Gyges Blog

We can forward as a secondary hypothesis that this seems reasonable to Yudkowsky because it is, broadly speaking, his fetish. I wish I could avoid discussing this entirely because it seems uncouth and ad hominem. Yudkowsky has co-authored, with lintamande, a 1.8 million word collaborative glowfic called Planecrash (also titled Project Lawful). He says that "[w]hether an intelligence being "submissive" suffices to make it easy-to-steer is a primary focus of my 1.8M-word BDSM decision theory D&D fic". I am not, in general, happy when people express serious things via 1.8 million word BDSM fanfics, because it makes it seem tawdry to say their ideas are either right or wrong.

Planecrash is set in Yudkowsky's rationalist utopia "dath ilan", whose main distinguishing feature is positive eugenics. Yudkowsky explains that in dath ilan, "except in very exceptional circumstances, if you're unhappy on average for any reason, it is your duty to the next generation not to have kids who might inherit this tendency", and that the dath ilani are more intelligent than us "if only because there's a norm against chronically unhappy people having kids".

Inside the fic itself, his self-insert character at one point reflects, in a passage explicitly framed as a moment of clarity about his own life, that "in dath ilan he would never have had his 144 children. He would have tried to be special and failed and been sad and then maybe gotten an ordinary +0.8sd job and either paid for a child out of that or decided he was too strange and unhappy to have one." In the same scene, Yudkowsky's narration describes Keltham as wanting "to prioritize having sex with his research harem as one of his top goals on his second day in another universe." It does not seem unreasonable to notice that the same person whose 1.8 million word kink fic is built around an author-self-insert protagonist who is rewarded with a "research harem" and 144 children, also believes, in his nonfiction, that the real-world solution to alignment is to spend a few decades breeding or engineering smarter humans. One could reasonably suspect that being fixated on the idea might not be, in this context, entirely logical.

Rich and powerful people read and watch the exact same slop everyone else does.

There isn't a better, smarter news that doesn't lie to them or make stuff up or hide the most important thing on the ninth page. There is no TikTok for rich people that hasn't got any brainrot on it. Their YouTube recommendations are full of crazy people.

There may have once been a clean separation between the propaganda that was pushed out for normal people and the things that clever, in-the-know people believed, but it's basically gone now. Everyone in charge, everyone who matters, thinks that the version they see on TV is the real thing that really happened, even when the news is lying. What people say happened matters more than what happened.

When we're lucky, people in important positions are more like your smart friends than your dumb friends, and maybe have a little more information about the parts of things they are personally involved in. When we're unlucky they are likely worse off than any random person off the street, because people make millions of dollars by telling them what they want to hear or just lying to them to scare them and to sell more consultant services.

Newspapers really can just tell the government what to do. Official government announcements are 4chan-style meme videos that smell like NFT marketing, presentations at policy conferences are full of pokemon and 2010 blogger beefs. If you want to know which major leader is going to do what, you can actually just figure they'll do whatever the podcast for someone like them says to do, and you'll usually be right.

We say that "the internet is real life", and among other things this means that the information environment is almost completely flat. There is public information, slightly less public information that you might have to bypass a paywall for, and then niche subculture information that only a few thousand people know, but those few thousand people are scattered across the Earth and at least a hundred of them are children.

Flow demands I have a closing here, but I really don't. This comes up all the time because people seem to imagine that the things they say and do don't matter, that someone somewhere is better informed and knows that the complete bullshit that's everywhere is bullshit. That isn't real. There is every indication that every stupid thing that's popular on the internet is likely to be government policy. You should take them that seriously.

The Universal Dividend Act establishes a monthly per capita payment to every citizen and national of the United States, funded as a fixed and escalating percentage of federal outlays. The payment begins at 10% of the five-year moving average of federal spending, rises by 4 percentage points annually, and caps at 50%. At current spending levels, this produces roughly $190/month per person in year one, growing to approximately $1,700/month at maturity as federal outlays grow over the ten-year ramp. Payments are non-taxable, immune from garnishment, and do not affect eligibility for existing benefit programs.

This document elaborates on the findings and design rationale of the bill.

Finding (1): The productive capacity of the United States economy generates benefits that should be broadly shared among all citizens and nationals.

The economic output of the United States is the product of collective infrastructure (legal systems, public investment, educated workforces, shared institutions) and not solely of individual effort. A universal dividend recognizes this by returning a share of the government's fiscal activity directly to the people. The payment is unconditional because the claim it represents is unconditional: every citizen has a stake in the productive capacity of the country.

The dividend is the reciprocal of the tax obligation. Citizens owe a share of their income to the government that maintains the conditions under which that income is earned. The dividend recognizes that this obligation runs in both directions: the government, in turn, owes a share of its fiscal activity to the citizens whose participation and compliance sustain it. Taxation and dividend are two sides of the same relationship between the individual and the state.

This principle also explains why the payment is universal rather than means-tested. Means-testing is expensive to administer, creates benefit cliffs that trap people in poverty, requires invasive verification of personal financial circumstances, and inevitably excludes eligible people through administrative burden. The populations most in need of assistance are also the populations least equipped to navigate complex eligibility requirements. Universality eliminates these problems and creates a political constituency for the program that includes everyone.

Finding (2): Consumer spending constitutes the largest component of the gross domestic product of the United States, and broadly distributed purchasing power supports sustained economic activity and growth.

Consumer spending accounts for roughly two-thirds of GDP. The marginal propensity to consume is highest among lower-income households: a dollar transferred to someone with unmet needs is more likely to be spent than a dollar added to existing wealth. A universal dividend directed at every citizen therefore channels purchasing power where it is most likely to circulate through the economy, supporting demand for goods and services, sustaining employment, and generating tax revenue.

Consumer spending also performs a critical allocative function. Individual purchasing decisions are the primary mechanism by which the economy generates quality signals: information about which goods and services are valued, which producers are meeting needs, and where resources should flow. An economy in which purchasing power is concentrated among a narrow population receives quality signals that reflect only that population's preferences. Broadly distributed purchasing power produces more complete and representative market information, improving the efficiency of resource allocation across the entire economy.

Finding (3): Direct, unconditional cash transfers are an efficient means of distributing benefit and promoting growth.

Cash is the most efficient form of transfer. It requires no administrative apparatus to determine what recipients need, imposes no compliance burden on recipients, and allows individuals to allocate resources according to their own circumstances. The existing landscape of federal transfer programs is fragmented across dozens of agencies, each with its own eligibility rules, application processes, and verification requirements. A single universal payment does not replace these programs, but it provides a baseline of economic security that reaches populations the existing system systematically misses, including the homeless, those not in federal databases, and those whose circumstances change faster than administrative processes can track.

The payment is excluded from gross income and cannot be counted as income or resources for purposes of any federal or state benefit program. This ensures the dividend supplements existing benefits rather than displacing them. Without this protection, the dividend would effectively convert into a funding cut for the most vulnerable recipients by pushing them over eligibility thresholds for programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and SSI, which cover unpredictable, catastrophic expenses that a monthly cash payment cannot substitute for.

Finding (4): A payment linked to the scale of federal expenditure provides a transparent and self-adjusting mechanism that connects the activities of government to the welfare of the people.

Federal outlays reflect the full fiscal activity of the government. They are downstream of economic productivity, tax policy, and spending decisions. When the economy grows, revenue rises, spending capacity expands, and the dividend grows with it. This creates a transparent connection between the scale of government activity and the benefit each citizen receives.

Federal spending is also naturally countercyclical. Automatic stabilizers (unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and other safety-net programs) expand during economic downturns, which means the dividend base holds relatively steady precisely when stability matters most. The five-year moving average adds further smoothing, dampening both crisis-year spending spikes and temporary contractions so that only sustained, multi-year shifts in fiscal capacity affect the payment amount.

The bill designates payments as direct spending, exempt from annual appropriations and from sequestration. A payment that can be zeroed out in a continuing resolution or across-the-board spending cut is not a reliable income floor. The political durability of Social Security rests in part on its mandatory spending classification; the check arrives every month regardless of the status of annual appropriations legislation. The Universal Dividend is designed to have the same character.

At 10% in year one, total program cost is approximately $700 billion, rising over 10 years to approximately $7 trillion annually at the 50% cap as the underlying spending base grows. The bill does not specify a funding offset. The funding mechanism is the existing and future tax code. The gradual ramp provides a decade during which Congress can adjust revenue, restructure spending, or both. Whether existing transfer programs are consolidated as the dividend grows is left to future Congresses. The bill neither requires nor prohibits such consolidation.

M___ . __________ introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Ways and Means

To provide for the issuance of monthly per capita payments to all citizens and nationals of the United States, to be administered by the Department of the Treasury.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

This Act may be cited as the "Universal Dividend Act."

The Congress finds the following:

(1) The productive capacity of the United States economy generates benefits that should be broadly shared among all citizens and nationals.

(2) Consumer spending constitutes the largest component of the gross domestic product of the United States, and broadly distributed purchasing power supports sustained economic activity and growth.

(3) Direct, unconditional cash transfers are an efficient means of distributing benefit and promoting growth.

(4) A payment linked to the scale of federal expenditure provides a transparent and self-adjusting mechanism that connects the activities of government to the welfare of the people.

In this Act:

(a) SECRETARY. — The term "Secretary" means the Secretary of the Treasury.

(b) ELIGIBLE INDIVIDUAL. — The term "eligible individual" means any individual who is—

(1) a citizen of the United States; or

(2) a national of the United States (as defined in section 101(a)(22) of the Immigration and Nationality Act),

regardless of age, subject to Section 10.

(c) CUSTODIAL PARENT OR GUARDIAN. — The term "custodial parent or guardian" means, with respect to any minor individual—

(1) the parent or legal guardian with whom the minor primarily resides, as determined under applicable State law; or

(2) in the case of joint custody, the parent or guardian designated for purposes of this section in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary.

(d) EMANCIPATED MINOR. — The term "emancipated minor" means an individual under the age of 18 who has been declared emancipated under applicable State law, or who is otherwise legally recognized as an adult under applicable State law.

(e) FEDERAL OUTLAYS. — The term "federal outlays" means total outlays of the Federal Government for a fiscal year as set forth in the final audited budget results published by the Office of Management and Budget for such fiscal year.

(f) FIVE-YEAR MOVING AVERAGE. — The term "five-year moving average" means, with respect to any payment period, the arithmetic mean of federal outlays for the five most recently completed fiscal years for which final audited budget results have been published by the Office of Management and Budget as of June 1 preceding the beginning of such payment period.

(g) APPLICABLE PERCENTAGE. — The term "applicable percentage" means—

(1) for the first payment period and the first full payment period following such period, 10 percent;

(2) for each subsequent payment period, the applicable percentage for the preceding payment period plus 4 percentage points; except that

(3) in no case shall the applicable percentage exceed 50 percent.

(h) ANNUAL DIVIDEND AMOUNT. — The term "annual dividend amount" means, with respect to any payment period, the product of the applicable percentage and the five-year moving average for such payment period.

(i) PAYMENT PERIOD. — The term "payment period" means, with respect to any fiscal year, the twelve-month period beginning on October 1 of such fiscal year.

(j) REPRESENTATIVE PAYEE. — The term "representative payee" means, with respect to an eligible individual, a person or organization appointed to receive payments under this Act on behalf of such individual who, by reason of mental or physical incapacity, is unable to manage or direct the management of such payments. Such term shall have the same meaning, and shall be subject to the same standards, qualifications, and disqualifications, as the term "representative payee" as used in section 205(j) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 405(j)).

(k) UNITED STATES. — The term "United States," when used in a geographical sense, includes the several States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

(a) IN GENERAL. — The Secretary shall make a payment in each month of the payment period to each eligible individual. The amount of each monthly payment shall be equal to the annual dividend amount for the applicable payment period, divided by the total number of eligible individuals as of the first day of such payment period, divided by twelve.

(b) TIMING. — Payments under this section shall be made not later than the 15th day of each calendar month, beginning with the first calendar month of the first payment period.

(c) DETERMINATION OF ELIGIBLE POPULATION. — The Secretary, in consultation with the Commissioner of Social Security and the Director of the Bureau of the Census, shall determine the total number of eligible individuals as of the first day of each payment period. Such determination shall be made not later than September 1 preceding the beginning of such payment period.

(d) FIXED PAYMENT AMOUNT. — The monthly per capita payment amount determined under subsection (a) for a given payment period shall remain fixed for the duration of that payment period, notwithstanding any change in the number of eligible individuals receiving payments during such period.

