I think it got started with Yud and Salamon thinking “I’m not sure about race and IQ, but this community lets us recruit people to fight Skynet,” Siskind thinking “I’m not sure if Skynet is a danger but this community will let me spread the Truth about Black people,” and Bostrom and MacAskill thinking “bednet EA is a bit lame but it will let us recruit people to conquer Death together.” Then the people really interested in Ivermectin or COVID origins arrived and wanted to spread those ideas while slinging Rationalist jargon. And like El Sandifer predicted, most of them were not able to share their favourite brainworm without being infected by the others which were being passed around.

There are whole families of confidence games which rely on convincing the mark that he is about to cheat a third party.

I think the same pattern is why the subculture keeps spawning scams and gurus. Yud teaches in HPMOR that intelligence is the ability to predict the future and manipulate people and the best person is the most intelligent, so if you want to be his disciple, you try to find someone you can manipulate. The idea that you could work together with your community to shut down that pattern of behaviour and expel repeat offenders is alien to them, and most of them have trouble with the idea of being honest about what you want.

The foursome had been on the lot for a few months when the pandemic struck in March 2020. That same month, the price of Bitcoin — in which most of Borhanian’s life savings was invested, money that was covering much of the group’s expenses at that time — cratered. Soon after, the four of them stopped paying rent to Lind altogether.

Aella also lost much of her early earnings on crypto.

Curtis Lind reminds me of the businessman who supported Elron early on and lost most of his money.

The end where Gwen Danielson decides that Yudkowsky is her their savior is tragic.

edit/ The article describes Danielson as transfemme but refers to them as them so I will do the same

I think building codes and zoning reform are good topics to get into in rich English-speaking countries but you have to 1) learn from actual experts not x.com/wiseAss1488, and 2) engage in local politics and policy and not just post to nerds around the world.

You’re welcome. CFAR listed $2,224,970 in rental income for 2024 which could be how they classify the events. I am also curious whether someone, say Salamon and a partner or partners, lives in the Bodega Bay property. Was that a conventional mortgage from a bank or did another rich friend make the loan?

I can sympathize with helping a disabled friend afford rent and groceries for a few years, but that does not seem like effective altruism, and if Lighthaven and Bodega Bay were not cooperating they should have been separate nonprofits.

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Who TF was using LED lights for indoor lighting in the 1990s? Compact flourescents were the lightbulb replacement in the oughties.

And how TF do you write that post without using the phrase “sensory sensitivity” and citing some women who know they have autism? Once you know you are more sensitive to your environment than allistics, you can start to experiment with interventions.

Ex-CEO, ex-CFO of bankrupt AI company iLearningEngines charged with fraud - Reuters, 17 April 2026

Prosecutors said iLearning marketed itself as an artificial intelligence-driven digital education ​company with an “out-of-the-box AI platform,” and claimed to earn revenue mainly by selling ​licenses for its educational and training platforms to customers, including healthcare companies and schools.

According to the ‌indictment, ⁠the defendants used forged sham contracts to make it seem that iLearning’s customers were real, and used “round trip” transfers of investor and lender funds – meaning they sent money to purported customers, who then returned it to iLearning – to manufacture revenue.

At least ​90% of iLearning’s $421 million ​of reported revenue ⁠in 2023 was fabricated, the indictment said.

I think they called this wash trading in cryptoland.

There is quite a contrast between the call for conscription (6.), the whining that civil servants have too much pay and respect (8.) and the praise for public life (9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.) I think he means that earning a living wage for getting up every morning rain or shine and delivering an old man’s bank statements is BAD, but if you accept a modest position as Chief Technology Officer or Cabinet Secretary nobody should be allowed to criticize you.

The notorious socialists at the (checks notes) World Economic Forum rank social mobility in the USA as 27th in the world behind Sweden, Germany, Canada, and Japan (!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_United_States So this seems like another demonstration that being very rich is like being kicked in the head by a horse or drinking a bottle of wine a day.

