Startrek technologies like FTL are probably possible in this universe, but unfortunately not to show how to achieve them!)
As for porn: eventually we'll be able to record and receive qualia. You would live the perceived existence of another person, with apparent complete free will but you would act exactly as they did cos you get their thoughts and motivations too. Before you get carried away I'm sure a day in the life of a porn star is "just another day at the office" and will be a disappointment.
Eventually everybody will be permanently hooked up to the shared experience, and maybe live on when their body perishes (how would you know?). Then we are Borg...
I think you're interpretting what I meant the wrong way around. I'm suggesting voyeurs might have the recorded PS experience, not that they might lend their bodies to be used in porn.
re really remarkable time: that's only how it looks from the outside. I suspect it rapidly becomes routine. (I have no personal experience of course.) I wonder if they suffer from imposter syndrome?
In reality I suspect our brains each develop in a unique way so you couldn't just "play" somebody else's qualia and get anything other than "nonsense".
As a service it's wide open to fraud cos all you need to do is implant the memories, and the recipient would be none the wiser.
Of course Philip K. Dick explored this back in the 60's: We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, which led to the movie Total Recall. They're more honest and only claim to give you the memories.
I was going to complain that people being transgender isn't a porn thing, but then I realized that that character would definitely *think* of it as a porn thing, so uh... fair enough.
AS well as changes in medical procedures, there may have been a social change in what it was acceptable to talk about,
When Barney and Betty Hill reported being abducted in 1961, we already see the medical procures in their account. Bur the media were more circumspect in reporting that aspect.
By the time Whitley Strieber wrote Communion in 1987, the media were much more willing to talk about it.
So if there's a social contagion aspect to the phenomenon, people only started learning from the media that they should expect to get anal probed from the 80s onwards.
NB: Not arguing, "aliens have been anal probing people for absolutely ages, and it is only now that victims are able to talk about it."
[Would like to have a solid reference for medical aspect of Barney Hill's abduction that was provably published before the '80s. The whole "David Grusch heard from a guy who heard from a guy that the government contacted aliens" makes me very suspicious of any claim that isnt firmly sourced]
It would be nice if people would take an hour or two, and listen to what Thiel himself has said, repeatedly, for the past 10 years on what he considers important for America and for American society.
Hint: it isn't any of those ridiculous stereotypes depicted in this faintly disguised hit piece written as satire.
That's deliberate, and ‘Secretly Funding All Media That You Personally Dislike’ should be obvious as not an actual division of any company. It's just a mockery of people who believe that.
Well you see, Scott wrote these pieces about attending house parties in the Bay Area. But now that you have revealed that the above piece about Thiel Capital is not literally true, the foundations of belief have crumbled beneath me. I have no firm footing anymore. I know not what or why or whom.
Could it - perish the thought, but the nagging doubt will not leave me! - could it be that *those* pieces were not true either? If the interviews at Thiel Capital don't go down as described in reality, maybe... maybe the house parties weren't real either!
You have done valuable work in assuring us that "it isn't any of those ridiculous stereotypes depicted in this faintly disguised hit piece written as satire", which is why I sought your guidance as to the house parties.
Scott no doubt does attend some parties - but nobody attends all of them. They are divided by class as well as interest. Is Scott part of the Burning Man crowd? Vs. say, the tech bros? Vs. say, the old money (Gettys and what not)? Vs. the banksters? There are many more: The White Russians, The Jews, the New Russians (now split between pro-Ukraine and pro-Russia), the Chinese, the Japanese, the Filipinos, the Mexicans, the Government, the police, and so on and so forth.
Yes, the lines are not solid - banksters will attend tech bro parties; some tech bros are burners etc etc but just attending some parties based on say, PMC class affiliation - which is what I would think Scott is part of - does not, by any means, mean that said parties are actually representative of anything.
The Bay Area is nothing more than a bunch of gossipy small towns that happen to be colocated.
My worldview is shattered. Scott blasphemes against his own holy words; he has lost the mandate of Berkeley and is no longer the rightful Caliph! Who will be the Caliph instead of the Caliph?
I know, Moon Moth, it's hard for me to process too. But c1ue says Scott is unreliable, and c1ue is an honourable man. When that the rationalists have nerded out, Scott hath tolerated it: deceit should be made of sterner stuff. Yet c1ue says Scott wrote a hit piece, and c1ue is an honourable man. You all did see that on Tau Day, we thrice proclaimed him Real Caliph, which he did thrice demur: was this stereotyping? Yet c1ue says he is faintly disguising it as satire, and sure he is an honourable man.
«those ridiculous stereotypes depicted in this faintly disguised hit piece written as satire.»
It’s not a hit piece. It’s earnestly participating in the symbolic reality of American mythology. Trump, Obama, Thiel, Soros, the Koch brothers, the Clintons, Trump, Epstein, the World Bank, Thiel Capital, the NYT… they surely did or do something or other in the real world. But why talk about them, as if they were real? Real stuff is boring and opaque. Let’s talk about them, as if they were larger-than-life sinister entities, instead. Everything is bigger in America!
I think you're just not getting that this is good satire. What makes it good satire is it's not just making fun of Thiel, it's making fun of the people who mischaracterize Thiel's ideas by showing how ridiculous it would be if the misrepresentations were actually true. The absurdity is a blade that cuts both ways. It makes fun of Thiel by portraying him as a cartoon villain (wanting to hire people based off working for dictatorships for example) and makes fun of his detractors for showing how ridiculous it is to portray him as a cartoon villain.
Is it really making fun of the people with the outlandish theories?
I detect none of that - particularly when the nonsensical bits are all on the supposed part of Thiel Capital as opposed to those in the mainstream media stories aligning with many of the above supposedly satirical characterizations.
You acknowledge this is precisely the stereotypes Thiel is accused of. The satire is of the stereotypes, not Thiel’s actual beliefs.
A lesser writer might write a thinly disguised hit piece/satire that just embellished the popular stereotypes in an attempt to say “Look at how evil Thiel is! Let’s all point and laugh.” The next level understanding is that such a satire by a lessor writer would still be funny not because it’s good satire, but because that author believes it’s accurate satire.
