New eugenics conference just dropped

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8ZExgaGnvLevkZxR5/attend-the-2025-reproductive-frontiers-summit-june-10-12

“Chatham House rules” so they can happily be racist without anyone pointing fingers at them.

Good on Quora members for debunking too.

should have gone with “Moldbuggery” Scott

Here’s an interesting nugget I discovered today

A long LW post tries to tie AI safety and regulations together. I didn’t bother reading it all, but this passage caught my eye

USS Eastland Disaster. After maritime regulations required more lifeboats following the Titanic disaster, ships became top-heavy, causing the USS Eastland to capsize and kill 844 people in 1915. This is an example of how well-intentioned regulations can create unforeseen risks if technological systems aren’t considered holistically.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ARhanRcYurAQMmHbg/the-historical-parallels-preliminary-reflection

You will be shocked to learn that this summary is a bit lacking in detail. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Eastland

Because the ship did not meet a targeted speed of 22 miles per hour (35 km/h; 19 kn) during her inaugural season and had a draft too deep for the Black River in South Haven, Michigan, where she was being loaded, the ship returned in September 1903 to Port Huron for modifications, […] and repositioning of the ship’s machinery to reduce the draft of the hull. Even though the modifications increased the ship’s speed, the reduced hull draft and extra weight mounted up high reduced the metacentric height and inherent stability as originally designed.

(my emphasis)

The vessel experiences multiple listing incidents between 1903 and 1914.

Adding lifeboats:

The federal Seamen’s Act had been passed in 1915 following the RMS Titanic disaster three years earlier. The law required retrofitting of a complete set of lifeboats on Eastland, as on many other passenger vessels.[10] This additional weight may have made Eastland more dangerous by making her even more top-heavy. […] Eastland’s owners could choose to either maintain a reduced capacity or add lifeboats to increase capacity, and they elected to add lifeboats to qualify for a license to increase the ship’s capacity to 2,570 passengers.

So. Owners who knew they had an issue with stability elected profits over safety. But yeah it’s the fault of regulators.

”Canola” was minted because ”rape seed oil” is an even worse name.

I don’t know anything about Abe apart from him being a right-winger. Was he also very very worried about Japan’s birthrate (just like Hackernews is)?

“Gross thrice-married orange man wants you to bonk more” is gonna be a hard sell but rest assured, his pals in tech will make sure their ad selection supports it.

“The CCP is worse than Hitler because at least Hitler was elected” is… a take

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MKS4tJqLWmRXgXzgY/why-should-i-assume-ccp-agi-is-worse-than-usg-agi-1?commentId=wLB2LFnJnHA8cJWuC

Gonna put that down to really really bad historical knowledge

when people do stuff like dismissing x-risk because their top Google search result pointed them at RationalWiki, what exactly was the proper non-free-speech-limiting solution to this problem?

How can we leverage the monopoly of violence of the state to promote our religious views?

Inside baseball, and I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but LW is crowing over a legal loss for RationalWiki

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KW5tjMmTqsoRa6zrd/pablo-s-shortform?commentId=wB9jcCPrXzNCLCQXL

They link to a TracingWoodgrain(!) tweet which is basically just a screenshot of a talk page

https://xcancel.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1913717061626347642

I don’t know the significance of this, if any. I don’t recognize the names of any of the plaintiffs(?) in the screenshot, so I find it a bit amusing that probably the only google juice they had were RW.

YIL there was a right-wing antisemitic US general called Moseley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Van_Horn_Moseley

Nominative determinism?

You still can’t be an outright Nazi without people getting mad at you. Obviously unacceptable.

TIL Richard fucking Hanania is a Rationalist, at least according to this excrescence from LW

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tKhbDBkstMJuBv7jg/three-months-in-evaluating-three-rationalist-cases-for-trump

The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere—in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany.[1]

Yeah I’m sure trying to dictate to Harvard who they can hire and what courses they can teach is not leading to a “draconian censorship regime”

[1] to be clear this is attributed to Richard Ngo, not Hanania

JZW link but meat is a 404 article, don’t wanna bypass their paywall

Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!

American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers […]

Eminently punchable face

I got it from a comment here, apparently some pie in the sky charity needs more money

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HL7zzZhCR59CCntpB/allfed-emergency-appeal-help-us-raise-usd800-000-to-avoid

His name is Scott.

Oldie but goldie LW:

Who should we prioritize saving from a global catastrophe. Obviously AI safety researchers

not every programmer posts to social media…

Not sure why anyone thought CS as a community can “save us”. It’s just as likely to be red/black-pilled (gold/black-pilled?) as any other heavily male tech adjacent community. The idea that nerds should be politically liberal because they were bullied in 80 high-school comedies is ludicrous.