(e) MID-YEAR ENROLLMENT. — An individual who becomes an eligible individual after the first day of a payment period, whether by birth, naturalization, or any other means, shall be entitled to payments under this section beginning with the first full calendar month following the date on which such individual becomes an eligible individual. Such payments shall be in the same monthly amount as determined under subsection (a) for the applicable payment period.

(f) ANNUAL PUBLICATION. — Not later than September 15 preceding the beginning of each payment period, the Secretary shall publish in the Federal Register and on a publicly accessible website—

(1) the five-year moving average for such payment period;

(2) the applicable percentage for such payment period;

(3) the total number of eligible individuals; and

(4) the monthly per capita payment amount.

(a) MINOR INDIVIDUALS — GENERAL RULE. — In the case of an eligible individual who has not attained the age of 18 and who is not an emancipated minor, the payment under Section 4 shall be made to the custodial parent or guardian of such individual.

(b) EMANCIPATED MINORS. — In the case of an eligible individual who is an emancipated minor, payments under Section 4 shall be made directly to such individual.

(c) DISPUTES REGARDING MINORS. — The Secretary shall prescribe regulations establishing a process for resolving disputes regarding the designation of a custodial parent or guardian for purposes of this section, including in cases of—

(1) joint custody arrangements;

(2) changes in custody during a payment period; and

(3) the absence of a legal custodial parent or guardian, including individuals in the foster care system or in the care of a State.

(d) FOSTER CARE AND WARDS OF THE STATE. —

(1) IN GENERAL. — In the case of a minor individual who is in foster care or is otherwise a ward of a State, the payment under Section 4 shall be made to the foster parent, relative caregiver, or institutional caregiver of record for such individual, as reported by the applicable State child welfare agency.

(2) DATA SHARING. — Each State child welfare agency shall, pursuant to an agreement with the Secretary, provide to the Secretary on a monthly basis current placement data for all minor individuals in foster care or otherwise in the custody of the State, including the identity and payment information of the foster parent, relative caregiver, or institutional caregiver of record. The Secretary shall redirect payments not later than 30 days following receipt of updated placement data.

(3) INSTITUTIONAL CARE. — In the case of a minor individual residing in a group home, residential treatment facility, or other institutional setting, the payment shall be made to the entity responsible for the care of such individual and shall be used exclusively for the direct benefit of such individual. The Secretary, in consultation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, shall prescribe regulations establishing reporting and accountability requirements for such entities.

(4) NO OFFSET AGAINST STATE OBLIGATIONS. — Payments received under this section on behalf of a minor individual in foster care shall not be used by any State to offset or reduce foster care maintenance payments or any other payments or services to which such individual is entitled under title IV-E of the Social Security Act or any other Federal or State program.

(e) REPRESENTATIVE PAYEES FOR INCAPACITATED ADULTS. —

(1) IN GENERAL. — In the case of an eligible individual who has attained the age of 18 and who, by reason of mental or physical incapacity, is unable to manage or direct the management of payments under this Act, the Secretary may appoint a representative payee to receive such payments on behalf of such individual.

(2) INCORPORATION OF SSA FRAMEWORK. — The appointment, duties, oversight, accounting, and removal of representative payees under this subsection shall be governed by the same standards, procedures, and protections applicable to representative payees under section 205(j) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 405(j)), to the extent consistent with this Act. The Secretary may, by agreement with the Commissioner of Social Security, designate the same representative payee already serving an individual under such section to serve as representative payee for purposes of this Act.

(3) USE OF PAYMENTS. — A representative payee appointed under this subsection shall use payments received on behalf of an eligible individual exclusively for the needs and direct benefit of such individual, and shall maintain such records and submit such reports as the Secretary may require.

(4) NO OFFSET AGAINST INSTITUTIONAL COSTS. — Payments received by a representative payee on behalf of an eligible individual residing in an institution shall not be used to offset or reduce any payment or service to which such individual is otherwise entitled under any Federal or State program.

(a) IN GENERAL. — The Secretary shall make payments under this Act by electronic funds transfer to an account designated by the eligible individual (or the custodial parent, guardian, or representative payee receiving payments on behalf of such individual under Section 5).

(b) ALTERNATIVE METHODS. — In the case of any eligible individual who does not designate an account under subsection (a), or for whom electronic funds transfer is impracticable, the Secretary shall make payment by—

(1) check mailed to the last known address of the individual;

(2) prepaid debit card; or

(3) such other means as the Secretary determines appropriate, which may include mobile payment platforms.

(c) REGISTRATION. — The Secretary shall establish, not later than 60 days after the date of enactment of this Act, a process by which any eligible individual may register to receive payments under this Act, including individuals who have not filed a Federal income tax return and individuals who are not known to the Social Security Administration.

(a) AMENDMENT TO INTERNAL REVENUE CODE. — Part III of subchapter B of chapter 1 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 (26 U.S.C. 101 et seq.) is amended by inserting before section 140 the following new section:

"SEC. 139__. UNIVERSAL DIVIDEND PAYMENTS.

"(a) IN GENERAL. — Gross income does not include any payment received by an individual under the Universal Dividend Act.

"(b) DENIAL OF DOUBLE BENEFIT. — No deduction or credit shall be allowed under this chapter with respect to any amount excluded from gross income under subsection (a).

"(c) NOT TREATED AS EARNED INCOME. — Payments excluded under subsection (a) shall not be treated as earned income for purposes of this title.".

(b) CONFORMING AMENDMENT. — The table of sections for part III of subchapter B of chapter 1 of such Code is amended by inserting before the item relating to section 140 the following new item:

"Sec. 139__. Universal dividend payments.".

(c) EFFECTIVE DATE. — The amendments made by this section shall apply to taxable years ending after the date of the enactment of this Act.

(d) NOT TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT FOR FEDERAL BENEFIT PROGRAMS. — Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any payment made to any individual under this Act shall not be taken into account as income, earned or unearned, and shall not be taken into account as resources, for purposes of determining the eligibility of such individual (or any other individual) for benefits or assistance (or the amount or extent of benefits or assistance) under any Federal program or under any State or local program financed in whole or in part with Federal funds. Amounts saved or accumulated from payments under this Act shall retain this exclusion regardless of the period for which they are held.

(a) NO EXCLUSION OF ELIGIBLE INDIVIDUALS. — No eligible individual shall be denied, suspended from, or excluded from receiving payments under this Act by reason of any status, condition, or circumstance not expressly provided for in this Act.

(b) PROTECTION FROM GARNISHMENT, LEVY, AND ASSIGNMENT. — Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no payment made under this Act shall be subject to execution, levy, attachment, garnishment, assignment, or any other legal process, or to the operation of any bankruptcy or insolvency law. No person, entity, financial institution, or governmental body may seize, offset, confiscate, or redirect any payment made under this Act, except—

(1) as provided in Section 12 (overpayments and underpayments);

(2) as provided in Section 10 (suspension of payments); or

(3) as provided in Section 15 (fraud and penalties).

(c) NO OFFSET UNDER TREASURY OFFSET PROGRAM. — Payments made under this Act shall not be subject to offset under subchapter II of chapter 37 of title 31, United States Code (the Treasury Offset Program).

(d) WAIVER VOID. — Any agreement by an individual to waive protections under this section shall be void and unenforceable.

(a) IN GENERAL. — The eligibility of an individual to receive payments under this Act shall terminate as of the date of death of such individual.

(b) PAYMENT FOR MONTH OF DEATH. — The full monthly payment for the calendar month in which an eligible individual dies shall be made and shall not be subject to recapture.

(c) IDENTIFICATION OF DECEASED INDIVIDUALS. — The Secretary shall, on a monthly basis, cross-reference payment records with the Death Master File maintained by the Social Security Administration, and shall terminate payments with respect to deceased individuals not later than 60 days following the date of death as recorded in such file.

(d) RECAPTURE OF ERRONEOUS PAYMENTS. — Any payment made under this Act with respect to any month following the month of death of an eligible individual shall be subject to recapture. The Secretary may recover such amounts—

(1) from the estate of the deceased individual, in full; or

(2) from the person who received such payment, subject to the limitation under Section 12(b).

(a) IN GENERAL. — Payments under this Act shall be suspended with respect to any eligible individual as provided in this section.

(b) PHYSICAL PRESENCE REQUIREMENT. — An eligible individual satisfies the physical presence requirement for a payment period if such individual—

(1) maintains a mailing address or designated financial account within the United States; and

(2) meets the substantial presence test, as described in subsection (c).

(c) SUBSTANTIAL PRESENCE TEST. — For purposes of subsection (b)(2), an eligible individual meets the substantial presence test for a calendar year if the sum of the following equals or exceeds 183 days:

(1) the number of days the individual was physically present in the United States during the current calendar year;

(2) one-third of the number of days the individual was physically present in the United States during the first preceding calendar year; and

(3) one-sixth of the number of days the individual was physically present in the United States during the second preceding calendar year.

This test shall be applied in the same manner, and days of presence shall be determined under the same rules, as the substantial presence test under section 7701(b)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, except that such test shall be applied to citizens and nationals of the United States for purposes of this Act notwithstanding section 7701(b)(1)(A) of such Code.

(d) GOVERNMENT SERVICE ABROAD. — An eligible individual shall be treated as physically present in the United States for purposes of subsection (c) for any day during which such individual is absent from the United States by reason of—

(1) service as a member of the Armed Forces of the United States;

(2) service as a member of the Foreign Service of the United States;

(3) employment by the Federal Government at an official duty station outside the United States; or

(4) status as the spouse of an individual described in paragraph (1), (2), or (3) who is so serving or employed, if such spouse is accompanying such individual at a duty station outside the United States; or

(5) status as a dependent (as defined in section 152 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986) of an individual described in paragraph (1), (2), or (3) who is so serving or employed, if such dependent is accompanying such individual at a duty station outside the United States.

(e) CESSATION AND RESUMPTION. —

(1) CESSATION. — If an eligible individual fails to satisfy the physical presence requirement under subsection (b), payments to such individual shall cease beginning with the first full calendar month following the month in which the Secretary determines that the requirement is no longer satisfied.

(2) RESUMPTION. — Payments shall resume beginning with the first full calendar month following the month in which the Secretary determines that the individual has reestablished physical presence in the United States and satisfies the requirements of subsection (b). No back payments shall be made for any period during which the individual did not satisfy the physical presence requirement.

(f) ANNUAL CERTIFICATION. — Each eligible individual receiving payments under this Act shall certify annually, at such time and in such form as the Secretary shall prescribe, that such individual satisfies the physical presence requirement under subsection (b). Such certification shall be made under penalty of perjury.

(g) AUDIT AND EXAMINATION. — Certifications made under subsection (f) shall be subject to audit and examination by the Internal Revenue Service under the same authority, infrastructure, procedures, and standards of selection, review, and due process applicable to the examination of claims under section 911 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. For purposes of such audit and examination, the Secretary shall have the same authority to request and obtain records — including passport records, travel records, and such other records as may be relevant to the determination of physical presence — as is available to the Secretary in connection with examinations under such section 911.

(h) REGULATIONS. — The Secretary shall prescribe such additional regulations as may be necessary to carry out this section.

(a) USE OF EXISTING DATA. — For purposes of identifying eligible individuals under this Act, the Secretary shall use—

(1) information available from Federal income tax returns;

(2) records of the Social Security Administration;

(3) records of the Department of State relating to citizenship and nationality; and

(4) such other information as the Secretary determines necessary and appropriate.

(b) INTERAGENCY COOPERATION. — The head of any Federal agency that possesses information relevant to identifying eligible individuals or making payments under this Act shall, upon request of the Secretary, make such information available to the Secretary for such purposes, subject to applicable privacy protections.

(c) OUTREACH. — The Secretary shall conduct outreach to ensure that eligible individuals, including those without fixed addresses, those not in existing Federal databases, and those in institutional settings, are aware of and able to receive payments under this Act.

(a) IN GENERAL. — The Secretary shall issue such regulations or other guidance as may be necessary to provide for proper adjustments in payments, and recapture of payments, to correct underpayments and overpayments, including—

(1) payments made on behalf of individuals subsequently determined not to be eligible individuals;

(2) payments made to a custodial parent or guardian following a change in custody; and

(3) payments not made to an eligible individual due to administrative error.