This piece is making fun of those who mischaracterize Thiel as a cartoon villain, by precisely doing that and showing how absurd such a view is.
There’s definitely shade thrown at Thiel too, which is ok because he definitely holds some odd or disagreeable beliefs.
This raises the obvious question that I haven't seen anyone ask yet: did Scott interview at Thiel Capital recently, and if so, for what division? I want to say Scott is too pro-social for the Undermining Democracy division. I could see his grant-making experience being useful to the Secret Media Funding team, but that seems like a poor use of his talent overall. I would guess they were looking at him for some role in the Subvert and Sabotage Academia Group.
Got any specifics in mind for that latter one? I was thinking limit mail ballots and disability assistance to twelve year olds and up, but allow voting at a poll booth at any age so long as the voter is able to enter alone and fill out the ballot without assistance. Of course I also wouldn't say no to just lowering the limit to 16 for now, and then making improvements on that later.
In terms of what I think will be realistically achieved in my lifetime and what I'd actually campaign for, lowering the voting age to 16 is about the limit for now. My ideal end state is, as you say, no minimum age for voting at a polling booth as long as they can fill out a valid ballot without someone physically guiding their hand. I see no reason to restrict children from using the same accessibility aids as adults—children under 12 can have disabilities too!
Allowing mail and proxy voting for children seems likely to end up effectively giving an extra vote to their parents/guardians, but in the aggregate I think that might not even be a bad thing as long as the system is set up so the kids can definitely vote for themselves as soon as they're old enough to want to, rather than their parents disenfranchising them. (Although, if I remember correctly, polling stations in the US are far enough apart that they're often driving distance from most people's homes, so they'd need an adult's cooperation to vote anyway...)
I did appreciate this bit: "Nirnaeth Arnoediad Inc. subdivision".
As for Luke - yeah, Biden is still the president. And now he's getting nothing but gushing praise from the same party members who were sharpening their knives before he got the hint and stepped down for Kamala. Isn't it... weird? The guy who was (we got told by all the little leaked chatty news stories) away with the fairies and incapable of being the nominee, is now somehow a shining example of true patriotism and perfectly safe pair of hands to keep charge of the situation in Gaza, Putin, etc. Kamala had to come to the rescue of the party as anointed nominee, but she's not so needed as VP to run the country in order to make up for Biden's decline, so she can concentrate on her campaign.
Hmmm. I wonder. Who *is* running the country? Could Luke be right, and Biden *is* the president in charge of making all the real decisions, no honestly he's the guy with the power, nobody else has their hands on the steering wheel?
I looked up Einstein's death, and according to Wikipedia,
> Einstein refused surgery, saying, "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly." He died in the Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.
" I didn’t know anyone had served in the Trump, Putin, and Jong-un administrations" hmm, are you suggesting a Thiel employee wouldn't know enoughn about Asian culture to figure out that Kim is the family name not Jong-un?
The 1st guy can still be right, the reason there's so much non-porn in the porn universe is that it's simply *foreplay* to the main action. The reason there's so much more foreplay in their porn compared to *our* porn, is that *their* culture is far more prudish & puritanical than ours. They'd have to be, in order to be capable of building entire universes -- you can't focus if you're distracted by the sexy. As proof, look at our own porn: *they can't even get a pizza delivered in that universe* -- they just can't get anything done, not when doing stuff is just foreplay to the real action.
So, therefore, we are to the universe-builders as the porno-denizens are to us: the less prudish version they imagined, so they could live out the fantasy of doing less stuff (and more of each other). But not *infinitely* less: in our own porn universes, we leave in enough foreplay for the people to at least *order* the pizzas, we're not that level of degenerate to imagine people getting down & dirty in the streets just because they made eye contact.
Similarly, *their* version of degenerate is "enough foreplay to invent the Internet" -- at which point everything else rapidly fades away, job done. We're living through the time of population decline & secular stagnation (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/uw5atu/wtf_happened_in_1971/), because all that other stuff we were doing was just "ordering the pizza", and *now the pizza boy is here*.
(Presumably the same thing would apply downwards as well as upwards, if we ever managed to create a fully functioning "porn universe" of our own, complete with NPCs: their version of "enough foreplay" would presumably be "making eye contact", given what passes for normal in their universe.)
It took me the last interview with Luke to realize the underlying message of this parody article: conspiracy theories have far greater appeal and selling power than dry old fact. The stronger the shock value of the claim/theory, the stronger, longer, and wider the attention it commands.
I think the appeal is that it makes you feel like part of an exclusive club, knowing things that not everyone knows, without having to actually put any work in to do so.
> “I don’t know, I still think it doesn’t make sex - I mean sense! - to have a porno with so little sexual activity, as weighted by experience-moments.”
Characterization adds to the desirability of the character, like how Tomoko Kuroki or Rei Ayanami clearly have charm levels far beyond what their body types or charisma would suggest. This sort of shallow thinking is far too common among the "based" right. Personality does, in fact, count for a lot.
> “Let me finish. I think we’re in a simulation, and it’s a porno.”
...and this theory is troubling.
*OK what I really mean is I make part of my living from writing erotica.
The thing is, I do have a "secondary world" or 'verse and it's not unlike a simulation, in that I try to have the people in it living realistic(ish) lives within the made up world, which increases the immersion when we spy on them during the sexy parts.
So it's entirely plausible that future perves might construct basically Porno Sims and dip into the juicy parts: the pool boy and the bored divorcee fantasy is even more erotic if you can ride in the head of the pool boy and he feels real.
Which is what's troubling about this theory!
The thing is, it's only worth creating a porno 'verse to support extreme themes.
The Omegaverse supports furry dominance hierarchies. My CARGO'verse supports hard F/m power exchange and male chastity. (Don't ask (or at least don't click through if you are at work)).
So if we are in a porno-sim, what extreme themes are our Creators getting off on?
What extreme sex-related things exist in our world that They couldn't experience for real in Their Shiny Future Utopia?
I see you’re still interviewing. I bumped into Mike the other day and he shared the details so let’s get started.
I have not one but two unusual beliefs.
Firstly: universal suffrage is a major threat to the survival of technical civilisation.
