Hossenfelder seemed like a normal science blogger and critic of string theory until some recent videos, and most people don’t update their blogroll every year. And Woit links her sensible (but defunct) blog, not her out-there videos.
A lot of people in this world have connections going back 15 or 30 years but ended up on opposite sides (eg. Charlie Stross and Curtis Yarvin, or Laurie Penny and Scott Aaronson)
The owner of Birdsite tweeted the same idea “make chatbots write a universal encyclopedia to free us from human experts” a year or so ago.
The Independent has yet another profile of the Collinses which finally starts to map their network (a brother is in DOGE). Just who is their PR person would be good to know. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-musk-ai-pronatalists-collins-b2777577.html
There’s a Collins Rotunda at Harvard, a physical testament to the amount of money Malcolm’s family has donated over the years. His uncle was the former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. In fact, pretty much every relative has been to an elite Ivy League institution and runs a successful startup or works in government.
Larry Niven had a fixed idea about cetacean intelligence, and it showed up in mass-audience SF like Star Trek IV.
The story below is another example of really creepy things being done in the name of science in the postwar era.
I wonder if Matthew Yglesias, author of One Billion Americans, has figured out that some of his co-authors think the USA has too many useless eaters already? I can’t tell you which they are, but when an organization has Effective Altruism money and a lead author who is close friends with Scott Alexander and Yud, it will have people ready to sterilize and deport poor brown people.
Brunig’s argument that Piper is ignorant of the founding arguments for the welfare state and just knows a neoliberal argument for something kind of like a welfare state reminds me of an exchange with someone of her class where I tried a basic Green argument and they fell into it like I was the first guy trying a Judo throw on an American in 1940something. They flailed wildly as if they had never encountered that move and did not have a response ready.
Yud once debated Massimo Pigliucci and did poorly. He tried and failed to publish academic research in a journal not controlled by his groupies (desk reject? failed to pass peer review?).
Have there been any other times when he engaged with someone with actual education and experience who was not his fan? It sounds like he was on twitter.
Wish the microblogger had archived the old text for verification but I can believe that Piper believes that marrying a femme and having many children while working a full-time, high-prestige job counts as a traditional gender role.
It shows great confidence in their ability to find paying readers that aside from Substack’s VC money they also borrowed $4 million to pay themselves. They don’t need an office, printing and distribution, or a sales team and Substack provides and maintains all the IT infrastructure (maybe one admin assistant / bookkeeper).
Has Piper ever been paid to write by an organization that was not funded by her college buddies like Caroline Ellison and Open Philanthropy staffers? RationalWiki mentions Vox (EA funded), something called Asterisk (EA funded), and this Substack blog.
I know that on the American right, every accusation is a confession, but I never thought I would read a scheming cartoon villain accusing his enemies of being the Antichrist! He is even queer-coded, would do great on TV in the 1990s.