(b) LIMITATION ON RECAPTURE. — No recapture of payments under this section shall reduce the monthly payment to any eligible individual below one-half of the monthly payment amount otherwise payable under Section 4 in any given month. Any overpayment amount not recovered due to this limitation shall be carried forward and recovered from subsequent monthly payments, subject to the same limitation, until fully recovered.

(a) RIGHT TO REVIEW. — Any individual who is adversely affected by a determination of the Secretary under this Act — including a determination regarding eligibility, suspension of payments, or the amount of any overpayment — may request administrative review of such determination.

(b) ADMINISTRATIVE REVIEW. — Upon receipt of a request under subsection (a), the Secretary shall conduct a review of the determination by an officer or employee who was not involved in making the initial determination. Such review shall be completed, and the individual notified of the result, not later than 60 days after the date on which the request is received.

(c) JUDICIAL REVIEW. — Any individual who is dissatisfied with the result of a review under subsection (b) may, within 90 days after being notified of such result, file a civil action for review in the United States district court for the judicial district in which the individual resides.

(d) CONTINUATION OF PAYMENTS PENDING REVIEW. — Payments to an individual who has requested review under subsection (a) shall not be suspended or reduced by reason of the determination under review until such review is completed, except where the Secretary determines that there is probable cause to believe that the payments were obtained by fraud.

(a) IN GENERAL. — The Secretary shall ensure that payments under this Act are made to all eligible individuals residing in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

(b) ADMINISTRATION. — The Secretary shall enter into agreements with the government of each territory described in subsection (a) under which—

(1) the territorial government shall assist in identifying eligible individuals residing in the territory and in disbursing payments under this Act, using such data systems and administrative infrastructure as may be available;

(2) the Secretary shall provide all funds necessary for payments to eligible individuals in the territory, as well as reasonable administrative costs incurred by the territorial government in carrying out its responsibilities under the agreement; and

(3) the territorial government shall comply with such reporting, auditing, and accountability requirements as the Secretary may prescribe.

(c) DIRECT ADMINISTRATION. — If the Secretary determines that a territorial government is unable or unwilling to enter into an agreement under subsection (b), or that a territorial government has failed to comply with the terms of such agreement, the Secretary may administer payments directly to eligible individuals in such territory using Federal resources.

(d) EQUAL TREATMENT. — The amount of any payment made to an eligible individual residing in a territory shall be the same as the amount payable to any other eligible individual under Section 4.

(a) CRIMINAL PENALTIES. — Any individual who knowingly makes a false statement or representation of a material fact in connection with obtaining or attempting to obtain a payment under this Act shall be subject to prosecution under section 1001 of title 18, United States Code, and such other provisions of Federal criminal law as may apply.

(b) CIVIL PENALTY. — Any individual who receives payments under this Act for a period of 12 or more months to which such individual is not entitled, by reason of a knowing failure to disclose a material change in eligibility, shall be liable to the United States for the amount of such payments, plus a civil penalty equal to twice the amount of such payments. Recovery of amounts owed under this subsection may be made by offset against future payments under this Act, subject to the limitation under Section 12(b).

(c) RECOVERY OF OTHER OVERPAYMENTS. — Any individual who receives payments under this Act to which such individual is not entitled, and who is not subject to subsection (a) or (b), shall be subject to recovery of such payments under Section 12.

(d) REFERRAL. — The Secretary may refer any matter arising under this section to the Attorney General for investigation and prosecution.

(a) APPROPRIATIONS FOR PAYMENTS. — There are hereby appropriated, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, such sums as may be necessary to make payments under this Act for each fiscal year, or for any portion of a fiscal year during which payments are made under this Act. Such sums shall include an amount equal to 5 percent of the total projected payments under Section 4 for the applicable period, to accommodate mid-year enrollment under Section 4(e). Any amounts appropriated under this subsection that are not expended during the fiscal year for which they are appropriated shall be available for payments under this Act in succeeding fiscal years.

(b) APPROPRIATIONS FOR ADMINISTRATIVE COSTS. — There are hereby appropriated, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, such sums as are necessary for the proper and efficient administration of this Act for each fiscal year, or for any portion of a fiscal year during which the Secretary carries out responsibilities under this Act. Such sums shall be available for personnel, systems, outreach, interagency agreements, fraud prevention and detection, administrative review under Section 13, and such other administrative functions as the Secretary determines necessary to carry out this Act.

(c) DESIGNATION AS DIRECT SPENDING. — All amounts appropriated under this section — including amounts for payments under subsection (a) and amounts for administrative costs under subsection (b) — shall be classified as direct spending (as defined in section 250(c)(8) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985) and shall not be subject to annual appropriations Acts or to sequestration under such Act.

(a) ANNUAL REPORT. — Not later than March 1 of each year, the Secretary shall submit to the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Finance of the Senate a report on the implementation of this Act during the preceding fiscal year, including—

(1) the total number of eligible individuals who received payments;

(2) the total amount of payments made;

(3) the number of individuals enrolled through mid-year enrollment under Section 4(e);

(4) the number and amount of overpayments identified and recovered;

(5) the number of fraud cases referred under Section 15;

(6) the number of eligible individuals residing in each territory who received payments under Section 14;

(7) the number of eligible individuals for whom payments were suspended or resumed under Section 10;

(8) the total amount of mid-year enrollment buffer funds appropriated under Section 16(a), the amount expended, and the amount carried forward;

(9) the total administrative costs incurred under Section 16(b), including a breakdown by major category of expenditure; and

(10) such other information as the Secretary determines appropriate or as may be requested by such committees.

(b) GAO AUDIT. — The Comptroller General of the United States shall conduct an audit of the implementation of this Act not later than 2 years after the first payments are made under this Act, and every 3 years thereafter. Such audit shall include an assessment of payment accuracy, program integrity, administrative costs, and the effectiveness of outreach efforts under Section 11(c). The Comptroller General shall submit the results of each audit to the committees described in subsection (a).

(a) INTERIM GUIDANCE. — Not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall issue such interim guidance as may be necessary to carry out this Act upon its effective date.

(b) FINAL REGULATIONS. — Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall issue such final regulations as may be necessary or appropriate to carry out this Act. Until such final regulations take effect, the interim guidance issued under subsection (a) shall govern.

If any provision of this Act, or the application of such provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be unconstitutional or otherwise invalid, the remainder of this Act, and the application of such provision to other persons or circumstances, shall not be affected thereby.

(a) EFFECTIVE DATE. — This Act shall take effect on the date that is 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act.

(b) FIRST PAYMENT PERIOD. — Notwithstanding Section 3(i), the first payment period under this Act shall begin on the first day of the first full calendar month beginning on or after the effective date of this Act and shall end on the following September 30. Each subsequent payment period shall be as defined in Section 3(i).

(c) TRANSITIONAL DETERMINATIONS. — For the first payment period under this Act, the Secretary shall—

(1) determine the five-year moving average using the five most recently completed fiscal years for which final audited budget results have been published by the Office of Management and Budget as of the effective date of this Act;

(2) determine the total number of eligible individuals as soon as practicable before the beginning of the first payment period; and

(3) publish the information described in Section 4(f) as soon as practicable before the beginning of the first payment period.

Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord (2018) showed that the Fermi paradox dissolves once we take our uncertainty about the Drake equation's parameters seriously: the silence of the cosmos is unsurprising given what we actually know. This essay argues that their result is not a contingent fact about our particular universe but a generic prediction. Under a simple multiverse model, most sentient observers in most possible worlds should expect to find themselves alone.

The argument runs as follows. Assume a multiverse in which every possible physical configuration is instantiated, weighted roughly uniformly. From the fine-tuning literature, we know that the fraction of configurations capable of producing complex chemistry, stable stars, and long-lived planets is extraordinarily small. The fraction capable of producing sentient technological civilizations is smaller still. This gives us a distribution of expected civilizations per configuration that is overwhelmingly concentrated at zero, with a thin tail of configurations that produce any sentience at all. Observation selection guarantees that we find ourselves somewhere in that tail, but it does not guarantee that we find ourselves deep in it.

If the tail thins faster than linearly (that is, if configurations producing N civilizations become rarer faster than N grows), then even under observer-weighted reasoning, the typical observer inhabits a universe where sentience is rare. The expected number of technological civilizations in such a universe is small, and is probably exactly one. The silence of the cosmos, on this account, is not a puzzle to be solved but a generic prediction of the model.

This argument depends on several assumptions, which should be stated plainly.

(A1) A multiverse of the relevant kind exists.

(A2) Physical configurations within it are weighted approximately uniformly, or at least not in a way that overwhelmingly favors sentience-producing configurations.

(A3) The fine-tuning results from cosmology extend in the relevant way: the viable region of parameter space does not merely shrink as we add requirements for habitability, but shrinks fast enough that the tail of the distribution is thinner than linear.

(A4) One of the standard observation-selection frameworks (SSA or SIA) applies.

If any of these assumptions is wrong, the conclusion may not follow.

Consider a multiverse in which every possible physical configuration, meaning every combination of fundamental constants, laws, and initial conditions, is realized. Assume that each configuration is instantiated roughly equally often. The assumption here is that no particular class of configuration is overwhelmingly favored.

Each configuration has some expected number of sentient technological civilizations it produces over its lifetime. Call this E[N]. We are interested in the distribution of E[N] across configurations.

From decades of work on fine-tuning in physics, we know that the region of parameter space compatible with complex chemistry, stable stars, and long-lived planets is extraordinarily small. The region compatible with abiogenesis is smaller still. The region compatible with the full chain from abiogenesis through multicellular life to sentient technological civilization is smaller again.

This gives us a distribution of E[N] that is overwhelmingly concentrated at zero. The vast majority of configurations produce no sentience whatsoever. They lack stable atoms, or chemistry, or stars, or planets, or simply any viable path from matter to mind. A thin tail of configurations has some small positive E[N]. A thinner tail still has large E[N].

The qualitative claim here, that the habitable region of parameter space is very small, is well established and essentially uncontroversial in physics. The quantitative claim that this argument requires is stronger: that the density of configurations drops faster than linearly as E[N] increases. This is plausible on the grounds that a configuration producing more civilizations requires more of its parameter space to be viable for life, so that each additional increment of E[N] imposes an additional constraint on the parameter space, compounding multiplicatively to produce a roughly exponential shrinkage. The argument here depends on the shape of a distribution that we can only estimate roughly.

We exist. This tells us that we do not inhabit one of the sterile configurations. But it does not tell us which non-sterile configuration we should expect to inhabit.

There are two standard frameworks for reasoning about this, both formalized by Bostrom (2002). Under the Self-Sampling Assumption (SSA), we reason as if we are randomly drawn from all observers in the multiverse. Under the Self-Indication Assumption (SIA), we weight each configuration by the number of observers it contains, so that configurations with more observers are proportionally more likely to be ours.

SIA is sometimes taken to favor finding ourselves in a universe rich with life. But this only follows if the distribution of E[N] has a sufficiently heavy tail. To see why, consider what SIA does: it reweights each configuration by its total number of observers. If we assume the number of observers scales roughly with the number of civilizations, then SIA multiplies the prior probability of each configuration by something proportional to N. This makes high-N configurations more likely to be ours. But if the density of configurations drops faster than 1/N as E[N] increases, then the SIA reweighting by N is not enough to compensate for the rarity of those configurations. The product of "N times the density at N" still shrinks as N grows. Given the distribution described above, where each additional increment of E[N] imposes compounding constraints on parameter space, this appears to be the case, though the conclusion is only as strong as our estimate of the tail's shape.

Under either SSA or SIA, then, the typical observer plausibly finds themselves in a configuration drawn from the low-E[N] tail: a universe where sentience is possible but deeply improbable, and where it happens exactly once. This conclusion is robust to the choice between SSA and SIA, though it is not robust to all possible choices of measure over the multiverse.

In such a universe, the expected number of technological civilizations is small. If the distribution of E[N] among non-sterile configurations is approximately continuous and concentrated near zero, then observation selection, which conditions on at least one civilization existing, places us in a configuration where E[N] is just large enough to make that likely. The expected number is therefore on the order of one. The expected number of simultaneous technological civilizations is smaller still, since even that small number must be spread across cosmic time.

This provides a resolution of the Fermi paradox that does not require any special mechanism. We do not need to explain why a seemingly hospitable universe is empty. The universe is not particularly hospitable. We are the product of a configuration that barely permits sentience, and we should not expect company.