I don’t mean that the unwashed elect idiots (although this is not unknown, but this is not much more wasteful than the usual to and fro between parties where each dismantles the achievements of the other. Being idiots they aren’t able to full capitalise on the opportunity, at least not unless you’re stupid enough to elect them more than once.)
Universal suffrage preaches that every man’s vote is equal. This has morphed into every man’s opinion being equal. Whether you’re new to the subject of have spent twenty tears researching it, your opinions are equally valid. Experts are already universally distrusted. We must build on this to completely remove experts, specialists and all other enemies of democracy from the Nation’s decision-making process.
Secondly: most people believe they are living in a simulation; they just don’t realise they believe it.
Let’s break it down: Nick Bostrom originally said we are all living in an ANCESTOR simulation, but everybody forgets the ancestor bit and so will we.
Mankind’s simulations nowadays are digital computer simulations, but this is just how we choose to do it. In the palaeocomputer age there used to be analog computer simulations: these were potentially much faster since they didn’t have to process lots of bits for each calculation, but they were clumsy in that you had to change the circuit to modify the program. And inaccuracies rapidly built up as errors accumulated. [Of course, analog technology has recently resurfaced in AI chips where it promises vastly improved speed and similarly reduced energy requirements. And before you jump to the obvious conclusion: absolute accuracy isn’t needed in the guts of LLM’s etc and doesn’t materially affect the output.]
But it doesn’t need to be on a computer either. An orrery was the original solar system simulation. Indeed, the Oxford dictionary defines simulation as: imitation of a situation or process. So any creation which matches a preexisting situation or process is a simulation.
Let’s get back to “most people”. Most people have a religion, and most religions have a creator myth. Clearly the creator must have had some idea of what he was going to create so reality is a simulation of his original idea.
There's a contradiction in the first one. Our knowledge of the demand for porn and tendency to use technology for making it derives from our current sexually liberated society. If our society is a sexy simulation, there is no reason to believe that real-universe porn consumption is anywhere near what we consider normal.
"Who's the protagonist?" Scott, you're part of the rationalist community. You live in the Bay Area. If this theory is true, then you, and a majority of the people reading this know exactly who the protagonist is. Hell, some of my friends and I already referred to this person as "the protagonist of reality", even before this column. If reality is a porno, that makes it doubly clear that [REDACTED] is the protagonist.
I quite like Mike Solana, for the record.
But I did laugh at Tartaria.
I didn't realize the first names were supposed to refer to anybody. And I still don't know who the others are.
Quite funny
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.
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.
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)
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.
How about gold? It's easy to work and non-toxic.
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.
So how about gold-plating the lead helmet, to reduce its potential for poisoning the user through contact contamination?
So basically, we seem to be leaning towards some kind of pewter, and likely adding back at least a little tin.
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.
Yes, I absolutely love this too
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.
I remember that, too. I think the real solution is to wrap the "birds" in tinfoil.
*checks over shoulder*
*leans in, whispering*
jews built the pyramids
Ashkenazi?
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.
It's worse than that. The pyramids were (supposedly) built way before Jews even existed as a distinct tribe/culture/religion.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Allegedly they even had to make the bricks without straw sometimes!
They didn't have to make bricks without straw, they had to gather their own straw instead of having it provided.
... as a Time machine. (Joe Rogan probably believes this)
A+
... judging based on the job titles, i would NOT work for "Thiel Capital" if it existed, even though the interview would be fun
It definitely exists! It even has an appropriately sinister website: https://thielcapital.com/
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..."
significantly more ads in the header than I'd expect from looking at the page
Even Thiel isn't even enough to use Bootstrap
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.
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 -->').
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.
Thank you for going the extra mile to confirm this, thus adding to the mystique.
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."
How appropriate.
It's Copperplate Gothic Bold with some of the serifs filed off, plus some minor tweaks to stroke widths.
Very well written.
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.
thonkerium
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
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.
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.
This is actually a common method in ancient Icelandic litterature. Perhaps Scott caught the habit from Niall's saga
Personally, I suspect some sort of time travel on the part of the reporter is involved.
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
I’d like to talk to that Luke guy about my theory that Pinochet’s coup of Allende was a CIA plot.
Was likely naval intelligence rather than the CIA IRL
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.
I'd like to know how project cybersyn would have worked out anyway.
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 ?
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.
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).
Why don't the US Government's powers to effect meaningful change extend to the US?
They ran out of the catalyst - hope.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn't you steal that from... Peter Thiel?
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.
One of Clarke's best stories.
I am surprised it's almost no theory it happened because of end of Bretton-Woods system
It is as big as if Trump turned USD into cryptocurrency nowadays
The 1970s is when per capita energy consumption started stagnating in the west.
Perhaps solar power will get us out of this draught.
*Waves away smoke from the nearby coal-fired power plant*
No, that would be environmentally irresponsible!
> When you stare at it really hard, it resolves into an imagine of some people in surgical gowns
typo: "image"
This is hilarious, thank you Scott 🤣💙🙏🏼
Hiding fascinating original stuff in laugh-out-loud comedy posts.
Thank you Scott !
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.
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.
Or at least in explaining to you why you have observed such an apparently-low-probability near-miss of human extinction....
I... I don't get the punchline.
But as with all of these short fic-bits, I love it anyway.
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
MANY people believe dumb stuff. YOU don't have to be one of them.
If I knew it was dumb, would I have believed it in the first place? (Don't answer that.)
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.
The second shooter conspiracy stuff was actually made up by the CIA, in order to conceal the existence of magic bullet technology
I thought it was a group of time-travelers who paused time and switched out JFK for a dead clone?
Yeah everyone knows that. i just mean it was Oswald who shot the clone.
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.
Jack Ruby putting down Oswald 3 days later is about as publicly conspiratorial as you get.
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.
> 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.
Unstable people in these conspiracies are frequently given nudges and helping hands.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
Lucky he brought the gun to the job then, just in case.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.)
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.
Yeh, what about Catholic child abuse? Mass cover ups, lots of people involved, lots of police and journalist inactivity.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1596
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
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.
> 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.
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?
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".
That’s a fun one to ponder in relation to Thiel :)
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.
Don't lye to us!
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?)
