Is this… the perfect grift?

Surely the free market would never allow this.

So many of the prominent eugenics enjoyers name-dropped in the article have being regulars in ACX in common, as well as having been personally sanewashed by siskind on numerous occasions, that it’s becoming increasingly absurd how he keeps flying under the radar when modern racism and eugenics are being discussed in major outlets.

Like, I don’t see how Cremieux/Lasker/TP0 ever breaks into the mainstream enough to be notable by The Guardian without Siskind making rationalist spaces super friendly to people like him as well as deferring to him and endorsing his writing.

in order to dissuade hypothetical agents from blackmailing you

There’s also a whole thing with Yud accepting the many worlds interpretation as obvious truth that leads to (some) rationalists believing that getting killed in one timeline helps your surviving parallel selves by bolstering your case of being unblackmailable by said hypothetical agents, who are also from the future, which is why you can’t negotiate with them directly.

Also “return the offense thousandfold” figures in LaVeyan satanism I think (cross referencing unsuccessful; too many black metal bands in search results) as a counterpoint to by far the least observed christian guideline of turn-the-other-cheek.

Vox happens to be downstream of EA money, coincidentally.

Lesbionest, there is no better proxy for polygenic fitness than your total word count at lesswrong and acx.

Baldness just makes you more aerodynamic, and in our eugenics enabled charter city/network state/seastead you’ll be getting assigned a state sponsored waifu anyway (terms and conditions may apply, like being not unprovably not related to persons of dubious genetic heritage).

In a completely unexpected turn of events this new experiment in mainstreaming eugenics is being currently boosted by siskind.

a lot of kids

They had 3 kids last time they came up, which despite their posturing is not really a notable amount, and they’re both nearing their 40s, so it’s unlikely they’ll hit quiverfull numbers.

“Genetic Enhancement: Prediction Markets for Future People” by Jonathan Anomaly

What a completely cursed presentation title. According to the first youtube transcription service that pops up on google, he means that we should use prediction markets to find out which diseases will be curable/treatable in the next however many years so we can prioritize accordingly when doing polygenetic embryo screening based family planning.

Eugenics enjoyer quotient: Mr Anomaly is an iq enthusiast who goes on to talk about how genetic screening starts at choosing a suitable partner. Also, we should establish something like a polygenic health index that represents an individual’s genetic health to better systematize selection. This will be based on the individual’s known genetics as well as family history, I’m assuming because getting tricked into marrying someone with a schizophrenic great uncle or an obese cousin is a serious concern for him.

This presentation came up on the subject of how Cremieux/TP0/Lasker got invited to give a talk in Stanford if he’s only known for his race science bullshit while otherwise unaffiliated, and the answer is that the school of business faculty who organized the talks was into forecasting markets and almost definitely met him in this event.

So we have the broader rationalist cultic milieu to once again thank for bringing terrible people together, I guess.

They basically invent a special new type of mental impairment to apply to brown people to sidestep the need to explain why entire swaths of the global south aren’t desolate wastelands of barely functional people trying to converse in grunts, as predicted by Lynn’s research.

That the statistics of a mean IQ of nothing imply that you should be able to fit every current African university graduate in a room together seems pretty valid as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole affair, surprised I didn’t see it mentioned before.

Why

Hot take time, I think when siskind was at the age that he decided there are some things he will never again change his mind about he happened to be downstream of some flavor of transhumanism that favored gene editing instead of cybernetic augmentations and brain uploads, and things kind of escalated from there.

Spotlighting eugenics-based IQ-maxing is probably his version of going all in on summoning the acausal robot god to fix everything, and also the substack money is pretty good.

The follow up article where normally he retreats to the motte and cherry picks comments from the previous one is somehow worse, we’re now treating Lynn as obviously correct as “has been confirmed by later research which is harder to bias.”

Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake.

Steve Saller is in the comments calling himself moderately reasonable. Also woke enabled pakistani rape gangs in the top comments.

Cracker Johnny calls this ‘an unironically stunning and brave article and I’m here for it. I appreciate your post.’

TTLX thinks we should move to the obvious next step and finally start talking how this is affected by sexual selection, combining inceldom and eugenics in a way that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Scott chimes in to say that seeing results in 2-3 generations is unlikely unless you get hardcore about it and only allow the top 10% IQ havers to reproduce, otherwise more like 20-30 gen.

E. Kirkegaard and his shitrag appear to be the sum total of his sources and he’s still trying to do the enlightened centrist thing of couching everything in ‘this is what people (who I implicitly consider qualified) have come up with to explain Lynn’s absurd bullshit’, which I guess at this point might possibly fool some of his Nepal-based readers (average IQ of 42 according to Lynn).

Uncharacteristically short post by slatescott, best he could come up with to explain how Lynn’s results are worth considering once we choose to ignore his vibe based research methodology appears to be that:

• Lynn’s research is in fact anti-racist because US blacks not being uniformly mentally disabled supports nurture over genetics wrt IQ and
• really low IQ scores achktually fail to capture mental disability because it is comorbid with all sorts of impairments besides low IQ, and it’s really surely entirely possible to have a chat with a person who scored 60 on an IQ test and only realize something’s off when you try to discuss the finer points of HPATMOR with them, so having a functional country where the median IQ is several standard deviations below normal shouldn’t be out of the question.

Siskind doesn’t give a shit. If we take the above at face value the obvious conclusion is that IQ is garbage at what it’s supposed to be useful for, but the comment sections is currently full of HBD enthusiasts excited to finally be feeling seen and probably eager to send subscription money his way.

I can never tell, is there an actual ‘experiment’ taking place with an LLM backend agent actually trying stuff on a working vm or are they just prompting a chatbot to write a variation of a story (or ten, or a million) about what it might have done given these problem parameters?

And all that stuff just turned out to be true

Literally what stuff, that AI would get somewhat better as technology progresses?

I seem to remember Yud specifically wasn’t that impressed with machine learning and thought so-called AGI would come about through ELIZA type AIs.

Getting Trump reelected should count as ‘billionaire philanthropy’.

thinkers like computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky

That’s gotta sting a bit.

Nabokov’s Lolita really shouldn’t be pigeonholed as merely that, but I guess the movies are another story.

Dolores in Lolita was like twelve though, at least in the book.