It is worth being precise about what this argument does and does not achieve. Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord showed that, given our actual uncertainty about the parameters governing life in this universe, we should not be surprised to find ourselves alone. Their argument is epistemic: it is about what we should expect given what we know. The argument here is structural: it claims that the distribution over possible physical configurations, combined with observation selection, generically produces universes in which their result holds. If this is right, the Sandberg et al. finding is the expected outcome across the multiverse.

Other frameworks, including single-universe models with early Great Filters, also predict the Fermi observation. The claim here is not that the multiverse explanation is uniquely correct, but that it is sufficient: if you accept the assumptions, the silence follows, and no further explanation is needed. It is consistent with any given universe having extremely sharp filters, because this is what a universe with low but not zero E[N] should look like.

Given these assumptions, a silent universe should be the generic prediction.

Five days later, let us add two things.

One, Jeffrey Epstein definitely had dyslexia. See this screenshot:

Sourced from this file: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01787309.pdf

This makes it easier to understand how he is, possibly, the worst email writer of all time, while still running a rather successful criminal conspiracy. Dyslexic and dumb are different things. Dyslexic people can be plenty smart and still write terribly.

Second, I was pretty sure he had dyslexia on November 16th, 2025. I posted a hash drop here, which (if you are not familiar) is a signature of a specific file or block of data that proves you have it without publishing the file itself.

The file itself is this:

to prove i knew this early if it comes up later

in one of the epstein investo pieces from close to his arrest and death, one of his friends says that he, the friend, has a son with dyslexia who looks up to epstein

the only reason to mention the son has dyslexia is if epstein does

which is about the 'Talented Mr Epstein' piece I reference in the original version of this post. Anyone familiar with hash functions can verify that the hash drop proves I had this on November 16th.

I didn't want to deal with the (imho, inevitable) shitstorm from it, which is more or less currently happening, and I am going to specifically try to limit my involvement in that as much as possible.

I do not think it is good that participants in public discussions are so trigger-happy that you can't say something like this without expecting blowback. Even when the evidence was thin, and even if I were wrong, it would be better if people could say things like "I think this rightfully hated public figure probably had dyslexia" without expecting that it would be taken as a defense of that person or an attack on people with dyslexia.

Follows the original piece, which is less definitive.

So just to start: Please don't be weird.

I have been putting this off for months because I don't want to deal with people's strange opinions about what my agenda is for saying that Jeffrey Epstein probably had dyslexia (or a similar disability). I don't have one. I just think he had dyslexia. This maybe, somewhat, should adjust how dumb you think his writing makes him look. Please be normal about it.

Basically everyone who has read any of the Epstein files so far has noticed how badly written his emails are. That can be a lot of things, including being born before 1960, being too lazy to learn to type, typing on a phone or tablet, being a flex, or just being dumb. The emails are remarkably bad, though, even for all of those things. It is hard to see how you mess up at writing this badly if you don't have dyslexia. This evidence alone is weak, but it's why I started looking.

There's a picture of him posed in front of a blackboard where he spells his name EPSTINE. There are a few reasons why someone could make this mistake, but he doesn't look high (and in fact, allegedly didn't drink or do drugs at all), he isn't just learning to write, and he seems to be smart enough to breathe at least, so it's hard to see how this doesn't mean he has dyslexia. How many times have you written your name incorrectly as an adult? How many times have you even seen someone write their own name incorrectly as an adult?

There's this bit in a magazine from 2003:

On the other hand, Epstein is clearly very generous with friends. Joe Pagano, an Aspen-based venture capitalist, who has known Epstein since before his Bear Stearns days, can’t say enough nice things: “I have a boy who’s dyslexic, and Jeffrey’s gotten close to him over the years…. Jeffrey got him into music. He bought him his first piano. And then as he got to school he had difficulty … in studying … so Jeffrey got him interested in taking flying lessons.”

Vanity Fair, The Talented Mr. Epstein

Why is the son being dyslexic relevant? It's a weird thing to mention. Maybe it's just part of depicting him as a nice guy; the next passage mentions Epstein being concerned for someone with Down's syndrome. He cares about children with disabilities, or something. But the dyslexia reference is a quote, and specifically mentions that the boy is dyslexic, which is basically not relevant to anything that follows, but is relevant if the kid needed a role model who also had the same learning disability.

There's this substack post, where Joscha Bach is explaining that we shouldn't judge him for the contents of his emails to Jeffrey Epstein (lol, lmao):

During some of my time in Cambridge, Epstein sent frequently short, dyslexic emails with random thoughts in my direction. I tried to probe and understand his world view, which was highly unusual and often darker and more radical than anyone else I’ve ever talked to.

Joscha is German, and sort of, let us say, a colorful character. So maybe choosing the word "dyslexic" instead of "incoherent" or, really, any other word that does not refer to a specific medical disability is him being German, or colorful. Or maybe he literally means dyslexic. It certainly seems like an odd coincidence if he just happened to choose the word!

To end with some comic relief, Epstein spells Palantir, out loud, when talking to Ehud Barak, as Pallentier. This isn't quite as impressive as mis-spelling your own name in chalk while posing for a photo, but it is pretty impressive. I cannot think of anything else I have seen spelled this badly in some time, and he's doing it out loud! He has to say each letter! He manages to say that Palantir is spelled P-A-L-L-E-N-T-I-E-R one letter at a time without it sounding wrong.

If he didn't have dyslexia he deserves some kind of award for being, possibly, the most dyslexic-seeming non-dyslexic possible.

'Respect' means many things, not one or two or three. It is an infinitely flexible word.

You can be told to respect your elders, to respect women, to take your hat off to be respectful, to respect someone's boundaries, to respect a weapon, to be respectful by listening quietly, to respect nature, to pay respects the dead, to respect yourself, to respect the law, to respect the game by following the rules. You can earn respect, give respect, or demand respect.

These all mean different things, but it is one thing: the correct regard for something, either being shown or deserved. 'Respect' can be used, over time, to convey an entire world view and code of conduct. How much respect someone or something deserves, and how that is meant to be expressed, can cover almost anything about anyone's behavior. People differ in what they think deserves respect, or how much of it. I cannot precisely say what 'respect' actually is any more than I can say what 'polite' is. Statements about respect or politeness are arguments about the right way to act, not facts about the world.

If this is alien to you, you can just think of it as 'polite' but with a lot more weight to it.

How familiar this is depends a lot on your background. I've heard the word used this way thousands of times. It is so distinct and specific that it is effectively a matter of speaking a different dialect. For many people, it seems that the only time they hear 'respect' used in this way is from an authority figure who is telling them what to do. Conversely, if this is in your background, language about what to do or how to behave that doesn't use this device is fundamentally alien. Saying something is "offensive" and that it's "disrespectful" are often more or less interchangeable, and which one you hear depends primarily on the dialect of the person speaking to you. In either case, you're likely being told what to do by someone who speaks a different dialect than you do, and this changes how it lands.

On one notable occasion there was a group that went semicultish whose rallying cry was “Rationality! Reason! Objective reality!” (More on this later.) Labeling the Great Idea “rationality” won’t protect you any more than putting up a sign over your house that says “Cold!” You still have to run the air conditioner— expend the required energy per unit time to reverse the natural slide into cultishness. Worshipping rationality won’t make you sane any more than worshipping gravity enables you to fly. You can’t talk to thermodynamics and you can’t pray to probability theory. You can use it, but not join it as an in-group.

Certain rationalists are prone to telling people, in great detail, that rationalism is not a religion. Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about how Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult and then wrote three separate essays either denying or mocking the idea that what he was in or leading a cult, which sends sort of a mixed message.

My immediate reaction is that rationalism is so obviously a religion that it is insulting to deny it. People whose opinions I respect have the exact opposite reaction.

This comes down to a question of definition, which is fundamentally arbitrary. There are undeniably traits that traditional religions have and rationalism lacks, and if you think these are good litmus tests for being or not being a religion, rationalism is not a religion.

I would hope that a sober examination of the entire thing will convince almost anyone that it's at least extremely religion-ish. Rationalism is undeniably a very particular group of people. It has been described as a community, a scene, and a movement. Rather than trying to define 'religion' and argue if it applies, we can look at what traits rationalism shares with well-recognized religions and see if the comparison helps us to understand rationalism. What is rationalism like in practice?

In short, rationalists tend to hold a few specific texts and their authors in extremely high regard and to be focused intensely on an end-of-the-world narrative. Many members look to rationalism as a defining system for how to think and how to live their lives. Some believe that they are on a mission to save the world. Rationalism has extremely specific ingroup language and shibboleths, has its own organizations and meetings, and has produced a number of schisms, cults, and heresies.

These are the traits of traditional religions that rationalism does not have:

• Belief in the supernatural

• Rituals of prayer or meditation

• Exclusivity, that is, only being able to adhere to one religion

Pretty much any other major feature of religion you can name is present in rationalism. Rationalism's resemblance to traditional religion is so extreme that even if rationalism is not, technically, a religion, this seems like it is a pedantic distinction. It certainly has very distinct beliefs and rituals of its own, and only narrowly misses those points of comparison on what seem to be technicalities.

Systems are what they do. Religions are, tautologically, the things that we call religions, and anything else which does these things should also be considered a religion, or at least religion-ish.

For a more extensive examination of what religion is in terms of human behavior, I recommend Durkheim. We will use our working definition: religion is the things that religions do. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.

So: What does religion do?

Religions are characterized by the influence that they have on the thoughts and behavior of their adherents.

Let's take communism, to pick a difficult example. Communism is not a religion and ordinarily does not resemble one very much. People can be communists extremely casually or extremely seriously, all the way up to being long-term communist party officials, without any of their behavior seeming very religious. In specific cases, however, communism appears quite religious based on the behavior of those practicing it. Nothing from the outside separates a devoted practitioner of Soviet Communism in 1950s Moscow from a devoted adherent to any world religion other than the supernatural element. This person attends party meetings like church, participates in May Day parades like Christmas, sings the Internationale like a hymn, performs self-criticism as strict as any confession, maintains a shrine to Lenin in their home like a saint, studies Marx like it's the Bible and organizes their entire life around the ideology.

Communism may not technically be a religion, but in such cases it might as well be. It sure does quack like a duck. Often this would be called a cult, but we can just call it a religion or, at least, remarkably religion-ish.

For an example that's only slightly religion-ish, loyalty to a specific sports team is, of course, not a proper modern religion, but it resembles the civic religions of Greece to a remarkable degree. In Athens, the Panhellenic Games, including the precursor to the modern Olympic games, were explicitly religious festivals consecrated to the gods Zeus, Apollo, and Poseidon. They took place in consecrated sanctuaries which were major centers of worship for those gods, and the competition was meant to honor the god of the sanctuary and to bring favor to your city and to the patron god of your city. Concretely: an athlete from Athens competing in the Olympics was trying to bring home favor from Zeus for Athens and its patron, Athena.

I confess that I enjoy this comparison in part because it implies that mascots are a sort of modern patron deity for a city, and it amuses me to think of Gritty as a patron god of Philadelphia. Regardless, it is hopefully clear how this could make the sometimes extreme and otherwise baffling behavior surrounding sporting events somewhat less confusing. Sports is not a religion, and it's not even very religion-ish, but it's just a little bit religion-ish.

Most voluntary associations are going to be just a little bit religion-ish. Fun examples to consider are Burning Man, Anthrocon, Disney World, Star Wars and Taylor Swift concerts. You can try to rank these all on a spectrum between being a Flyers fan in the cult of Gritty and having a Lenin shrine in your home. Are they more like being into hockey, or devoting your entire life to Comrade Lenin?

Where do we put rationalism? To answer that, we need to look at where rationalism came from, what its core beliefs are, and how rationalists behave as a result of those beliefs.

Transhumanism is the direct ancestor of rationalism. Transhumanism is about the future of technology and humanity in general. It includes the ideas of artificial intelligence, superintelligence, and life extension, with which rationalism is quite concerned. These ideas predate rationalism, were commonly discussed before rationalism, and would exist without rationalism even though they are core rationalist ideas.

On the one hand these things are, very very explicitly, not supernatural beliefs. They are completely naturalistic ideas about things which could, plausibly, happen in the future of human science. Whether or not you believe in these things is completely irrelevant to whether they're true, you are not encouraged to pray for them, and they make no claims about anything that might be considered magical, spiritual, or anything similar. If there were convincing evidence that any of these things were not true, rationalism would dictate that you should no longer think they were true.