If it wasn't clear from my comment, I was joking.
aw man, I was really hoping this was a legit weird thing! Crazier things have been real. Bummer!
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".
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.
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.
There's a reason he's referred to as "the based one" in the suttas.
Bernie is no longer asking, he's ordering you to send him $6
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.
Thanks for the news cycle context!
The irony is, of course, that calling someone/thing "based" is actually cringe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I thought that song was by one of the Tim & Eric guys (can't remember if it was Tim or Eric).
based on oneself
[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.
[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.
> “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.
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.
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.
No, no, that's simply the Anthropornmorphic Principle at work!
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.
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.
The plot parts of seventies porn movies ar a form of art that still needs to be academically appreciated.
The decline of those scenes mirrors the decline of romance! Now we don't even have to say "nice boots".
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.
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.
Perhaps the amount of sex decreased, but the amount of distinct partner matches and the variety of sex has increased?
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.
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?
I'm curious about the last one. What is dubious about the power-set axiom, in your opinion?
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.
The one about alien abduction sounds almost plausible. (I have heard that theory before),
Would be interesting to see whether those who report abduction are disproportionately likely to have had at least one colonoscopy
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18834282/
Forrest, David V. Alien abduction: a medical hypothesis
... someone even got an academic paper out of it.
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.
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"
What newborn experience does the rectum probing come from?
The theory didn't explain that one (rectal temperature checks, maybe?)
such a good start of the day!
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...)
"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!
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.
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.
> 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?
vibecamp
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.
Generally lots of smaller events promoted on X and things like Hereticon and Vibecamp
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
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?
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.
I thought sneer club hated rationalists?
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.
Why this comment in particular? It rather sounds like a joke.
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.
Serious discussion about how your favored faction is "more attractive, accomplished, and charismatic" while the side you disfavor is responsible for SBF.
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.
Some of us just like joking around (while smoking cigars)... :-(
Hah, I've been accused of being many things, but being a screechy HR type Sneerclub refugee is definitely a first.
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?
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
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?
Pretend to drown, obvs!
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.
Post-rats are a subtype of wharf-rats, who hang around the underside and supports of wharves, and are therefore considered more "based".
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.
Hahaha “anything to do with Trump is crossing the event horizon”
> 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)".
I'm judgemental of post-rat woo nonsense and am fine with them leaving.
This only confirms my beliefs
> 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*
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.
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.
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.
Exquisite. Phenomenal. Stupendous.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
I'm trying to figure out how the Tracey Ullman show fits into this timeline.
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.
I still can't believe that no one has mentioned Legos yet!
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".
I believe that Scott fully intended to write "Einstein".
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."?
The point was to list things that are obviously true. There's no way he intended to write "Epstein didn’t kill himself." because that's a stock conspiracy meme, not an obvious fact.
That's how I understood it at first, too - and well enough . But as I wrote, IMS/demost comments made me see: there is a reason Scott chose "Einstein" instead of "name of any other famous scientist who did NOT kill himself". As Einstein's name alludes to Epstein. Who may or may not have killed himself, but sure has become a stock conspiracy meme.
Well yeah, I thought that was obvious. The point is to parody common conspiracies by stating obviously true things that sound similar instead.
e.g. “The Muslims did 9/11.” is a play on "The Jews did 9/11"
I thought the CIA did. ;) Probably the same thing, lol.
Also: "I thought that was obvious" that "The point was to list things that are obviously true." Indeed, all that was obvious. So, I do not really get the intent of your comments. Have a wonderful day, anyway.
No. That whole part of the piece was about a guys who’s conspiracy was clearly not anything anybody else believes. There’s no other layer.
I think it was Einstein. The joke is they're conspiracy theories that everyone believes and aren't denied, i.e. conventional wisdom--the Cuban Missile Crisis was, in fact, a Communist plot by the Communist government of Cuba to undermine the US, the 9/11 hijacking was indeed carried out by Muslims, and Joe Biden is indeed President, though I imagine he's a figurehead at this point. And nobody thinks Einstein killed himself, and as far as we can tell he didn't.
"And nobody thinks Einstein killed himself, and as far as we can tell he didn't"
Well, now I'm wondering!
My conspiracy theory is that it was one of Einstein's relatives.
He has small babas in the house who are at the babbling stage now. He may be trying to ingrain the habit of self-censorship before they learn words they shouldn't be saying at that age 😁
My mother was *astounded* when we, around age eight or so, demonstrated that we knew the word beginning with "c" and ending in the letters n, t and u (not in that order) because she had no idea where we picked it up. Neither did we know it was a bad no-no word you shouldn't be saying, because we'd heard adults using it so it must be fine, yeah? Little pitchers have big ears.
Cnut the Great was a perfectly cromulent King of England.
"D'oh! Merriam-Webster surprised fans of “The Simpsons” by adding the word “cromulent” to the dictionary as part of the most recent update, making it official with the made-up term that first appeared in a 1996 episode of the game-changing animated show.29 Sept 2023" Also: Germans write Cnut as 'Knut' while "Kante" (cvnt-a) means 'corner' (of a table/book/stone - not a street corner).
Also Blatt (as in "'blood') means sheet/leave in German while it is "cvnt" in Russian. Took me some time to understand why German teachers in Russia said "Liste" when it was obviously just a sheet of paper, ein Blatt. 80% of Russian guys use blad/bladnoi as often as British soldiers use fvck: thrice per sentence.
"What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”
I believe that Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan is likely the site of Alexandria Oxiana, also called Alexandria on the Oxus, but that historians won't admit this since the Taliban makes excavation there impossible and historians want to get grant money to excavate other sites.
That was rather creative. Some great writing and ideas there!
These radiate SMBC energy (though I'm not sure Zach would have the guts to do no. 3 and 4).
He kind of did the holocaust bit: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2509
Also https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3266
Today's was surprisingly similar:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/life-4
The last one is interesting, because I think there is something in actually "staring mentally" at the facts like that. Usually these facts come with the defense/explanation, in such a way that I'm not sure how many people actually agree on those facts. That even applies to "Thiel Capital is just another tool of the billionaire elites".