Steelmanning is making the best possible argument for a position, whereas CEV is sorting out all the delusions and contradictions in someone’s thinking and giving them what they would want if they were wise enough to know it. Central bankers engage in extrapolated volition when they try to make the economy run in a way that will make people happy, even if what they do is not what the woman on the street wants them to do because the woman on the street has no idea how the economy works. Friends engage in extrapolated volition when they intervene in a marriage or a drinking bout and say “you are ruining your life, and we are stopping it now.” Extrapolated volition is paternalistic (“you think you want that, but I know better …”) and Yudkowsky’s CEV would demand God the Father. Yud’s original paper is available.

It is a bit more than that: CEV is what he would want if he were wiser and less confused. Yudkowsky’s vision was that we want a lot of things which are contradictory or conflict with others or will make us sad, but Friend Computer could sort that out. But talking your friend into going to an event or trying a new food which she actually likes when she tries it is definitely in the spirit.

That third post could have been interesting, because there was a school of thought that Vladimir Putin was an Antonio Salazar or Lord Vetinari who wanted the good for his country and was willing to do whatever that took. But now it is clear that he is a Russian nationalist who still believes what his textbooks told him when he was 14. Even if he were better informed about the facts, a Putin who did not want ethnic Russians to dominate the former USSR would not be Vladimir Putin.

Twitter posts which mention stock symbols will now link to a trading app in Canada. Trading individual stocks is almost always a bad idea, even more so doing it based on social media post or the newspaper. https://betakit.com/wealthsimple-partners-with-elon-musks-x-for-direct-stock-trading-via-social-media/

Someone on the Other!SneerClub compared SlateScott to Max Naumann, head of the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden

In the comments Habryka says he is an immigrant. Is this him? This one is a German with studies in Mathematics at Stuttgart and UCal Berkeley (I am not firing up LinkedIn). https://standardresume.co/r/OliverHabryka

The thing with the Trail of Tears is that the Five Civilized Tribes were adopting the parts of European civilization which they found helpful. Sitting on vast tracts of underused land is as American as apple pie. But Andrew Jackson decided he had the firepower to steal their land.

So it was! As an aside, Substack’s archival navigation is awful (search and the infinite scroll seem the only way to navigate). https://slatestarcodex.com/2021/01/21/introducing-astral-codex-ten/

He claims he turned against Trump after the Capitol Putsch, so the two halves would be 2009-2019 and 2020-2026. He actually celebrated Trump’s second inauguration with his post about how everyone knows Richard Lynn was right but cowardly liberals pretend to believe blacks and whites are equal.

I thought his posts about “women don’t like Nice Guys” ended around 2013 like a lot of shouting about gender online? Dating a young cam-person and sex blogger in 2014 must have improved his mood even if the relationship did not last.

Scott Alexander published a blog post about how its unfair to call Victor Orban an autocrat but:

I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.

Dsquareddigest responds:

I believe the full quote is “to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from, if you are being dumb on purpose”

It’s in the dictionary next to Upton Sinclair’s famous line that “it is hard to get a man to understand something when he is a massive dumbass”

Back in 2023, someone called adamrat asked about this Slimrock company and why FTX owed it money.

What is Lightcone’s relationship to Slimrock, and is there any specific reason that the purchase of the Rose Garden Inn was financed through them rather than a more mundane/pedestrian lender?

Habryka was forthcoming about every detail except why they borrowed from Tallinn. It looks to me like FTX was supposed to provide the down payment for a mortgage and probably ongoing donations. They bought the property with the loan from Tallinn on 4 Nov 2022, two days after CoinDesk reported that FTX was entangled with Alameda Research, and one week before FTX filed for bankruptcy. Did Tallinn sit them down and say “if you complete the deal with FTX and they go bankrupt, you could lose Lighthaven, whereas I am solvent and offer easy terms?”