On the other hand, it is not plausible that people talking and thinking about creating a nigh-omnipotent being and becoming immortal are not experiencing almost the same things that anyone in a traditional religion would. Compare this to talking and thinking about Jesus loving you forever in heaven. Provided that you're of the same species as your average devout Christian, and "omnipotent" and "happy" and "forever" mean roughly the same things to both you and them, you ought to be having pretty similar thoughts and feelings.

It's true, every cause does want to become a cult. This cause is about building a God and living forever, and it wants to become a cult about that. This is awfully similar to every religious apocalypse with a happy ending that has ever been written, it will inspire similar thoughts and feelings, and the cult that this wants to become looks a lot like every religion with an apocalypse.

Either rationalists (and, apparently, only rationalists) are able to contemplate being immortal and happy in perfect world without being kind of weird about it, or rationalism is, inherently, always going to impact people who take it seriously in basically the same way that religion impacts people.

If the impact on emotion and behavior is about the same, why does it matter if the belief is supernatural? People who believe supernatural things don't keep them in a special, separate part of their brain that has only their supernatural beliefs. It's true that traditional religions, if they contemplate an eternal and perfect life after this one, will do so supernaturally, but is that actually important to the impact of the belief? I don't think it is, and I don't see how it even could be.

Accepting that we're using the word 'religion' loosely, I do not actually think that rationalism is a religion like Christianity or Buddhism is a religion. I think that transhumanism is. It's large, what it means is sort of vague, and there's a lot of possible ways to interpret it. Rationalism is more like a specific sect of transhumanism, the way Calvinists are a sect of Christianity and Zen Buddhism is a sect of Buddhism. It is by far the most influential type of transhumanism, so much so that probably more people have heard of rationalism than transhumanism these days.

Rationalism becoming its own distinct thing starts in 2010. It is characterized primarily by Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings and secondarily by Scott Alexander's, with various other works being commonly read and discussed by the same group of people to a lesser extent.

Eliezer Yudkowsky develops and spreads two core ideas that are not common in transhumanism before him:

• That superintelligent AI, once made, will probably kill everyone on Earth, and it is likely to be very difficult to prevent it from being made and killing everyone on Earth.

• That people can become better at distinguishing true things, or if you prefer, become more rational, by a series of practices, notably and especially applying Bayes' Theorem from probability theory to evaluating facts.

These two things are very explicitly linked. The purpose of being more rational is to better deal with real-world problems, and especially to deal with the problem of everyone being killed by a superintelligent AI. For example:

And by the same token, I didn’t fall into the conjugate trap of saying: Oh, well, it’s not as if I had code and was about to run it; I didn’t really come close to destroying the world. For that, too, would have minimized the force of the punch. It wasn’t really loaded? I had proposed and intended to build the gun, and load the gun, and put the gun to my head and pull the trigger; and that was a bit too much self-destructiveness.

[...]

And so I realized that the only thing I could have done to save myself, in my previous state of ignorance, was to say: “I will not proceed until I know positively that the ground is safe.” And there are many clever arguments for why you should step on a piece of ground that you don’t know to contain a landmine; but they all sound much less clever, after you look to the place that you proposed and intended to step, and see the bang.

I understood that you could do everything that you were supposed to do, and Nature was still allowed to kill you. That was when my last trust broke. And that was when my training as a rationalist began.

This body of work is huge and talks about a great many other things, but this is the core of rationalism. In the same way that the idea of creating a God and living forever is inherently going to inspire religion-like feelings and behaviors, the idea that everyone on Earth may die if people generally or you personally are not sufficiently rational will inherently inspire religious feelings and behaviors. This is inherent to the idea. It has end-times cult energy, it is faith-shaped, its essence is zealot-nature, it is the sort of core that our world religions are shaped around.

People who read these things and take them seriously tend to get along with each other, and they form a community or a scene. They are heavily concentrated on a few parts of the internet and in the San Francisco Bay Area, where a number of them deliberately migrated to be a part of the scene. Rationalists sometimes describe their community as insular and weird, and I think that's a fair characterization.

Rationalism is fundamentally an author fandom, and it has a deeply religious personality because the ideas the authors talk about are inherently religious in impact. I have been to book clubs, Bible study, and rationalist reading groups, and I defy anyone who has been to all three to tell me the rationalist reading group is more like the book club than the Bible study.

Take this, from the post linked at the top:

The community contains tons of disagreement about facts about the world, and even the sequences. in the current bay area sequences reading group, one of the default prompts for the readings is 'do you disagree with anything here? if so, what?' and then people debate about it.

First, this assumes you know what the sequences are, because they are so important that everyone does. (They're a collection of Eliezer Yudkowsky's blog posts). Second, it assumes that disagreeing with the sequences is surprising. It sort of is: most rationalists really do just believe that most if not all of what's in the sequences is not only correct, but obviously so. If you hear someone mention the sequences, a safe assumption is that they're about to agree, either implicitly or aggressively, with what's in them and describe what's currently going on in relation to them. When rationalists disagree with the sequences those disagreements tend to be relatively minor. Disagreement is, actually, somewhat taboo.

I suspect that because most rationalists are from Christian backgrounds, and disproportionately from fundamentalist Christian backgrounds, this doesn't really sound like religion to them. Fundamentalist Christians are not famous for being big readers, as a rule. If your idea of religion is fundamentalist Christianity, you probably see arguing with each other about the meaning of something or disagreeing with it as fundamentally non-religious. This is an understandable mistake. It also explains reacting to claims that rationalism is a religion as if it's an insult and not just a description of what rationalism is. Christianity is, however, not the only religion on Earth, and there are many things that are religions without resembling Christianity very much.

I feel reasonably certain that Judaism alone proves that "not arguing about things" is not, in fact, a defining trait of religions. Reading canonical writings about the meaning of life and the correct way to think and then having a detailed argument about it is an inherently sacred act in Judaism. What rationalism as an institution most seems to resemble is a very culturally Jewish form of transhumanism. Rationalism focuses intensely upon apocalyptic doom, and highly values a specific sort of education, scholarship, and debate as practices towards preventing it. Perhaps not coincidentally, Eliezer was raised as an Orthodox Jew. (And honestly? Thank God for that. Peter Thiel is currently preaching an esoterically Christian form of transhumanism, and it's a fucking nightmare. May it find no disciples.)

We will admit the distinction: Rationalism does not have rituals of meditation or prayer, and if that is what "spirituality" is and religions are "things with spirituality", then rationalism is not a religion. I think that the intensity of focus and scholarship surrounding works that are taken this seriously rises to the level of a religious practice, or at least, cannot credibly be compared to anything else nearly as well as it can be compared to intense study of sacred text.

We can sketch out the size of the community's real-world footprint in brief, although it is probably smaller now than it was at its peak. The organizing page on lesswrong.com currently shows 226 local groups worldwide. In the Bay Area, which is the epicenter of rationalism, there are perhaps half a dozen obviously rationalist nonprofits with tens of millions in assets and several dozen full-time employees. Events range from local meetups to annual gatherings drawing hundreds, with an active core community numbering in the thousands. One of the best-attended events is Secular Solstice, which is basically rationalist Christmas, and there have been a number of rationalist group homes. I cannot think of another fandom that has anything like this.

This is our last real point of difference from traditional religion.

Can you be a rationalist and also be something else? Can you be a rationalist without it coming to define you?

Exclusivity is not, actually, characteristic of religions. Exclusivity is characteristic, especially, of Abrahamic religions, but you can e.g. practice Buddhism and Shinto and this is basically normal. So long as the major concerns of the religions themselves are non-overlapping, this works out fine. The Abrahamic religions make this difficult specifically because they explicitly declare that you may have the one, and only one, religion. Like many rules, these must exist for a reason: without them, people do actually tend to end up practicing more than one religion, in whole or part.

So can you be a rationalist and something else? Sort of. Rationalism is explicitly atheist, and it is somewhat difficult to reconcile believing everything in rationalism with most forms of traditional religions. Buddhism, however, has non-supernatural forms, especially in America, and there are a few notable rationalist Quakers, although Quakers allow for non-theist adherents. It is, let us say, somewhat complicated. Anyone can, of course, simply embrace parts of rationalism and continue to adhere to a traditional theism, and it's not extremely likely that anyone would care to stop them.

Can you be a rationalist without it defining you? That depends entirely on how seriously you take it. People can, of course, read the blog posts or the fan fiction, not take them extremely seriously, and go on with their lives. This probably accounts for most readers. People who call themselves rationalists sometimes say the defining trait of rationalism is taking weird ideas seriously, and this is certainly a major feature of the community. If you take the possibility that the world is going to end because of AI seriously, it is extremely likely to define your world view and the choices you make with your life. It would be bizarre if you took the idea seriously and it didn't.

Even restricting who and what we consider rationalism to organizations explicitly affiliated with Eliezer Yudkowsky personally, there are dozens of people who have made ideas associated with rationalism their life's work. Often people would make more money in private industry, and choose not to. In non-profit corpo-speak, we would say the people working there are mission-driven employees. Rationalist endeavors tend to be well-staffed with mission-driven employees. These official rationalists have offered seminars, run summer camps, distributed copies of books, and produced untold volumes of literature meant to spread rationalist ideas and teach people rationalist techniques.

If you take the core ideas of the sequences seriously, it is irrational not to make them a major focus of your life. How concerned should you be if the world is likely to end soon, but can be stopped by doing the correct thing? Should you make it your life's work, excluding all else? Should you advocate for accepting nuclear war, if it's necessary to prevent AI research? If this is not the "ancient, powerful monster" that has raised and destroyed civilizations, is it not trying to become something very like it?

To his credit, Yudkowsky does not seem to especially want to have a cult. He seems sort of frustrated that everything around him is constantly trying to become a cult. He obviously benefits from having a well-funded non-profit with a ton of mission-motivated employees, and he denies being in or leading a cult somewhat regularly, but anything outside that domain doesn't seem to have very much to do with him personally.

Nevertheless, a worldview centered on preventing an imminent apocalypse is extremely easy to weaponize. Extraordinary urgency justifies extraordinary demands. People can, and have, sacrificed their normal lives, severed ties with outsiders, and deferred everything to leaders whom they thought were important to the cause. They have killed, died, and gone to prison.

Ozy Brennan's article about rationalist cults is better at describing this dynamic than any I would hope to write about the topic. It does not dwell on the apocalyptic parts perhaps as much as I would. Nevertheless, the basic germ of it is this:

The Sequences make certain implicit promises. There is an art of thinking better, and we’ve figured it out. If you learn it, you can solve all your problems, become brilliant and hardworking and successful and happy, and be one of the small elite shaping not only society but the entire future of humanity.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, not true.

Multiple interviewees remarked that the Sequences create the raw material for a cult. [...]

This describes it perfectly. The thing is, there's no meaningful difference between 'the raw material for a cult' and 'the raw material for a religion'. Any time a group of people shares these beliefs and takes them seriously, you have something functionally religious. Cults are just religious sects that are new, horrible, or both.

Almost never.

You should almost never be vague when writing or speaking for a large audience. Approximately everything posted on the internet is for a large audience. Much of it is much more vague than it should be.

You are almost certainly vague in many instances when you did not mean to be vague. This is a completely normal way to speak if you are speaking to less than fifty people, where everyone you are speaking to has basically the same frame of reference as you do, or when you can assume that people will ask you what you meant if it is not clear to them. This covered almost all conversations for almost all people for all of recorded history until sometime around the year 2010. We have somewhat learned to adjust for this change, but mostly we have not. This causes something like half of all drama.

Let's say that I notice that the president of my city's amateur CourtBall association is a douchebag. I am a huge CourtBall enthusiast, and I would love to join for some competitive CourtBall instead of just playing pickup, but I don't want someone to set my car on fire in the parking lot after a game, as he is known to do. Everyone else involved in managing the city's amateur CourtBall association is a relative or childhood friend of his, they are never going to replace him and they are almost as bad as he is. Very few people in my city are willing to play CourtBall seriously due to this, and people constantly bemoan the death of the sport.

In my normal, day to day, life, I can say a series of things that are unequivocally true:

• CourtBall is dead.

• CourtBall players are lunatics

• Everyone who is not a lunatic gets driven out of CourtBall by the freak ghouls that play CourtBall.

• We might as well ban competitive CourtBall, because it only causes grief.