Maybe it's the difference between knowing something, and acting as if you truly believe in something. When you act on something as if you truly believed in it but don't really know the truth we sometimes call that faith. The opposite seems to be cognitive dissonance? And maybe by asking that question about beliefs the actual goal is to see if people actually act on their unusual beliefs.
Love it. Will also (mis)use the occasion to express my linguistic disapproval at the word "preventative". Unless we're trying to preventate bad things from happening...
I kind of feel this should have ended differently, with one last section of someone coming in to fire the interviewer for dismissing so many talented and well-qualified candidates. The interviewer objects, of course, but then the firer uses these as examples of "just the kind of people we're looking for" or something.
Brilliant! Favorite one is correlating jews with super weapons.
Very well done, as usual.
An alternative view for the first one about how you can get lots of explicit sex embedded in a long period of time without it, is it's a sexually-explicit simulation that puts the sex in the content of a story. Effectively, the descendant of the romance novel.
Thiel, being gay, naturally assumed it was a porno for *men*...
I believe: the gov budget should not be allowed to be over 10% of GDP in peace-times. State schools are a mix of day-care and day-prison. Trump is an ok fellow who would love to be a good/great POTUS.
(Also, he is not really up for that task, I doubt K.H. is. Oh, and Obama is a Christian mulatto + was the best looking POTUS ever.) Germany's far-right AfD should not be banned - though I also believe it is an instrument of the Kremlin, too. As is Sahra Wagenknecht and her brand new, far-left, xenophobic party: BSW. Humans are not blank slates. Autobahnen should have a speed limit. There should be less parking reserved for handicapped (and none for women). Nowadays, "Trans" (with an y-chromosome) are mostly gays who want to stand out or guys with a fetish. AI is not a good long-term investment for retail investors.
I am convinced, SAS is the best essayist ever. Blogger, as they call it now. (I know Sam Kriss, I know Erik Hoel.)
There's parking reserved for women?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_parking_space
... and they result in the predictable jokes:
https://www.amazon.de/Metallschild-Frauenparkplatz-Aluminiumschild-Blechschild-Autofahrerin/dp/B076MG1HSP
KI?
oops my bad; used the German abbreviation KI - "Künstliche Intelligenz". Edited now.
If there was a speed limit on all Autobahnen, there'd be no roads left to ride absurdly fast legally, would there? I'd miss that. Anyway, most Autobahnen are either falling apart or congested most of the daytime.
Some of that is very German specific. Russia might be funding some of those parties, however lightly, but if I were a conspiracist I’d go a bit further and have a theory about Merkel being a sleeper. Instructed to “Leave in all the Syrians” and “close down all the nuclear plants”. She was born in east Germany after all.
This may well be continuing with the “destroy German industry by making energy prices as expensive as possible directive.
German specific, indeed. Hard to avoid, really. "Most people" is usu. a subset, not all those 8 billion, most never heard of Kennedy
, Merkel or Thiel. If you believe that stuff about Merkel, go ahead. I don't.
That was hard to parse and I don’t understand the reference to Kennedy. I don’t believe the Merkel as a spy. Never ascribe to malice what you can more easily ascribe to incompetence.
My bad. 1. The "challenge" in the "job-interview" was: "what’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on? For example, just as a prompt, something like ‘maybe racism is actually good’ "
2. "Very few people" refers implicitly to people of "your circle": your country / your education-level / people you communicate with. If it were about literally all humans on earth, one might be surprised how many are e.g. openly racist. In Russia, I heard many tell anti-semitic stuff; in my youth there were brutal jokes about Turkish "Guestworkers/Gastarbeiter" ("what is the difference between Jews and Turks: For the Jews, it's in the past."), Saudi Arabia is the most openly racist society I've ever worked in. As I was not yet in China ("Ok, racism is bad, we know. But does racism really apply to Blacks? I mean, they are not really humans, are they?" - reported by colleagues).
3. Thus, among ACX readers, a Milton Friedman statement: "10% GDP is about the right level of state expenditure" may not even raise eyebrows. David Friedman and Bryan Caplan may well dream of 0%. But in Germany: even 20% are never even considered. Wishing for 40% makes you are heartless capitalist monster. - But then again, among anarcho-capitalists, a speed-limit may not be a popular idea.
4. "Kennedy" is John F. Kennedy. Hardly any German knows any other Kennedy (RFK Jr.? Who's that?). And most people alive on this planet outside NATO never heard of JFK even (Because they are too young and too poor.). So, they can not have any opinion about his death.
5. The ONE believe I have, but a majority of the 8 billion probably disagree with: "I believe astrology, spirits and witchcraft are all utter nonsense".
- All that said, I tried to come up with genuine believes of mine, some of those might be controversial, nay "unheard of", in my country/my circles. NOT with conspiracy theories. I do not believe that leaders of AfD/BSW are only motivated by Kremlin-money. I do believe it plays a role, and a more important one than most acknowledge. Wolf Biermann: "Die blaue AfD und die falschen Roten von Wagenknecht stehen beide aufseiten von Putin in diesem blutigen Ukrainekrieg." paywalled, but: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/wolf-biermann-sieht-viele-gemeinsamkeiten-zwischen-afd-und-bsw-100.html
> “It’s when something retains a design that no longer makes sense in context. The classic example is the floppy disk icon meaning ‘save’ on a computer program. Zoomers don’t even know what a floppy disk is, but they still click the weird-looking black square every time they want to save something. One day the meaning will be completely forgotten.”
You think that's weird? I once had a coworker, about 20 years ago, who didn't know what the New Document icon was. You know, the one that's clearly a piece of paper with the top-right corner folded down? She called it "the Utah button."
In an office that still kept a lot of records on paper, to boot!
"Omegaverse."
Laughing in fanfiction writer. IFKYK.
Emoji color is so obvious; yellow is the only usable color to represent all people (that's still legible as a background for features in a saturated shade) that doesn't denote anything else: red = angry, pink = blushing, blue = suffocating, green = ill/"green around the gills", gray = dead. Yellow could indicate cowardice (or jaundice), but that's not a cast skin usually ever takes.
And also probably because of the Simpsons.
