esprit d’escalier

this whole “superbabies will save us from AI” presupposes that the superbabies are immune to the pull of LW ideas. Just as LW are discounting global warming, fascism etc to focus on runaway AI, who says superbabies won’t have a similar problem? It’s just one step up the metaphorical ladder:

LW: “ugh normies don’t understand the x-risk of AI!”

Superbabies: “ugh our LW parents don’t understand the x-risk of Evangelion being actually, like, real!”

I got caught on that quote too…

Superbabies is a backup plan; focus the energy of humanity’s collective genetic endowment into a single generation, and have THAT generation to solve problems like “figure out how to control digital superintelligence”.

Science-fiction solutions for science-fiction problems!

Let’s see what the comments say!

Considering current human distributions and a lack of 160+ IQ people having written off sub-100 IQ populations as morally useless […]

Dude are you aware where you are posting.

Just hope it never happens, like nuke wars?

Yeah that’s what ran the Cold War, hopes and dreams. JFC I keep forgetting these are kids born long after 1989.

Could you do all the research on a boat in the ocean? Excuse the naive question.

No, please keep asking the naive questions, it’s what provides fodder for comments like this .

(regarding humans having “[F]ixed skull size” and can therefore a priori not compete with AI):

Artificial wombs may remove this bottleneck.

This points to another implied SF solution. It’s already postulated by these people that humans are not having enough babies, or rather the right kind of humans aren’t (wink wink). If we assume that they don’t adhere to the Platonic ideal that women are simply wombs and all traits are inherited from males, then to breed superbabies you need buy-in from the moms. Considering how hard it is for these people to have a normal conversation with the fairer sex, them both managing to convince a partner to have a baby and let some quack from El Salvador mess with its genes seems insurmountable. Artificial wombs will resolve this nicely. Just do a quick test at around puberty to determine the God-given IQ level of a female, then harvest her eggs and implant them into artificial wombs. The less intelligent ones can provide eggs for the “Beta” and “Gamma” models…

But you don’t go from a 160 IQ person with a lot of disagreeability and ambition, who ends up being a big commercial player or whatnot, to 195 IQ and suddenly get someone who just sits in their room for a decade and then speaks gibberish into a youtube livestream and everyone dies, or whatever.

These people are insane.

They didn’t care much for marine life when they abandoned a tugboat, leavnig it to leak fuel and crap into the sea:

https://archive.ph/1UcWZ

they recently got a profile in fucking WaPo

FWIW here’s LW with discussion

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PKDbddjdDaPikQT3b/thread-for-sense-making-on-recent-murders-and-how-to-sanely

Lies, damn lies, racist statisticians, but P-VALUES ARE THE TRUTH I TELL YOU

I am geniunely shocked that Elsevier had this journal under its imprint.

I feel exactly the same.

I think we can all agree now that US Rationalists are basically all ex-Christians who are looking for the same thing but with the serial numbers filed off.

Correct url: https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/caroline-ellison-romance-novel-ftx-sentencing/

Obligatory HN link

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41598803

Pray for poor Prospera, beset by “leftists”.

I’ve had to do a number of “aptitude tests” in conjunction with applying for jobs[1] and RPMs have been a staple.

1. Swedish Defense Force aptitude test (you kind of stand out as middle aged among all the yoofs taking it)
2. one for a job at a state-owned enterprise
3. one for a job at an outfit selling this stuff for other companies[2]

I never really got a good score on them either!

[1] I don’t really like this but beggars can’t be choosers

[2] like I said, beggars can’t be choosers, lucklily I didn’t have to take the job

I knew this was good stuff when the majority of HN commenters where huffily complaining about the tone.

I don’t wanna be a wet blanket but one thing that struck me back in the Last.fm days was how little music taste correlated with how I got along with people (online and off). That said I’ll give these a fair shake but I’m an old man set in my ways when it comes to music.

FWIW I usually find what JWZ recommends/promotes to be ok.

This is hilarious. For ages every time Urbit has appeared in tech aggregators the original connection with Yarvin has been raised, and the proponents have snippily replied he’s not longer involved. No idea what passive-aggressive bullshit they’ll invent next time now that he’s back in charge, baby!

balajis has been a bitcoin shill since almost the very beginning (I was blocked from following his crap on Xhitter ages ago probably because he applied a collective banlist to everyone who had ever expressed an anti-BTC sentiment he knew of ) His probably most famous venture was trying to construct and sell a self.-contained BTC miner in an RPi form factor, which crashed and almost literally burned hilariously. Now I think he’s just coasting on his VC billions, slowly self-radicalizing in a social media soup. If the superyacht he was traveling in to his Arbeitslager island was sunk by orcas at least we’d get a decent headline out of it.

Looking at the map of Singapore there are lots of islands around it (Singapore was probably chosen as a reference datum because libertarians like it and it’s a big transport hub). Most of the islands seem to be Indonesian territory.

What or who are NSBM? National Socialist Black Metal?

Most people who buy entire islands in Sweden are evil as in they are very very rich, don’t give a crap about the local community, and do dumb things like build giant pools depleting the scarce local water supply.

But if you wanna start a cult just snag a big ole house in the relative boondocks and have it there. Creepy cults in the country are a staple of mid-budget TV action thrillers here, so apparently they’re everywhere.

It’s detailed in the 3rd para of the linked article.