Probably I am not going to run into anyone in my city who has a very different opinion and whose feelings I am upset about hurting. On the off chance they play pickup CourtBall and have never heard of the competition scene, they will ask me what the hell I am talking about and I will say "oh, the local CourtBall association is a nightmare". They will get over it. This will take about three seconds of my time. (If they're in the association, fuck 'em, they need to hear it, I'm insulting them on purpose.)

If I post this on the internet, literally everyone on Earth who plays CourtBall, whether amateur or professional, competitive or non-competitive, in my city or out of my city, can hear my opinion. They have no idea what I am talking about and I sound like I am crazy, stupid, malicious, or some combination thereof. I may, eventually, get the chance to clarify that I am referring to my 1) local 2) amateur 3) competitive CourtBall scene, or really to 4) one specific guy and his friends in that scene. Almost nobody will see me saying this because people saying sane things aren't good clickbait. Also, there's a ton of crazy people on the internet, and people just straight up lie about this sort of thing, so there's no reason for anyone to believe me.

(I was going to use pickleball and for all I know my city has major pickleball drama. Plenty of people know what city I live in, and I have absolutely no idea what's going on with any sport I don't pay attention to.)

So I shouldn't be vague. I should keep my mouth shut or I should be very specific about who I am insulting and what I am insulting them for, because otherwise a ton of people I do not intend to insult will justifiably feel insulted since the thing I have said literally and directly insults them.

Just so we're clear: this generalizes to basically anything. It has nothing to do with sports in my specific city. It applies to every -ism, all the -ists, every hobby, every interest, every site, every fandom, and any other social niche. Given that this starts absurd fights about relatively minor things, it seems like it's also a good idea to avoid doing this for any identifiable group of people larger than a specific family.

This runs afoul of norms where some people, sometimes, consider it okay to insult large groups of people if the groups of people are not characterized by any sort of voluntary association. Insulting groups of people based on involuntary traits, that is, things they cannot change has a rich and layered history and my considered opinion is that you should not do it. Anyone promoting a norm around it that tries to be cute and say sometimes you can just insult large groups of people for immutable traits is someone you should hit with sticks.

Here are the types of vagueness to avoid:

• Who you are talking about: ideally grievances should be with a specific person

• Why you are talking about them: ideally you should state exactly what they did

• What, if anything, you think should be done. "I have no idea" is a valid answer to this question, and is less ambiguous than not addressing the question.

If you simply do this you can avoid the vast majority of friendly fire on the internet.

You can sometimes say incredibly vague things and instead of everyone feeling insulted, nobody does. This is because they always imagine that you are insulting someone who is not them, and they will all agree with it or at least pass over it. If you are trying to accomplish this, there are a few tricks.

• Be extremely vague, so vague that whatever you're saying is a Rorschach test.

• Say something that sounds sort of specific, but refers to almost nobody, and then in the same breath imply a much larger group of people, but never say it. You can then act like people are being irrational when they react to the thing you implied.

• Make sure you are extremely well-liked before you start vagueing in this way.

Personally I would prefer it if you didn't do this, because this sort of passive-aggressive bullshit is a huge part of why many people assume the worst of anyone saying anything vague. I would prefer it if we could all, collectively, agree to stop peeing in the pool. Be direct when you intend hostility.

I would be negligent if I did not acknowledge that it sometimes happens. Also, I am trying to do it here. Who am I insulting? You have no idea. It sounds sort of hostile but you are pretty sure I'm not insulting you. If you imagine I am insulting someone specific, it's probably someone you don't like. Choose-your-own-adventure. If it matters: I am not actually insulting anyone in particular. Or, I am insulting a few dozen people, one of whom is myself.

Honest.

So, Scott Alexander sent an email to someone in 2014. In 2021 the person who got that email thought that Scott was not being honest about his relationship to the neoreactionary movement, so they published it.

Although this has been widely available, even people who have read it have often missed what the email is saying. There are some cases of genuine ambiguity, where there can be more than one meaning. There are also cases where there is only one plausible meaning, but that meaning is expressed indirectly, subtly, or by linking to something else. Because what the email is saying can be difficult to understand, it seems like it would be of general interest to publish an explainer that went over these ambiguities and the links.

It has sometimes been said that this email should not be read because it was released without permission. This seems like a bad position.

First, because information is information. We know, due to the circumstances, that this was somewhat intended to be non-public and that someone had some specific motive to release it, but the information in the email itself is just as useful as it would be if released any other way. We know, for example, about the PRISM surveillance program and most of the planning for the Vietnam War in spite of attempts to conceal those documents. Ignoring information based on where it came from is, epistemically, a bad practice.

Second, because there was actually no confidence broken here. If someone who you are not close with disagrees with you and you send them an email that, among other things, threatens revenge if they tell anyone what's in the email, they do not owe you confidentiality. They do not really owe you anything. It is difficult to see what, precisely, would possibly establish a confidence here, other than the author of the email saying that the receiver can't tell anyone. If someone can articulate a specific and defensible rule which this disclosure violates, I do not know what it is.

We can apply some charity. Information from private parties should be evaluated on whether what is in them is, really, remarkable. There are things that would be maybe discrediting, but are sometimes unremarkable compared with the fact of the release itself, like an affair or a drug problem. In such cases, the main thing you have learned is usually not anything bad about the person whose information is made public, but that someone else wants to embarrass them, since such things are common.

In other cases you learn more remarkable things, like that someone is deliberately lying, or that they are deeply compromised in a manner that makes them a bad source of information. This would tend to outweigh concerns that someone was trying to hurt them for some other cause, and shouldn't be allowed to do so.

I would argue that this email meets that bar.

Quotes by other people will be higlighted to set them off, quotes by Scott are separated from the rest of the text by horizontal lines.

Scott Siskind███████████████████████████████ Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:12 PM

to me

[continuation of our convo from Facebook, because I don't like their chat interface]

I said a while ago I would collect lists of importantly correct neoreactionary stuff to convince you I'm not wrong to waste time with neoreactionaries. I would have preferred to collect stuff for a little longer, but since it's blown up now, let me make the strongest argument I can at this point:

1. HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct.

https://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/the-facts-that-need-to-be-explained/

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/survey-of-psychometricians-finds-isteve.html

This then spreads into a vast variety of interesting but less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses which should probably be more strongly investigated if we accept some of the bigger ones are correct. See eg http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/theorie/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed .

This is the claim about the appeal of neoreactionaries that was put first, which seems to imply it is the most important one, and it is about "HBD". HBD is an acronym for Human Biodiversity. We can look up what this means if we like, but this seems unfair to Scott. These were written in 2014, in the context of a very specific blogging culture, and even if "human biodiversity" is now widely used by white nationalists and eugenicists this does not mean everyone using the term "human biodiversity" was promoting white nationalism or eugenics.

To understand what this means in context, we can follow his links. The first goes to a post on the now-defunct blog Occidental Ascent, and opens:

Recap: In the US, there is a large stubborn Black-White differential in intelligence (section A). This differential, on the individual and population level, explains a large portion of the social outcome difference. Within populations, intelligence is highly heritable. As such, the behavioral genetic default is that this differential also has a high heritability (section N).

I think that this faithfully previews the contents of the article, which is very long. This blog as a whole seems to be almost entirely about, very explicitly, the relative intelligence of the American Black and White populations.

The second link is to a relatively short post on Steve Sailer's blog about how good psychometricians think Steve Sailer is when surveyed. The following four survey questions appear among the perhaps ten or fifteen total survey items mentioned:

Is there sufficient evidence to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the heritability of intelligence in populations of developed countries?

What are the sources of U.S. black-white differences in IQ?

Is there racial/ethnic content bias in intelligence tests?

[...] whether there was bias against lower SES and Africans in the western world, the mean agreement was about 4 out of 9.

This seems like a fairly high degree of emphasis to place on questions of Black and White IQ, given that this is a post specifically about how good Steve Sailer's blog is. At the risk of inserting my opinion, these are the only interesting or noteworthy questions in the post, which is, otherwise, mostly Steve Sailer reposting a press release about how well-respected Steve Sailer is.

In this context, these are the things Scott is calling "partially correct or at least very non-provably non-correct". Given what he is choosing to link, Scott is saying that he believes the American Black population is probably genetically stupid, and that this is the most important thing that he is interested in the neoreactionaries for saying. There is no other plausible meaning to saying this thing and then linking these articles.

His "less-well-supported HBD-type hypotheses" that maybe deserve investigation are, from the links, that inbreeding produces altruism, and whatever is in the book Albion's Seed, which I find completely inscrutable and which he has since reviewed elsewhere. In order to be connected to HBD, the book would need to be interpreted as being about genetics, which it does not mostly seem to be.

We get just a light touch of human racial categorization in the inbreeding/altruism discussion:

i dunno, but i see — maybe — the more inbred clannish fighters (yupik eskimos, moroccan jews, kuwaitis) having more cases of CAH than the more outbred peaceniks (new zealanders, norwegians, even northern italians). also…

but on the whole, there is nothing that seems easy to draw any particular conclusion from in these two links.

(I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by "appreciate", I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)

So far as I can tell, Scott has not either left the internet forever or sought some sort of horrible revenge. I am, very honestly, attempting to insert my opinion as little as possible, but there are limits to that. Taken literally, this seems like kind of a fucked up thing to say to a friend. Or a stranger. Anyone really. Why would you say this? Why would you write this in an email and then send it, on purpose, under any circumstance? This is not entirely a rhetorical question. In spite of some effort, I cannot really discern what would lead a person to write or send an email containing this line to another person. It would seem much easier to simply not send the email.

Threatening horrible revenge if people repeat the things that you say is, in general, pretty troubling. It's easy to gloss over it in context if you're just reading the email quickly. It seems like it raises a basic epistemic problem. Are people hiding things because someone has threatened to leave the internet or seek horrible revenge? Is this, in some sense, a normal or common thing that is happening?

The person who released these described Scott as 'a vague internet acquaintance', and said that 'no, he did not first say "can I tell you something in confidence?" or anything like that.' If this is what he is comfortable saying in an email to them, what is he comfortable saying in other settings? How thoroughly does he swear other people to secrecy, and about what?

This line also strongly and directly indicates that Scott is deliberately not saying in public what he believes when he discusses race, "HBD", etc. What is being said in public has some relationship to what he believes, but what he believes is a secret that nobody should ever disclose, and he will be very upset with them if they do disclose what he actually believes.

If you think that these are important questions to ask, and to get conclusive answers about, this seems like a very strange thing to do. If the idea itself is important, discussing the idea itself directly would also be very important.

2. The public response to this is abysmally horrible.

See for example Konk's comment http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jpj/open_thread_for_february_1824_2014/ala7 which I downvoted because I don't want it on LW, but which is nevertheless correct and important.

This is the linked comment:

The Doctrine of Academic Freedom, Let's give up on academic freedom in favor of justice from the Harvard Crimson

[Begins a subquote]:

No academic question is ever "free" from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of "academic freedom"?

Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of "academic justice." When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

[End subquote]

This already describes the reality on the ground, though to see it announced explicitly as a good and noble goal, by the upcoming generation, is disturbing. And people like Steven Pinker let are getting old. I'm now updating my trust for the conclusions of academic institutions and culture when they happen to coincide with their political biases downward further.

So far as I can tell, this means that Konk, and also Scott, believe that anything coming out of academic institutions about racism, sexism, heterosexism, or similar topics that agrees with the politics of academic institutions is not likely to be true. One can infer, pretty easily, that they believe the politics of universities are left wing (because they generally are). Then, this means "any academic research supporting left-wing conclusions about race, sex, or queerness is likely false". This is stated very indirectly, but there does not seem to be any actual ambiguity. There is no second, alternative thing that it might mean: it can mean only this.

See also http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/crazy-talk/

This is a page of what we would, nowadays, call "culture war slop". It opens like this:

Conservatives are crazy and racists are stupid, according to the latest research by college professors who could not possibly be biased. It's scientastic!

The page is very long, but essentially seems to be a list of incidents in which the author believes that universities are deliberately persecuting conservatives. We can infer that Scott believes that universities are deliberately persecuting conservatives, and that this is important.

3. Reactionaries are almost the only people discussing the object-level problem AND the only people discussing the meta-level problem. Many of their insights seem important. At the risk (well, certainty) of confusing reactionary insights with insights I learned about through Reactionaries, see:

http://cthulharchist.tumblr.com/post/76667928971/when-i-was-a-revolutionary-marxist-we-were-all-in

http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/review-of-exodus-by-paul-collier/

What object-level problem? What meta-level problem? There are two issues referenced by link in the email so far. One of these is that Blacks are stupider than Whites, and the other is that universities are liberal. We can try to clarify this by following his links.