Very annoying! You've stolen a couple of ideas that I thought were all my own (but the racist twists you added are all your own)!
re how we survived the Cold War etc: this is just the Domesday Argument on steriods. Of course one day we'll populate the galaxy but that's such a skinny time-line that we're more likely to find ourselves here at peak Earth population. (FWIW: Fine Tuning can be extrapolated to show that Startrek technologies like FTL are probably possible in this universe, but unfortunately not to show how to achieve them!)
As for porn: eventually we'll be able to record and receive qualia. You would live the perceived existence of another person, with apparent complete free will but you would act exactly as they did cos you get their thoughts and motivations too. Before you get carried away I'm sure a day in the life of a porn star is "just another day at the office" and will be a disappointment.
Eventually everybody will be permanently hooked up to the shared experience, and maybe live on when their body perishes (how would you know?). Then we are Borg...
If qualia can be transferred, porn stars won't generally look a certain way, they'll be notable for having a really remarkable time.
I think you're interpretting what I meant the wrong way around. I'm suggesting voyeurs might have the recorded PS experience, not that they might lend their bodies to be used in porn.
re really remarkable time: that's only how it looks from the outside. I suspect it rapidly becomes routine. (I have no personal experience of course.) I wonder if they suffer from imposter syndrome?
In reality I suspect our brains each develop in a unique way so you couldn't just "play" somebody else's qualia and get anything other than "nonsense".
As a service it's wide open to fraud cos all you need to do is implant the memories, and the recipient would be none the wiser.
Of course Philip K. Dick explored this back in the 60's: We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, which led to the movie Total Recall. They're more honest and only claim to give you the memories.
I was going to complain that people being transgender isn't a porn thing, but then I realized that that character would definitely *think* of it as a porn thing, so uh... fair enough.
"I was going to complain that people being transgender isn't a porn thing"
I see you are blissfully unaware of the latest feather-ruffling (thank you, if thanks are appropriate, to r/Drama for making me aware of it):
https://metro.co.uk/2024/09/03/transfishing-become-a-thing-couldnt-appalled-21538741/
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/my-gender-isnt-your-costume-only-fans-models-accused-of-mocking-transgenders/articleshow/113016116.cms
Tom is right. *Everything* is porn.
Re: alien abduction.
AS well as changes in medical procedures, there may have been a social change in what it was acceptable to talk about,
When Barney and Betty Hill reported being abducted in 1961, we already see the medical procures in their account. Bur the media were more circumspect in reporting that aspect.
By the time Whitley Strieber wrote Communion in 1987, the media were much more willing to talk about it.
So if there's a social contagion aspect to the phenomenon, people only started learning from the media that they should expect to get anal probed from the 80s onwards.
NB: Not arguing, "aliens have been anal probing people for absolutely ages, and it is only now that victims are able to talk about it."
[Would like to have a solid reference for medical aspect of Barney Hill's abduction that was provably published before the '80s. The whole "David Grusch heard from a guy who heard from a guy that the government contacted aliens" makes me very suspicious of any claim that isnt firmly sourced]
I suppose it's possible that over time, the aliens began to do anal probing more often, as it became normalized and even expected in their culture?
It would be nice if people would take an hour or two, and listen to what Thiel himself has said, repeatedly, for the past 10 years on what he considers important for America and for American society.
Hint: it isn't any of those ridiculous stereotypes depicted in this faintly disguised hit piece written as satire.
This is not a hit piece. It's supposed to be absurd and not about the actual Thiel Capital.
Right - which is why the stereotypes portrayed are precisely the nonsense Thiel is accused of.
That's deliberate, and ‘Secretly Funding All Media That You Personally Dislike’ should be obvious as not an actual division of any company. It's just a mockery of people who believe that.
So tell me the real scoop about those Bay Area house parties!
Which Bay Area house parties? There are all sorts of groups that have parties, although Thiel is not known for being the party type unlike say, Musk.
Well you see, Scott wrote these pieces about attending house parties in the Bay Area. But now that you have revealed that the above piece about Thiel Capital is not literally true, the foundations of belief have crumbled beneath me. I have no firm footing anymore. I know not what or why or whom.
Could it - perish the thought, but the nagging doubt will not leave me! - could it be that *those* pieces were not true either? If the interviews at Thiel Capital don't go down as described in reality, maybe... maybe the house parties weren't real either!
You have done valuable work in assuring us that "it isn't any of those ridiculous stereotypes depicted in this faintly disguised hit piece written as satire", which is why I sought your guidance as to the house parties.
Scott no doubt does attend some parties - but nobody attends all of them. They are divided by class as well as interest. Is Scott part of the Burning Man crowd? Vs. say, the tech bros? Vs. say, the old money (Gettys and what not)? Vs. the banksters? There are many more: The White Russians, The Jews, the New Russians (now split between pro-Ukraine and pro-Russia), the Chinese, the Japanese, the Filipinos, the Mexicans, the Government, the police, and so on and so forth.
Yes, the lines are not solid - banksters will attend tech bro parties; some tech bros are burners etc etc but just attending some parties based on say, PMC class affiliation - which is what I would think Scott is part of - does not, by any means, mean that said parties are actually representative of anything.
The Bay Area is nothing more than a bunch of gossipy small towns that happen to be colocated.
Have you read any of his Bay Area House Party posts? If you haven't, you'll be less likely to get the joke here.
Clearly not.
But I guess I should not be surprised that this forum is transforming into a PMC "in" group as opposed to one of open ideas.
You may or may not be fun at parties, but you are definitely not fun at describing parties. Unlike Scott.
> maybe the house parties weren't real either!
My worldview is shattered. Scott blasphemes against his own holy words; he has lost the mandate of Berkeley and is no longer the rightful Caliph! Who will be the Caliph instead of the Caliph?
I know, Moon Moth, it's hard for me to process too. But c1ue says Scott is unreliable, and c1ue is an honourable man. When that the rationalists have nerded out, Scott hath tolerated it: deceit should be made of sterner stuff. Yet c1ue says Scott wrote a hit piece, and c1ue is an honourable man. You all did see that on Tau Day, we thrice proclaimed him Real Caliph, which he did thrice demur: was this stereotyping? Yet c1ue says he is faintly disguising it as satire, and sure he is an honourable man.
