Who needs time travel when you have Timeless Updateless Functional Decision Theory, Yud’s magnum opus and an arcane attempt at a game theoretic framework that boasts 100% success at preventing blackmail from pandimensional superintelligent entities that exist now in the future.

It for sure helped the Zizians become well integrated members of society (warning: lesswrong link).

I think it’s more like you’ll have a rat commissar deciding which papers get published and which get memory-holed while diverting funds from cancer research and epidemiology to research on which designer mouth bacteria can boost their intern’s polygenic score by 0.023%

The point is that you are still calling it out as racism, a term racists very much don’t like. Meaning, the “racism” is the important part in “scientific racism”, because it unequivocally tells us that the science in question is shit.

The actual euphemism for sciency racism is human biodiversity studies.

“not on squeaking terms”

by the way I first saw this in the stubsuck

This just comes off as your extended justification about not liking to think about things too hard.

Genetic engineering and/or eugenics is the long term solution. Short-term you are supposed to ban GPU sales, bomb non-complying datacenters and have all the important countries sign an AI non-proliferation treaty that will almost certainly involve handing over the reins of human scientific progress to rationalist approved committees.

Yud seems explicit that the point of all this is to buy enough time to create our metahuman overlords.

Honestly, it gets dumber. In rat lore the AGI escaping restraints and self improving unto godhood is considered a foregone conclusion, the genetically augmented smartbrains are supposed to solve human ethics before that has a chance to happen so we can hardcode a don’t-kill-all-humans ethics module to the superintelligence ancestor.

This is usually referred to as producing an aligned AI.

When this was posted to the curatedtumbler subreddit so many people thought it calling out racist pet rat owners.

Apparently genetically engineering ~300 IQ people (or breeding them, if you have time) is the consensus solution on how to subvert the acausal robot god, or at least the best the vast combined intellects of siskind and yud have managed to come up with.

So, using your influence to gradually stretch the overton window to include neonazis and all manner of caliper wielding lunatics in the hope that eugenics and human experimentation become cool again seems like a no-brainer, especially if you are on enough uppers to kill a family of domesticated raccoons at all times.

On a completely unrelated note, adderall abuse can cause cardiovascular damage, including heart issues or stroke, but also mental health conditions like psychosis, depression, anxiety and more.

All the stuff about ASI is basically theology, or trying to do armchair psychology to Yog-Sothoth. If autonomous ASI ever happens it’s kind of definitionally impossible to know what it’ll do, it’s beyond us.

The simulating synapses is hard stuff I can take or leave. To argue by analogy, it’s not like getting an artificial feather exactly right was ever a bottleneck to developing air travel once we got the basics of aerodynamics down.

Remember, when your code doesn’t compile, it might mean you made a mistake in coding, or your code is about to become selfaware.

Good analogy actually.

Don’t forget Yud is also a big compiler understander

The arguments made against the book in the review are that it doesn’t make the case for LLMs being capable of independent agency, it reduces all material concerns of an AI takeover to broad claims of ASI being indistinguishable from magic and that its proposed solutions are dumb and unenforceable (again with the global GPU prohibition and the unilateral bombing of rogue datacenters).

That towards the end they note that the x-risk framing is a cognitive short-circuit that causes the faithful to ignore more pressing concerns like the impending climate catastrophe in favor of a mostly fictitious problem like AI doom isn’t really a part of their core thesis against the book.

They also seem to broadly agree with the ‘hey, humans are pretty shit at thinking too, you know’ line of LLM apologetics.

“LLMs and humans are both sentence-producing machines, but they were shaped by different processes to do different work,” say the pair – again, I’m in full agreement.

But judging from the rest of the review I can see how you kind of have to be at least somewhat rationalist-adjacent to have a chance of actually reading the thing to the end.

The pair also suggest that signs of AI plateauing, as seems to be the case with OpenAI’s latest GPT-5 model, could actually be the result of a clandestine superintelligent AI sabotaging its competitors.

copium-intubation.tiff

Also this seems like the natural progression of that time Yud embarrassed himself by cautioning actual ML researchers to be weary of ‘sudden drops in loss function during training’, which was just an insanely uninformed thing to say out loud.

We should be so lucky, the ensuing barrage of lawsuits about illegally cribbing company IP would probably make the book author class action damages pale in comparison.

if one person came out and spilled the beans, it’d suggest that there might be more people who didn’t

I mean, after his full throated defense of Lynn’s IQ map (featuring disgraced nazi college dropout Cremieux/TP0 as a subject matter expert) what other beans might be interesting enough to spill? Did he lie about becoming a kidney donor?

I think the emails are important because a) they make a case that for all his performative high-mindedness and deference to science and whinging about polygenic selection he came to his current views through the same white supremacist/great replacement milieu as every other pretentious gutter racist out there and b) he is so consistently disingenuous that the previous statement might not even matter much… he might honestly believe that priming impressionable well-off techies towards blood and soil fascism precursors was worth it if we end up enabling human genetic experimentation to come up with 260IQ babies that might have a fighting chance against shAItan.

I guess it could come out that despite his habit of including conflict of interest disclosures, his public views may be way more for sale than is generally perceived.

some relevant discussion from a couple of years ago

I wonder if this is just a really clumsy attempt to invent stretching the overton window from first principles or if he really is so terminally rationalist that he thinks a political ideology is a sliding scale of fungible points and being 23.17% ancap can be a meaningful statement.

That the exchange of ideas between friends is supposed to work a bit like the principle of communicating vessels is a pretty weird assumption, too. Also, if he thinks it’s ok to admit that he straight up tries to manipulate friends in this way, imagine how he approaches non-friends.

Between this and him casually admitting that he keeps “culture war” topics alive on the substack because they get a ton of clicks, it’s a safe bet that he can’t be thinking too highly of his readership, although I suspect there is an esoteric/exoteric teachings divide that is mostly non-obvious from the online perspective.

In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound

He starts his recent article on AI psychosis by mixing up psychosis with schizophrenia (he calls psychosis a biological disease), so that tracks.

Other than that, I think it’s ok in principle to be ideologically opposed to something even if you and yours happened to benefit from it. Of course, it immediately becomes iffy if it’s a mechanism for social mobility that you don’t plan on replacing, since in that case you are basically advocating for pulling up the ladder behind you.

This was an excellent read if you’re aware of the emails but never bothered to read his citations or to dig into what the blather about object-level and meta-level problems was specifically about, which is presumably most people.

So, a deeper examination of the email paints 2014 Siskind as a pretty run of the mill race realist who’s really into black genes are dumber, you guys studies and who thinks that higher education institutions not taking them seriously means they are deeply broken and untrustworthy, especially with anything to do with pushing back against racism and sexism. Oh, and he is also very worried that immigration may destroy the West, or at least he gently urges you to get up to speed with articles coincidentally pushing that angle, and draw your own conclusions based on pure reason.

Also it seems that in private he takes seriously stuff he has already debunked in public, which makes it basically impossible to ever take anything he writes in good faith.