There is an old principle in software development not to make the GUI too pretty until the back end works, because managers and customers will think its ready when they can click around buttons with nice shading and animations. I think slopware is like that. People see the demo that appears to work and don’t see what maintaining it and integrating it with other systems is like.

Yud has posted:

Among my friends who came to my attention for psychelics[sic] having had any significant impact on them, positive or negative, I would say the mean result has been overwhelmingly, heartbreakingly negative. Please seriously consider not doing drugs.

He seems very worried about his tendency to procrastination (akrasia in LessWrong jargon) and inability to make himself exercise. So he is concerned about inability to control himself. So his public position is that LSD might have medical uses, but it has harmed people close to him.

AFAIK, the people in this space who have acknowledged using LSD and other psychedelics are gwern, Aella, and QiaochuYuan (during his rationalist phase). Scott Alexander hinted that he might have tried it, Eliezer Yudkowsky is interested in psychedelic therapy but also tells readers to please not use LSD. Can any of you name anyone else in this space who has talked about dropping acid?

I don’t want to get into “A says that B dropped acid” in a StubSack thread.

The 2016 Nootropics Survey results and Nootropics Survey 2020 Results suggest that it was popular with anonymous SlateStar readers.

There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card’s Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)

I first sighted Nick Bostrom in a series of mad-science-flavoured erotic horror comics on the Internet Archive (The Apsinthion Protocol and Progress in Research by the same writer). I wish more people had the sense to keep those ideas in the world of weird fiction like Charlie Stross does

The comic I linked is pretty tame (particularly the first few pages with the Bostrom reference). The whole series contains a wide variety of squicks so use your judgement before exploring.

Yes, not mutilating infants’ genitals is the default choice! A few nations have that custom like a few have the custom of stretching necks, or footbinding, or piercing ears. Its not even a very old custom in the USA (early 20th century I think whereas in North Africa and West Asia it goes back thousands of years).

Argentina and Russia are the usual examples of countries which had great futures in 1913 and threw them away with a series of bad decisions

Rationalists 🤝 Postrationalists Writing screeds about how following the advice of Internet posts and self-medicating with controlled substances can be good if you are very smart

Also had a beef with Aella when they were both in Austin!

They are not beating the allegations that a Postrationalist is a Rationalist who admits Yud is just a dude and their goals are religious goals.

Update: There is a partially cached Facebook post where MacDonald states what he claims is Eigenrobot’s government name and says that Eigenrobot’s “(self admitted) BPD wife used to want to fuck me” (Google and Bing saved snippets, but do not share the full cache). That could have been what got him kicked out of VibeCamp for doxxing.

The simplenote post from a VibeCamp attendee claimed that “prior to Scott Alexander’s articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall,” Any idea what post he was thinking of? Know Your Amphetamines - archive was from January 2021 so about the time VibeCamp got started.

The post is undated but mentions Hereticon in January 2022. Update: it links several more simplenote posts with statements like “It’s 2022 as of the time of this writing” and “as of Mar 30 2022.” The author lived in Austin when Aella was there. So it seems likely that the post about VibeCamp was written in 2022.

Update Again: the author posted to Substack under a meatspace name and linked “Know Your Amphetamines”. I don’t recommend reading the whole post, its just an unpleasant person with logorrhea unloading a stream of consciousness at unpleasant people.

invest

If you are broadly invested in US stocks, you are already invested in the chatbot bubble and the defense industry. If you are worried about that, an easy solution is to move some of that money elsewhere.

You would need a non-self-published source which says u/TPO = Lasker

GeneSmith who told LessWrong “How to Make Superbabies” also has no bioscience background. This essay in Liberal Currents thinks that a lot of right-wing media personalities are using synthetic testosterone now (but don’t call it gender-affirming care!). Roid rage may be hard to separate from Twitter brain-rot and slop-chugging.

CFAR lists nine employees with six-figure salaries plus a president. Oliver Habryka is one of those employees at the lower end of the pay scale. LightCone lists Habryka with a $3,000 honorarium and $110,000 in other salaries and expenses which looks like one or two system administrators or IT technicians. In 2024 Lightcone Infrastructure gave most of its expenses to something called Lightcone Research which actually operates LessWrong, and I predict that in 2026 LightCone will give most of the money raised to CFAR to pay the mortgage on the Rose Garden property and be very worried about Robot God.

In December LightCone raised $1.6 million of donations plus a 12.5% matching donation from the Survival and Flourishing Fund. They threatened to shut down if they didn’t raise $1.4 million and wanted at least $2 million.

Jaan and SFC (Jaan Tallinn and the Survival and Flourishing Corp) helped us fund the above-mentioned settlement with the FTX estate (providing $1.7M in funding). This was structured as a virtual “advance” against future potential donations, where Jaan expects to only donate 50% of future recommendations made to us via things like the SFF, until the other 50% add up to $1.29M in “garnished” funding. This means for the foreseeable future, our funding from the SFF is cut in half.

Lightcone Infrastructure did not list any large liabilities like this on its 2024 form 990, but CFAR listed several things which could cover it if the settlement was in 2024.

In December MIRI raised $1.6 million in donations plus a 100% matching donation from SFF. They wanted a total of $6 million. The donations grew from $1 million to $1.6 million in the last few days, suggesting that they talked a few of their upper-middle-class supporters into chipping in amounts in the high tens or low hundreds of thousand to capture the matching donation. Both fundraisers reached their minimum targets but not their goals.

I could one day but nitter and the Wayback Machine and public tools have gotten me this far!

Jax Romana accused Yud of using his polycule as servants and the Nonlinear Fund openly used an intern as a cheap maid-of-all-work so they could focus on their important{CitationNeeded} work

MIRI mentioned receiving “A two-year $7.7M grant from Open Philanthropy, in partnership with Ben Delo, co-founder of the BitMEX cryptocurrency trading platform.” in April 2020. Good luck to anyone who wants to track down that $15.6 million donation.

Sounds like a typical young make seeker (with a bit of épater les bourgeois). Not the classic Red Guard personality but it served Melon Husk’s needs.

Two of the bsky posts are log-in only. Huh, Killian is in to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (blockchain), high-frequency trading (like our friends at Jane Street), veganism, and Effective Altruism?