This forum is on the unceded ancestral land of the Ohlone people!
Where can I find those? YouTube?
«those ridiculous stereotypes depicted in this faintly disguised hit piece written as satire.»
It’s not a hit piece. It’s earnestly participating in the symbolic reality of American mythology. Trump, Obama, Thiel, Soros, the Koch brothers, the Clintons, Trump, Epstein, the World Bank, Thiel Capital, the NYT… they surely did or do something or other in the real world. But why talk about them, as if they were real? Real stuff is boring and opaque. Let’s talk about them, as if they were larger-than-life sinister entities, instead. Everything is bigger in America!
I think you're just not getting that this is good satire. What makes it good satire is it's not just making fun of Thiel, it's making fun of the people who mischaracterize Thiel's ideas by showing how ridiculous it would be if the misrepresentations were actually true. The absurdity is a blade that cuts both ways. It makes fun of Thiel by portraying him as a cartoon villain (wanting to hire people based off working for dictatorships for example) and makes fun of his detractors for showing how ridiculous it is to portray him as a cartoon villain.
Is it really making fun of the people with the outlandish theories?
I detect none of that - particularly when the nonsensical bits are all on the supposed part of Thiel Capital as opposed to those in the mainstream media stories aligning with many of the above supposedly satirical characterizations.
You acknowledge this is precisely the stereotypes Thiel is accused of. The satire is of the stereotypes, not Thiel’s actual beliefs.
A lesser writer might write a thinly disguised hit piece/satire that just embellished the popular stereotypes in an attempt to say “Look at how evil Thiel is! Let’s all point and laugh.” The next level understanding is that such a satire by a lessor writer would still be funny not because it’s good satire, but because that author believes it’s accurate satire.
This piece is making fun of those who mischaracterize Thiel as a cartoon villain, by precisely doing that and showing how absurd such a view is.
There’s definitely shade thrown at Thiel too, which is ok because he definitely holds some odd or disagreeable beliefs.
This raises the obvious question that I haven't seen anyone ask yet: did Scott interview at Thiel Capital recently, and if so, for what division? I want to say Scott is too pro-social for the Undermining Democracy division. I could see his grant-making experience being useful to the Secret Media Funding team, but that seems like a poor use of his talent overall. I would guess they were looking at him for some role in the Subvert and Sabotage Academia Group.
> Jon-Un administration
should be:
> Kim administration
Korean usually write their surname first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name#:~:text=Name%20order,-Ban%20Ki%2Dmoon&text=In%20English%2Dlanguage%20publications%2C%20including,first%20and%20the%20surname%20last.
"Jon-Un administration" makes sense to me because otherwise there's no way to differentiate any of the North Korean leaders.
Trying to think how I'd answer that question. Not sure whether they'd want to hear about prison abolition or voting rights for minors...
Got any specifics in mind for that latter one? I was thinking limit mail ballots and disability assistance to twelve year olds and up, but allow voting at a poll booth at any age so long as the voter is able to enter alone and fill out the ballot without assistance. Of course I also wouldn't say no to just lowering the limit to 16 for now, and then making improvements on that later.
In terms of what I think will be realistically achieved in my lifetime and what I'd actually campaign for, lowering the voting age to 16 is about the limit for now. My ideal end state is, as you say, no minimum age for voting at a polling booth as long as they can fill out a valid ballot without someone physically guiding their hand. I see no reason to restrict children from using the same accessibility aids as adults—children under 12 can have disabilities too!
Allowing mail and proxy voting for children seems likely to end up effectively giving an extra vote to their parents/guardians, but in the aggregate I think that might not even be a bad thing as long as the system is set up so the kids can definitely vote for themselves as soon as they're old enough to want to, rather than their parents disenfranchising them. (Although, if I remember correctly, polling stations in the US are far enough apart that they're often driving distance from most people's homes, so they'd need an adult's cooperation to vote anyway...)
I dunno, I think Tom might be on to something.
I did appreciate this bit: "Nirnaeth Arnoediad Inc. subdivision".
As for Luke - yeah, Biden is still the president. And now he's getting nothing but gushing praise from the same party members who were sharpening their knives before he got the hint and stepped down for Kamala. Isn't it... weird? The guy who was (we got told by all the little leaked chatty news stories) away with the fairies and incapable of being the nominee, is now somehow a shining example of true patriotism and perfectly safe pair of hands to keep charge of the situation in Gaza, Putin, etc. Kamala had to come to the rescue of the party as anointed nominee, but she's not so needed as VP to run the country in order to make up for Biden's decline, so she can concentrate on her campaign.
Hmmm. I wonder. Who *is* running the country? Could Luke be right, and Biden *is* the president in charge of making all the real decisions, no honestly he's the guy with the power, nobody else has their hands on the steering wheel?
Numberless as the wings of trees, doubtless.
Scott knows his audience all too well 😁
I've just been rereading The Silmarillion. That reference would likely have sailed over my head had I not _just_ read that section the other night.
Not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence 😁
I looked up Einstein's death, and according to Wikipedia,
> Einstein refused surgery, saying, "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly." He died in the Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.
So that's surprisingly non-clear-cut.
Jong-Un is his given name. His surname is Kim.
Lol...
" I didn’t know anyone had served in the Trump, Putin, and Jong-un administrations" hmm, are you suggesting a Thiel employee wouldn't know enoughn about Asian culture to figure out that Kim is the family name not Jong-un?
I almost died at the Jews part
This is absolutely hysterical. I met someone last month who tried to convince me that Trump has been dead for two years, he should apply!
Half-serious suggestion:
The 1st guy can still be right, the reason there's so much non-porn in the porn universe is that it's simply *foreplay* to the main action. The reason there's so much more foreplay in their porn compared to *our* porn, is that *their* culture is far more prudish & puritanical than ours. They'd have to be, in order to be capable of building entire universes -- you can't focus if you're distracted by the sexy. As proof, look at our own porn: *they can't even get a pizza delivered in that universe* -- they just can't get anything done, not when doing stuff is just foreplay to the real action.
