Another surprise is that illegal weed still has 30% of the market in Canada. I don’t know how much of that is consumer inertia (“My buddy Mike always gets me the good stuff eh”) and how much is avoiding taxes.

I didn’t know that Moray in QC was around in 2018! <Crumbles into dust.>

That is a good example because it shows the failure of imagination (can imagine the end of the world, can’t imagine working public transit and public policy to discourage driving) and because hf he thought it through he might get to “humh, some people like to drive, but its bad for public and social health, how can we discourage it while preserving liberties?”

I really wonder what he did as a medical student in Cork other than study and read racist Tumblr accounts. Did his friends never drag him to Amsterdam to ride a bike and eat an edible?

Blast from the past: in 2014, Scott Alexander posted a take on marijuana legalization which showed excellent knowledge of medical papers but huge gaps in his knowledge of what brown people or smart policy reformers have to say. David Gerard and Christopher Hallquist in the comments, digression on how pot affects your IQ with gwern chipping in. Alexander came back in 2018 promising that he was right all along with a footnote about how some people in the comments told him that people like smoking weed and he did not know how to process that because his utilitarian calculation said it was bad for society.

Baldur Bjarnason has a whole book on the business risks of LLM use https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/

bad at epistemology

Gwern once denied chaos theory in a way that Freeman Dyson called out in 1985, and as LessWrongers go he is a pretty clear thinker!

It can help to think of the current US administration as less the Third Reich, more a postcolonial dictatorship. That is also a description not a value judgement: POTUS is a reality-TV star who dreams of being a Mafia boss.

How the frigg does anyone in the SF Bay Area in 2026 still believe that most of what big American web service companies do is driven by the profit motive? They are more like big-talking Geniuses getting a king to give them some money and promising they will make something cool (with Google’s and Facebook’s advertising and AWS and Amazon retail standing in for taxing millions of peasants). Arms like Google ads and Amazon Web Services fund billions of dollars of money-losing nonsense.

Usually AI boosters are claiming that soon most humans will be economically useless, not that it would be terrible if there were fewer white people. One reason people avoid having children is that they feel economically insecure and doubt there will be respected places in society for their offspring.

Dwarkesh Patel is the only other Indian American I have seen who is friends with our friends.

Fortunately, most of the rest of the world economy is heading in the opposite direction and building new free-trade zones without the US. I think the US in a few years will start to feel a lot like the UK today, with everything falling apart, everyone becoming poorer and less mobile, and anger about Hispanics instead of Poles and trans people.

Yes, in the 2016 emails Yudkowsky hints that he knows Epstein has a reputation for pursuing underage girls and would still like his money. We don’t know what he knew about Epstein in 2009, but he sure seemed to know that something was wrong with the man in 2016. And that makes it harder to put Yud’s writings about the age of consent in a good light (hard to believe that he was just thinking of a sixteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old, and had never imagined a middle-aged man assaulting fourteen-year-olds).

Also likely to be concentrated in the USA, whose government is helpfully screaming at the rest of the world “disconnect your economies and your IT systems from ust!” Most of us are busy doing that as fast as possible although it takes a while to get everyone on board.

its a very useful skill when reading the internet to learn to see when “in the US and UK” or “in SoCal and London” should be appended to a sentence. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

A few people in LessWrong and Effectlve Altruism seem to want Yud to stick in the background while they get on with organizing his teachings into doctrine, dumping the awkward ones down the memory hole, and organizing a movement that can last when he goes to the Great Anime Convention in the Sky. In 2022 someone on the EA forum posted On Deference and Yudkowsky’s AI Risk Estimates (ie. “Yud has been bad at predictions in the past so we should be skeptical of his predictions today”)

A Christopher DiCarlo (cwdicarlo on LessWrong) got AI doomerism into Macleans magazine in Canada. He seems to have got into AI doomerism in the 1990s but hung out being an academic and kept his manifestos to himself until recently. He claims to have clashed with First Nations creationists back in 2005 when he said “we are all African.” His book is called Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It.

There must be many such cases who read the Extropians in the 1990s and 2000s and neither filed them with fiction not turned them into a career.

And its a fable about having to petition a mercurial and brutal authority for resources you need to live! A lesson that anyone who wants to make their living vibe-coding should ponder.

Economist John Quiggin posts a critique of William MacAskill’s type of utilitarianism with confusing logic, has to retract it when a quote with chapter and verse in his main text does not exist:

Even though I have a clear memory of locating the third quotation in the Gutenberg edition, I can’t find it now. So, I;ve edited the post to deleted it. Apologies for this. I’m assuming the quote I found was some kind of AI confabulation, and that I slipped up on the check. I will need to double check more carefully in future.

(quote is from the comments I have not corrected or added sic)

He says he is writing a book against pro-natalism.

Everything depends on the details like what country, what field, and what university. Because this involves specific people, its also inherently unpredictable.

how is Tesla stock a thing?

Edward Niedermeyer write a book to answer that very question (cheating on taxes + organize gangs of invested fanboys who suppress negative news online)

Stock markets in the rest of the developed world seem less bubbly than the US market.

It looks like this site requites https:// or http;// to recognize a link as an external link, otherwise it prepends awful.systems/ and treats it as an internal link

“U” for “you” was when I became confident who “Nina” was. The blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but can’t make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like “what is Hereticon?” for granted and is still into crypto.

She links someone called Sonia Joseph who mentions “the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers … leads (sic) to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen.” Joseph says she is Canadian but worked in the Bay Area tech scene. Cursed phrase: agi cnc sex parties

I have never heard of a wing of these people in Canada. There are a few Effective Altruists in Toronto but I don’t know if they are the LessWrong kind or the bednet kind. I thought this was basically a US and Oxford scene (plus Jaan Tallinn).

The Substack and a Rationalist web magazine are both called Asterisk.

There is an old principle in software development not to make the GUI too pretty until the back end works, because managers and customers will think its ready when they can click around buttons with nice shading and animations. I think slopware is like that. People see the demo that appears to work and don’t see what maintaining it and integrating it with other systems is like.