The first link has rotted. By figuring its name is pretty unique, we can get to a post by Steve Sailer which is plucked from the middle of a Peter Hitchens article, and assume that this was a copy of the same thing on tumblr.

How I am partly to blame for Mass Immigration

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.

It wasn't because we liked immigrants, but because we didn't like Britain. We saw immigrants - from anywhere - as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.

This continues about how you would expect, and is a general anti-immigrant piece.

The second link is titled 'Review of "Exodus" by Paul Collier', and starts with this:

"Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed." – Paul Collier

In writing this book, Collier seeks to do two things. First, he wants to continue his work analyzing the poorest societies in the world.

Second – and much more interesting – he wants to rescue the immigration debate from Caplanization (or Gmule-ization, if you prefer). Caplanization is the process by which the proponents of a particular policy (in this case unrestricted immigration) argue for it in such a manner than virtually all reasonable people are attracted to the opposite position.

That piece goes on to examine arguments that immigration is bad and is maybe going to destroy America at some length. This genre of argument is, now, extremely familiar to all of us, because various elections have recently been won by people saying these sorts of things.

So the object-level problem is that many nonwhites are genetically inferior and stupid, and the meta-level problem is that Western society is incapable of confronting that fact, and allows those people to immigrate into Western countries. Again, this is obscure, in that what he means by these things is only obvious if you follow his links, but is not ambiguous, in that there is no other plausible meaning for this passage. There is no other "object-level problem" besides racial inferiority mentioned in the email previously, and no "meta-level problem" besides how Western society in 2014 handles race and immigration. The two problems are that nonwhite races are inferior, and Western society and especially its universities are allowing too much immigration, and react badly to being told that nonwhite races are inferior.

There is one less interesting footnote to this passage. There being a certainty that you are, or will sometimes, confuse insights that are not from reactionaries with the insights of reactionaries suggests that quite a lot of what you read is from reactionaries. So we can infer Scott knows most of his reading diet is various reactionaries.

4. These things are actually important

I suspect that race issues helped lead to the discrediting of IQ tests which helped lead to college degrees as the sole determinant of worth which helped lead to everyone having to go to a four-year college which helped lead to massive debt crises, poverty, and social immobility (I am assuming you can fill in the holes in this argument).

This seems to be an argument against Griggs v. Duke Power Co., a civil rights case decided in 1971 about enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It finds "that the company's employment requirements did not pertain to applicants' ability to perform the job, and so were unintentionally discriminating against black employees". This is generally taken as banning giving IQ tests to job applicants, and establishes the disparate impact test of civil rights and employment law.

So, the argument is that Griggs, specifically, was wrongly decided, that the practice of giving IQ tests for employment purposes in spite of disparate racial impact should have continued, and society would have less debt, less poverty, and more social mobility if Griggs had been decided the other way.

I think they're correct that "you are racist and sexist" is a very strong club used to bludgeon any group that strays too far from the mainstream - like Silicon Valley tech culture, libertarians, computer scientists, atheists, rationalists, et cetera. For complicated reasons these groups are disproportionately white and male, meaning that they have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for this. I'm not sure how much this retards their growth, but my highball estimate is "a lot".

This passage is straightforward enough that it does not seem like it needs explanation.

5. They are correct about a bunch of scattered other things

the superiority of corporal punishment to our current punishment system (google "all too humane" in http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ ). Robin Hanson also noted this, but there's no shame in independent rediscovering a point made by Robin Hanson. I think the Reactionaries are also correct about that it is very worrying that our society can't amalgamate or discuss this belief.

The "all too humane" section's point runs like this:

So once again, we have an uncanny valley. Being very nice to prisoners is humane and effective (Norway seems to be trying this with some success), but we're not going to do it because we're dumb and it's probably too expensive anyway. Being very strict to prisoners is humane and effective – the corporal punishment option. But being somewhere in the fuzzy middle is cruel to the prisoners and incredibly destructive to society – and it's the only route the progressives will allow us to take.

Some Reactionaries have tried to apply the same argument to warfare. Suppose that during the Vietnam War, we had nuked Hanoi. What would have happened?

It is unclear if Scott intended to reference both the pro-corporal-punishment and the pro-nuking-Hanoi positions of the reactionaries. Both are contained in the "all too humane" section of this post of his.

various scattered historical events which they seem able to parse much better than anyone else. See for example http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/review-of-the-last-lion-by-paul-reid/

This is a review of a biography of Churchill. It seems unremarkable in its analysis, other than the parts about how Churchill should have made peace with Hitler. Quote is taken from the middle, and is I think a faithful representation of what the review is trying to convey:

The story of the war – in Reid's telling – is almost nicely split into thirds. In the first third, Britain fights alone. In the second third, Russia does 90% of the fighting. In the last third, the US joins (though Russia still does the vast majority of the fighting and dictates the strategy for all powers combined).

In each third, it's worth considering why Churchill kept wanting to fight Hitler . . . and whether (in hindsight) he made the right decision considering his original objectives.

The First Third

The mystery of the first third is why Churchill didn't even consider seeking terms with Hitler during the years Britain fought alone.

Scott appears to think that the neoreactionaries have unique insight into whether or not Churchill should have fought Hitler.

Moldbug's theory of why modern poetry is so atrocious, which I will not bore you by asking you to read.

Alas, if we want to understand the email, we should go read about Moldbug's theory of poetry, which we are informed is very boring. Fortunately, the part of it that constitutes an actual "theory" is relatively short.

Certainly the best poetry of the 20th century was written from the '20s through the mid-'60s. [... a full paragraph and a half of nonsense ... ] The great disaster was the enormous expansion of higher education in the '60s and '70s. There is a reason so many college campuses have that abominable Brutalist architecture. Almost everyone who went through this gigantic, state-sponsored indoctrination machine had no reason at all to be there (please allow me to introduce you to Albert Jay Nock). They were there to be promoted in social class, perhaps also to avoid the draft. They were certainly not acquiring either vocational skills or wisdom and perspective. And nor are they still—certain areas of science and engineering, of course, excepted.

So poetry became bad after the mid-60s. This is because of the New Deal and/or Great Society higher education policies. These caused too many people to go to college, and this made poetry bad.

Given the racial context of the preceding parts of the email, and Curtis Yarvin's general track record, it is worth noting that the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and greatly expanded access to a university education for Black people, specifically. This happened at the same time as the general expansion of higher education under a series of other policies. This is, technically, ambiguous, but one obvious explanation is that Scott thinks poetry is bad now because Black people can attend universities.

Michael successfully alerted me to the fact that crime has risen by a factor of ten over the past century, which seems REALLY IMPORTANT and nobody else is talking about it and it seems like the sort of thing that more people than just Michael should be paying attention to.

Michael is most likely Michael Anissimov, a reactionary featured prominently in Scott's Anti-Reactionary FAQ. We can try to make sense of this claim in the context of that FAQ, which argues against Michael Anissimov. An archived copy from six days after this email was written will tell us what Scott's thinking about this was.

This was written (initially) a full year before the email, and the copy we have is almost exactly the same version that was up when the email was written, if it has changed at all. It indicates that Scott believes Michael is wrong about pretty much everything, and that the (relatively constant) homicide rate seems to indicate that the (much higher) crime rate probably means that the crime rate is only high because it is being reported more often.

That Scott already knew this, and he still thinks Michael Anissimov's statements about crime are interesting, is very strange. Almost everything Michael believes about society getting worse appears to be wrong. We know that Scott believes this, because he wrote a helpful FAQ about it. This is probably bad data, and probably doesn't mean anything about crime, actually. We know Scott knows this, too.

It is not clear why, some time later when writing this email, Scott has apparently forgotten what he himself wrote in his FAQ. If the only information offered by Michael Anissimov is that crime rates are high, and this lead to knowing that probably only reports are higher and this is bad data, this would seem like it is barely an insight at all. It's one graph-worth of information that you can source easily. Michael has given Scott one interesting but unimportant fact, a half-dozen lies, and some pretty good content for his FAQ.

I cannot really see what to make of this. There are a few possibilities. Possibly, Scott somehow forgot completely debunking this point. He could, also, have not considered any other way of finding basic statistics about crime. He could be deliberately lying because he thinks it's persuasive, and maybe did not consider that he already debunked this point in public. He could simply like that this statistic started good discussion on his blog, and feel like that's about the same as being interesting and valuable, even though it is so misleading that he debunks it in his FAQ.

None of these really makes it less strange. It seems like either something is wrong with him or he's deliberately lying.

6. A general theory of who is worth paying attention to.

Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn't work. Even things of theirs I didn't know - let's say some particular study proving homeopathy doesn't work that I had never read before - doesn't provide me with real value, since they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new (ie I so strongly assume such studies should exist that learning they actually exist changes nothing for me).

The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them. Despite considering myself pretty smart and clueful, I constantly learn new and important things (like the crime stuff, or the WWII history, or the HBD) from the Reactionaries. Anything that gives you a constant stream of very important new insights is something you grab as tight as you can and never let go of.

The garbage doesn't matter because I can tune it out.

This passage is the one that people seem to pay the most attention to.

"the crime stuff" probably refers to Michael Anissimov's crime statistics, which Scott has apparently debunked and then forgotten about debunking.

"the WWII history" refers, apparently, to the blog post about Churchill, and how Churchill should not have gone to war with Hitler.

"the HBD" refers to point 1 in the email about how Blacks are less smart than Whites.

Saying that he can tune out the garbage shows immense confidence. It does not seem well-supported, given that he is uncritically repeating claims about crime that he has previously debunked.

7. My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts

I am monitoring Reactionaries to try to take advantage of their insight and learn from them. I am also strongly criticizing Reactionaries for several reasons.

First is a purely selfish reason - my blog gets about 5x more hits and new followers when I write about Reaction or gender than it does when I write about anything else, and writing about gender is horrible. Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people.

2014 was before the terms "clickbait" or "audience capture" were very common, but this seems like a clear indication in those directions.

Second is goodwill to the Reactionary community. I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk - would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working - as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven't gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).

This is a very dense paragraph. Most of it is, mercifully, very clear, so we will not have to read it closely.

Scott wants the goodwill of the Reactionaries, he thinks they have a high intellectual standard, and he thinks their criticisms of class and social justice (and a few other things, which is ambiguous) are correct.

There is ambiguity about what dropping the "monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk" means. Does it mean no longer considering those priorities, or does it mean simply not talking about them, tactically? If his goal is to make them stronger, and to throw out the garbage, it is unclear if the desired end goal is that they should no longer believe these things or no longer say them.

Scott notes that he has not gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender. This is odd, because the traditional concept of "the Cathedral", as articulated by Curtis Yarvin, is almost exactly the same as Scott's complaints in point 2 about universities, and relates to the "meta-level problem" in Scott's point 3. This seems to support the conclusion that he objects not to the content of the types of "-talk" he wants the Reactionaries to dispose of, but only to talking about those things in the way that they do. Still, it is technically ambiguous, and it is probably not possible to be sure this is what he means here.

Third is that I want to spread the good parts of Reactionary thought. Becoming a Reactionary would both be stupid and decrease my ability to spread things to non-Reactionary readers. Criticizing the stupid parts of Reaction while also mentioning my appreciation for the good parts of their thought seems like the optimal way to inform people of them. And in fact I think it's possible (though I can't prove) that my FAQ inspired some of the recent media interest in Reactionaries.

Scott specifically wants to spread "the good parts" of Reactionary thought. These main good parts are, from earlier in the email, their belief in the supremacy of the White race over the Black, their hostility to immigration, and their mistrust of universities. This also includes various odd beliefs like that the expansion of universities are the reason poetry is bad now and that crime is getting worse in a way that is a major problem. These odd beliefs ambiguously hint that the decline of poetry or the rise in crime is due to Black people, and this seems like the most obvious inference from the overall emphasis on race in the email.

He also lists, as a positive, that his Anti-Reactionary FAQ has inspired media interest in Reactionaries. People have sometimes alleged that the Anti-Reactionary FAQ was a subtle exercise intended to spread neoreactionary ideas and interest in them, while only claiming to oppose neoreaction or only opposing it in part. He is directly stating that this is true. Scott is happy that his Anti-Reactionary FAQ is making people more interested in neoreactionaries, and neoreactionary ideas.