So, therefore, we are to the universe-builders as the porno-denizens are to us: the less prudish version they imagined, so they could live out the fantasy of doing less stuff (and more of each other). But not *infinitely* less: in our own porn universes, we leave in enough foreplay for the people to at least *order* the pizzas, we're not that level of degenerate to imagine people getting down & dirty in the streets just because they made eye contact.
Similarly, *their* version of degenerate is "enough foreplay to invent the Internet" -- at which point everything else rapidly fades away, job done. We're living through the time of population decline & secular stagnation (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/uw5atu/wtf_happened_in_1971/), because all that other stuff we were doing was just "ordering the pizza", and *now the pizza boy is here*.
(Presumably the same thing would apply downwards as well as upwards, if we ever managed to create a fully functioning "porn universe" of our own, complete with NPCs: their version of "enough foreplay" would presumably be "making eye contact", given what passes for normal in their universe.)
It took me the last interview with Luke to realize the underlying message of this parody article: conspiracy theories have far greater appeal and selling power than dry old fact. The stronger the shock value of the claim/theory, the stronger, longer, and wider the attention it commands.
I think the appeal is that it makes you feel like part of an exclusive club, knowing things that not everyone knows, without having to actually put any work in to do so.
These frauds and phonies aren’t Thiel Capital material. I’d do so well they’d give me Peter’s spot.
> “I don’t know, I still think it doesn’t make sex - I mean sense! - to have a porno with so little sexual activity, as weighted by experience-moments.”
Characterization adds to the desirability of the character, like how Tomoko Kuroki or Rei Ayanami clearly have charm levels far beyond what their body types or charisma would suggest. This sort of shallow thinking is far too common among the "based" right. Personality does, in fact, count for a lot.
I'd have gone with: humans were bred into existence by a lost civilization of elephants
https://www.tumblr.com/o-craven-canto/685773740709167104/
Okay, I'm convinced. Thanks.
Turtles all the way down.
>Nirnaeth Arnoediad Inc.
I heard that's a rough place to work. So rough that no song or tale can contain all of its grief.
And all that begins well ends in evil. Very tough when it comes to the performance review!
Don't get me started on why the 17th Amendment should be repealed.
https://substack.com/@midcenturynews?r=4d2tno&utm_medium=ios
Genuinely funny. Wonderful absurdism.
I want some of whatever you're smoking 😁
Actual *pornographer here...
> “Let me finish. I think we’re in a simulation, and it’s a porno.”
...and this theory is troubling.
*OK what I really mean is I make part of my living from writing erotica.
The thing is, I do have a "secondary world" or 'verse and it's not unlike a simulation, in that I try to have the people in it living realistic(ish) lives within the made up world, which increases the immersion when we spy on them during the sexy parts.
So it's entirely plausible that future perves might construct basically Porno Sims and dip into the juicy parts: the pool boy and the bored divorcee fantasy is even more erotic if you can ride in the head of the pool boy and he feels real.
Which is what's troubling about this theory!
The thing is, it's only worth creating a porno 'verse to support extreme themes.
The Omegaverse supports furry dominance hierarchies. My CARGO'verse supports hard F/m power exchange and male chastity. (Don't ask (or at least don't click through if you are at work)).
So if we are in a porno-sim, what extreme themes are our Creators getting off on?
What extreme sex-related things exist in our world that They couldn't experience for real in Their Shiny Future Utopia?
Not nice ones, I think.
Phototherapy for bili babies is actually just blue light, not UV.
I see you’re still interviewing. I bumped into Mike the other day and he shared the details so let’s get started.
I have not one but two unusual beliefs.
Firstly: universal suffrage is a major threat to the survival of technical civilisation.
I don’t mean that the unwashed elect idiots (although this is not unknown, but this is not much more wasteful than the usual to and fro between parties where each dismantles the achievements of the other. Being idiots they aren’t able to full capitalise on the opportunity, at least not unless you’re stupid enough to elect them more than once.)
Universal suffrage preaches that every man’s vote is equal. This has morphed into every man’s opinion being equal. Whether you’re new to the subject of have spent twenty tears researching it, your opinions are equally valid. Experts are already universally distrusted. We must build on this to completely remove experts, specialists and all other enemies of democracy from the Nation’s decision-making process.
Secondly: most people believe they are living in a simulation; they just don’t realise they believe it.
Let’s break it down: Nick Bostrom originally said we are all living in an ANCESTOR simulation, but everybody forgets the ancestor bit and so will we.
Mankind’s simulations nowadays are digital computer simulations, but this is just how we choose to do it. In the palaeocomputer age there used to be analog computer simulations: these were potentially much faster since they didn’t have to process lots of bits for each calculation, but they were clumsy in that you had to change the circuit to modify the program. And inaccuracies rapidly built up as errors accumulated. [Of course, analog technology has recently resurfaced in AI chips where it promises vastly improved speed and similarly reduced energy requirements. And before you jump to the obvious conclusion: absolute accuracy isn’t needed in the guts of LLM’s etc and doesn’t materially affect the output.]
But it doesn’t need to be on a computer either. An orrery was the original solar system simulation. Indeed, the Oxford dictionary defines simulation as: imitation of a situation or process. So any creation which matches a preexisting situation or process is a simulation.
Let’s get back to “most people”. Most people have a religion, and most religions have a creator myth. Clearly the creator must have had some idea of what he was going to create so reality is a simulation of his original idea.
There's a contradiction in the first one. Our knowledge of the demand for porn and tendency to use technology for making it derives from our current sexually liberated society. If our society is a sexy simulation, there is no reason to believe that real-universe porn consumption is anywhere near what we consider normal.
This post is old, but:
"Who's the protagonist?" Scott, you're part of the rationalist community. You live in the Bay Area. If this theory is true, then you, and a majority of the people reading this know exactly who the protagonist is. Hell, some of my friends and I already referred to this person as "the protagonist of reality", even before this column. If reality is a porno, that makes it doubly clear that [REDACTED] is the protagonist.
"Jews" theory makes sense, we see the same tendency with Ukrainians
Strategic bomber - Sikorsky
Intercontinental missiles - Koroliov
Soviet project to give country management to AI - Hlushko
Now we see how Ukrainians at war put more and more drones with a single task "kill whatever looks the most suspicious once I take hands off"