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.

In case anybody skips the article, it’s a six year old cybernetically force grown to the body of a horny 13 to 14 year old.

The rare sentence that makes me want to take a shower for having written it.

…with a huge chip on his shoulder about how the system caters primarily to normies instead of specifically to him, thinks he has fat-no-matter-what genes and is really into rape play.

There’s also the communal living, the workplace polyamory along with the prominence of the consensual non-consensual kink, the tithing of the bulk of your earnings and the extreme goals-justify-the-means moralising, the emphasis on psychedelics and prescription amphetamines, and so on and so forth.

Meaning, while calling them a cult incubator is actually really insightful and well put, I have a feeling that the closer you get to TESCREAL epicenters like the SFB the more explicitly culty things start to get.

EA started as an offshoot of LessWrong, and LW-style rationalism is still the main gateway into EA as it’s pushed relentlessly in those circles, and EA contributes vast amounts of money back into LW goals. Air strikes against datacenters guy is basically bankrolled by Effective Altruism and is also the reason EA considers magic AIs (so called Artificial Super Intelligences) by far the most important risk to humanity’s existence; they consider climate change mostly survivable and thus of far less importance, for instance.

Needless to say, LLM peddlers loved that (when they aren’t already LW/EAs or adjacent themselves, like the previous OpenAI administrative board before Altman and Microsoft took over). edit: also the founders of Anthropic.

Basically you can’t discuss one without referencing the other.

It’s complicated.

It’s basically a forum created to venerate the works and ideas of that guy who in the first wave of LLM hype had an editorial published in TIME where he called for a worldwide moratorium on AI research and GPU sales to be enforced with unilateral airstrikes, and whose core audience got there by being groomed by one the most obnoxious Harry Potter fanfictions ever written, by said guy.

Their function these days tends to be to provide an ideological backbone of bad scifi justifications to deregulation and the billionaire takeover of the state, which among other things has made them hugely influential in the AI space.

They are also communicating vessels with Effective Altruism.

If this piques your interest check the links on the sidecard.

The justice of the argument is clear to me. I have already made arrangements for my children to come to not be genetically mine. When the time comes, I will call upon their aid, presuming the sequencing does not tell us there are incompatibilities

I like how that implies that he keeps a running genetic tally of all his acquaintances in case he needs to tap them for genetic material, which is not creepy at all.

(Rorschach voice) Watched them today—parade their genetic blessings like medals earned in some cosmic lottery. Strong jawlines, symmetrical faces, eyes that catch the light just right. Retrieved 23AndMe card from alley behind 41st street. Admins restrained commenter screaming how it’s all just eugenics. Is everyone but me going mad?

I liked how Scalzi brushed it away, basically your consciousness gets copied to a new body, which kills the old one, and an artifact of the transfer process is that for a few moments you experience yourself as a mind with two bodies, meaning you have at least the impression of continuity of self, which is enough for most people to get on with living in a new body and let philosophers do the worrying.

I feel like a subset of sci-fi and philosophical meandering really is just increasingly convoluted paths of trying to avoid or come to terms with death as a possibly necessary component of life.

Given rationalism’s intellectual heritage, this is absolutely transhumanist cope for people who were counting on some sort of digital personhood upload as a last resort to immortality in their lifetimes.

You mean swapped out with something that has feelings that can be hurt by mean language? Wouldn’t that be something.

Are we putting endocrine systems in LLMs now?