Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question.
Hey, can you show me the log files?
Sure here you go. Please help!
Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!
Can he round up the goons in the CIA and FBI while he’s at it? Is being a tributary vassal state of China materially worse than being a tributary vassal state of foreign power? I’d like sovereignty, but that’s not really an option.
I think his removal has a lot more to do with his willingness to cooperate with the “bad guys“ in the Middle East. I think this also has a lot to do with why we suddenly care about Somali fraud rings that have been operating since the 1990s. The stage is getting set for another regime change in the Middle East. It’s pretty amazing what you can buy with a $250 million campaign donation.
I think there were that many immigrants. I don’t believe they are so many living there now. Iran demonstrated pretty conclusively that mass repatriation is completely possible if you have a government that actually wishes to do so.
I think heads of state bearing personal responsibility for misconduct is an excellent precedent that I would love to see applied much, much more widely. Preferably to the superpowers, especially if said leader were to say, for a totally-hypothetical example, recklessly create a massive security risk near our borders for the sole purpose of benefiting a foreign interest group… but I’ll take what I can get. I think the Sword of Damocles is missing all too often from high society. If life and death decisions, don’t come with life and death risks, then I think they become taken too lightly. I think we are too quick to insulate high society from the consequences of their actions.
In this house we believe
Love is love
Black Lives Matter
Science is real
Feminism is for everyone
No human is illegal
Kindness is everything
Signaling your alignment to the public-facing opinions of your social betters is the modern ersatz religion for atheists. The television is the temple, the pundits the priests. Apostates and heretics are not welcome here. Now, my child, you would not want your words to inadvertently cause the faithful to stray. Would you? Just think of what the late night comedians would say if they could hear you cast doubt on their sponsor Pfizer? Perhaps you would rather join our hate session on the pagans in flyover country?
I wish atheist would just stop writing about Christian practices. Particularly screenwriters. It’s better that your audience assumes you are ignorant than to open your mouth and prove them right.
Unrelated to the topic, I’m a bit at a loss as to what to make of this website. There was a link to a really cool analysis of artificial intelligence research. And I guess they are a nonprofit and are raising $2M for “infrastructure“ but I think they mean infrastructure in the sense of software they like, and not the kind of infrastructure normal people think of like plumbing, electricity, and roads. I spent a few minutes browsing, and I can’t even tell what charitable purpose or educational purpose they could be serving. There’s just no clear statement of purpose anywhere other than I suppose being really rational.
I can't tell whether your question here is satire. I want to believe it's genuine, by the power of HN norms, in which case congratulations, you are one of today's unlucky 10,000.
It's been around long enough to have a Wikipedia page [1], which can give you the main facts & demographics. In short, it started in 2006 as a group blog for people interested in AI. This was long before LLMs, and it was expected among the readership that understanding the math of decision theory would be important to AI. This spiraled out into general interest in how to be more rational as humans, and LessWrong is largely responsible for rescuing Bayesian statistics out of the academic wilderness. Many jargon phrases that are now common in nerdy circles originated there as well. They invented the field of AI safety, and are unhappy about the poor state of AI safety at this time.
There are in-person meetups (primarily as a social group) in most large cities. At the meetups, there is no expectation that people have read the website, and these days you're more likely to encounter discussion of the Astral Codex Ten blog than of LessWrong itself. The website is run by a non-profit called LightCone Infrastructure that also operates a campus in Berkeley [2] that is the closest thing to a physical hub of the community.
The community is called "rationalists", and they all hate that name but it's too late to change it. The joke definition of a rationalist is by induction: Eliezer Yudkowsky is the base case for a rationalist, and then anyone who disagrees online with a rationalist is a rationalist.
There are two parallel communities. The first is called "sneer club", and they've bonded into a community over hating and mocking rationalists online. It's not a use of time or emotional energy that makes sense to me, but I guess it's harmless. The second is called "post-rationalism", and they've bonded about being interested in the same topics that rationalists are interested in, but without a desire to be rational about those topics. They're the most normie of the bunch, but at the same time they've also been a fertile source of weird small cults.
Dude, seriously, walk away. You have stumbled upon the website of a cult that ensnares smart people and eats their brains. No level of exposure is safe.
Like something that if you look at it too long you won't be able to pull yourself away? Almost as if you were petrified? That's an interesting idea. Someone ought to write an essay.
In an early episode of EEVBlog, Jones made a big 14x14 grid of 1% tolerance resistors to estimate the resistance empirically. (He does do the knight's move like Munroe proposed at the very end.)
I don’t think self-dealing is new. Although it was eye-opening, when I learned that BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity all own 5-10% of every company and competition between the companies they hold is not meaningful. Everyone just has to have nice steady predictable returns and nobody is allowed to innovate too far ahead of anyone else for fear of devaluing the real bosses’ other assets.
I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.
As I said, BlackRock and their friends were just the beginning. NVdia is trying to own a huge chunk of the AI space using their profits. Other tech companies are using a similar playbook. And of course they're all owned by Wall Street. The competition is highly controlled so the winners are all part of the same club.
I’m not very confident in the strategy of immiserating most people to drive positive change. This has been a Communist talking point for a century and a half that has yet to produce positive results, despite many attempts.
I am pleased to read someone is taking some initiative.
I don’t believe in the communism vs capitalist debate. The latter has furthered progress so clearly there are benefits to be had. But yet the dream of the former continues on.
Someone who is more open to a “take the best of what exists” is what is needed.
Hey, can you show me the log files?
Sure here you go. Please help!
Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!
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