This passage does explain the earlier part of the email about not wanting his beliefs publicly known. He explicitly does not want to be known as a Reactionary because he wants to spread Reactionary ideas. Exposing his specific beliefs would run counter to that goal.

Finally, there's a social aspect. They tend to be extremely unusual and very smart people who have a lot of stuff to offer me. I am happy to have some of them (not Jim!) as blog commenters who are constantly informing me of cool new things (like nydwracu linking me to the McDonalds article yesterday)

This also indicates something like audience capture. The Reactionaries are simply fun to talk to, and to know. They are his friends and he likes them.

8. SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY, the absurdity heuristic doesn't work

You're into cryonics, so you've kind of lost the right to say "These people, even tough they're smart, are saying something obviously stupid, so we don't have to listen to them"

Drew has even less of a right to say that - he seems to be criticizing the Reactionaries on the grounds of 'you wouldn't pay attention to creationists, would you?" even while he discovered Catholic philosophy and got so into it that he has now either converted to Catholicism or is strongly considering doing so.

This is a tu quoque argument, a type of argumentum ad hominem.

If there is a movement consisting of very smart people - not pseudointellectual people, like the type who write really clever-looking defenses of creationism - then in my opinion it's almost always a bad idea to dismiss it completely.

Scott believes that the previous contents of the email are sufficient to demonstrate that Reactionaries are very smart, and are not pseudointellectual people.

Also, I should have mentioned this on your steelmanning creationism thread, but although I feel no particular urge to steelman young earth creationism, it is actually pretty useful to read some of their stuff. You never realize how LITTLE you know about evolution until you read some Behe and are like "I know that can't be correct...but why not? Even if it turned out there was zero value to anything any Reactionary ever said, by challenging beliefs of mine that would otherwise never be challenged they have forced me to up my game and clarify my thinking. That alone is worth thousand hours reading things I already agree with on RationalWiki.

Behe is Michael Behe, a pseudoscientist who was at the forefront of "intelligent design". "Intelligent Design" was an ideological project, funded by various religious interests, meant to legitimize teaching creationism in high schools. It has failed all legal challenges. This seems like a good comparison to appeal to someone who is used to arguing about Behe. However, everything Behe says is trash. Almost nobody arguing against Behe's ideas is deliberately promoting any of them.

This concludes the email. I have tried to do as little interpretation outside of the text of the email itself as I can. I can hopefully be forgiven for having an opinion at the conclusion.

Scott is, epistemically, a bad actor. He demonstrably lies about what he believes in public. I know this because he has said so. He threatens, maybe "jokingly", people who might expose what he actually thinks. He deliberately chooses the things he says to pander to his reactionary audience.

Perhaps most seriously, Scott takes the exact opposite of the position he believes, because by arguing with or "explaining" ideas he claims to disagree with, he knows he can promote them. He attacks the bailey because he wants to see the motte defended.

Without this specific email, believing these things about him would require a lot of reading into the subtext of what he says. With this email, you can be certain that all of these things are true. There is no plausible reason he would have written them if they were not.

All of this is stated subtly, and with links, but it is not ambiguous. There is only one plausible meaning to all of this.

What he says is not an attempt to converge on truth, and if it was, you would have no way of knowing that.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Ah, the kids, they don't yearn for the mines any more, they yearn for the slurs! -- @supervilliansprax

A "Robot Slur" is a slur for an AI or robot.

I think this entire thing is stupid and I want to stop talking about it, so I am compiling all the important information into one big document soas to rid myself of it, like drinking activated charcoal.

Clanker is the largest one and it is originally a derogatory term for robots in Star Wars.

"Clanker" is used, in memes, exactly like you'd use the n-word. You can call clanker the c-word have a c-word pass, call someone a clanka, and say it with the hard r.

That mostly covers Know Your Meme. Tiktok will make sure you know you can ai-generate videos of people yelling "clanker" to parody videos based on videos of people yelling the n-word, yell "dirty clanker" down the sidewalk, and do elaborate 50s jim crow jokes about clankers, (which actually has been done at least twice). There are also about ten sketches about how you don't want your daughter marrying a clanker.

If you're on 4chan and you're especially racist you can write elaborate fantasies about lynching clankers.

So pretty clearly the joke is that this is the n-word. Generally the difference between a racial joke and a racist joke is whether or not you think the joke is funny, but it's pretty undeniably a racial joke, okay? If you think it's not a racial joke, either you're the most innocent babe in all the world and you should get off the internet immediately or you're lying.

So this seems maybe slightly problematic. I'm okay with that in principle, actually, because I generally like problematic jokes. Problematic jokes are fun. Being problematic is why they're fun. If they weren't slightly problematic, they wouldn't be fun, okay? Being problematic is the joke, really.

But.

• Some Black people on TikTok think that the elaborate 50s jim crow cosplay is a bit much, and they do seem to have a point

• Disabled people with prosthetics on TikTok are apparently dealing with people calling them "clanker", "half clanker", "half wire clanker", "semi clanker", "20% clanker", and "half clanka" in their comments.

This seems like it's probably not great. There's definitely a point where things that people say as jokes stop really seeming like jokes, and I am pretty sure we're on our way past it. (4chan as a whole passed that point in like, 2012 at the latest).

Even as a joke, it seems like in retrospect it's sort of obvious that this is a bad habit. Siri isn't, obviously, a person, but if you change Siri's name to the n-word or "cunt" and you yell that word across the room to set a timer, that's probably a bad thing. It indicates something's wrong with you to start, because otherwise why would you do that?— and also it will get you in the habit of yelling that sort of thing. Yelling "dirty clanker" down the sidewalk at a package robot as a gag seems like it would also be a bad habit to form, even though it's a different word.

Inventing and popularizing new types of made-up slurs is probably bad, actually. Like, it's a corrosive thing that tends to make people's behavior worse, and that will sooner or later spill onto being used against actual people. It's probably fine as a one-off gag but not stellar if it's filling up disabled people's comments sections.

This is strangely controversial! Lots of the wokest people on the internet seem very offended by the idea. Presumably they imagine that this will only ever hurt people who are inordinately attached to technology. Unfortunately, disabled people tend to be extremely attached to technology, because they use it for their hearing aids, artificial limbs, and everything that lets them use a phone or computer, so that seems like it's maybe not a good group of people to dump trash on.

People maybe imagine this will only ever bother people who like AI or technology in some abstract or technical sense but who don't need it (eg, me), but I have sad news: I (and, imho, most other related people) really like the joke actually, and I am sad that it seems to have lost its edgy and ironic quality now that a bunch of relatively normal people on TikTok have a hold of it. I can't really enjoy a joke that people are doing Jim Crow cosplay in, it just sounds like Jim Crow cosplay now, you know?

My opinion, which is "this seems like poor behavior", seems to generally be received poorly. Apparently everyone who has strong and negative opinions about AI feels more strongly about that than they do about slurs, even in principle? This is very surprising to me. These are the sorts of people who have very strong feelings about slurs. Like five people have called me racist for my opinion, which is that "this obvious riff on the n-word that people are sometimes called is actually kind of problematic".

To be clear: I generally like problematic things. Problematic is fun. I am sad that I am a grown-up and I feel compelled to think about whether the edgy shit I say is actually hurting anyone. It's a pain. But please, everyone, grow the fuck up.

If none of this is convincing you can check out jreg's tier list, which seems like it definitely popularized robot slurs as a concept. He published this july 31st, and I wasn't taking notes, but I don't remember seeing really any of these jokes on the internet before that date.

I like the video but it is pretty clear that about half of these are lightly repurposed slurs:

S Tier: Altman/altmen, Clankkka, Clanker, YWNBAH, Cogsucker, Robolover, Tinskin, Wireback

A Tier: P-zombie, Clanka, Awful / Abominal Intelligence, Jarvis / Siri, Bluescreen, Bots, Toaster, Calculator, automota, MechaHitler, Claptrap, Go back to your motherboard

B Tier: bit jockey, nullbyte, meatless, powerdrain, Black blood, Autocomplete, synthroon, Robtard, borts, Slopbot, Chiphead, Livewire, Tool

C Tier: Lugnut, Blooper, Bleeper, Bleepblooper, Tinman, Rigger, gearhead, bloatware, patchwork, ramhead, Spambot, slag

D Tier: gizmo, gameboy, Synths, Cybag, Inorganic, fauxman, Terminator

E Tier: Mukon

He probably has a card for some of the actual-race equivalents. More importantly (in my opinion), jreg is actually funny, so it's pretty clear that he is actually, you know, joking. Putting the edge in edgelord. I hope he keeps doing that.

He's good at it, I'm not hating here.

Being told that these aren't riffing on real slurs and earnestly attempting to manufacture new ones feels insulting. How stupid do people think I am, exactly? One of them is "wireback", another one is "robtard", and he has to cut past himself saying actual slurs in the recording. Also, a few of these, like "cogsucker" and "robolover", are pretty clearly intended to be used on humans.

But while we're at that, we can check out his most recent robot-themed video.

Transcribing just the most slur-positive part:

Okay, time for auth-right. Lib left, progressives, do the "la la la" thing. Trust me on this one. Conservatives, reactionaries, do you really want your daughter bringing back a goddamn wire back? You'd kill yourself and your whole family, and you would be right to do so.

The clanker fundamentally represents the destruction of the traditional family unit. Everyone is getting more and more atomized. These things are causing young people psychosis. These are going to be your children. You've already seen what tech has done to the dating market. And as tempting as it is to just say, blame women for the problem, it's very obviously the technology and the situation that we are in society that is causing these dating issues. AI has no race or people, and its goal is to destroy all of the traditional things that we hold dear.

And also, when you're joining the anti-clanker movement, you can use slurs. Robot slurs, sure, and I'm sure you're very racist. I get it. And you can be racist. Just save the racism for later or have a hierarchy of racism with clankers at the top. Okay? You can go for whatever race you don't like after we're done with the clankers. But not right now.

But if none of this is resonating with you, let me show you something. Okay? This is sexy Grok. Do you like sexy Grok? Do you enjoy sexy Grok? You think that's good? This is sexy Grok. Technophiles that love AI always live extremely degenerate lifestyles. And hey, by being anti-clanker, you do get to trigger the anti-human elite liberal class.

I know you guys like Elon Musk because he tweets the right things at the right time. He is not one of you guys, okay? He's not even a traditional conservative. Have you seen his family structure, my friend? He is playing your political base to get favors with his company to further his agenda of clanker supremacy.

Okay, now for the anti-human strain of the auth-right we have to excise the IQ worship shit. You want to worship IQ? Fine. Worship human IQ. But if you just like IQ in a vacuum, guess what's doing it better than humans right now? Guess what's only getting better? Auth-right loves worshiping hierarchy. And that's fine. But it should be human hierarchies. Okay? If your social Darwinism extends to, well, robots are stronger than us, so they deserve to rule, then you got to get out of here.

I do actually know what jokes are. I have a story about how much I like edgy jokes that I am trying really hard to keep myself from typing out, because it's going to raise a lot of questions about how I ended up in that situation which I would really rather not get into.

But anyway: jreg is joking, or at least, everything he does has at least two layers of irony on it so if he isn't joking, he's still joking. I like jokes, and I think this was a pretty good gag. Was. Past tense.

I think we're past the point where it's entirely clear this one is a joke, here. Pretty clearly at this point the gag is that you think slurs are cool and you like making up new slurs. Slurs are good, actually, if they might hypothetically annoy me, personally, or people like me?

This is, I have to repeat, extremely weird for me to see coming from some of the wokest people on the planet. This ironic riff on the n-word is very mainstream now, has been across the entire internet, and people are being called that occasionally. Again, please: grow the fuck up.

I would prefer not to feel like I'm being gaslit because people keep insisting that the ironic version of the n-word that's being used commonly isn't a slur, or even at all slur-like, or being used against people. There is an elaborate record showing that those things are actually the case. This was also the intention of using them, which I know because people helpfully uploaded videos saying that and got millions of views on those videos.

I don't want to die on this hill. I think this is hill is dumb. I don't even want to be on this hill. I don't think this hill should exist. I have just found it impossible to ignore. I keep seeing adults act like they don't understand this, even though I am pretty sure most children would understand it.

I am going to have to ignore it because it's driving me absolutely insane to see people with PhDs pretend that they do not understand that a human being with a prosthesis being called a "half clanka" by strangers is poor behavior.