Imagine insecure smart people yes-anding each other into believing siskind and yud are profound thinkers.

Wish I’d found a non clunky way to work “cult incubator” into that.

It’s pick-me objectivism, only more overtly culty the closer you are to it irl. Imagine scientology if it was organized around AI doomerism and naive utilitarianism while posing as a get-smart-quick scheme.

It’s main function (besides getting the early adopters laid) is to provide court philosophers for the technofeudalist billionaire class, while grooming talented young techies into a wide variety of extremist thought both old and new, mostly by fostering contempt of established epistemological authority in the same way Qanons insist people do their own research, i.e. as a euphemism for only paying attention to ingroup approved influencers.

It seems to have both a sexual harassment and a suicide problem, with a lot of irresponsible scientific racism and drug abuse in the mix.

I hate being reminded that besides phrenology physiognomy is also a thing.

I like how this presupposes that unlike the tendency towards violent crime, pedophilia is equally distributed among all races and skull bump arrangements.

The post is using traditional orthodox frankincense scented machine learning techniques though, they aren’t just asking an LLM.

This is AI from when we were using it to decide if an image is of a dog or a cat, not how to best disenfranchise all creatives.

Could be an SSC type situation: you write an interminable pretend research post in a superficially serious manner on an obviously flawed premise and let the algorithm help it find its audience of mostly people who won’t read it but will be left with the impression that the premise is at least defensible.

This will be made considerably easier once siskind puts it in his regular link roundup with a cheeky comment about how he doesn’t really truly endorse this sort of thing.

His commenters really didn’t like the ‘white’ part.

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.