one of the brain geniuses at bluesky

wrt to the first part, nick consistently outmaneuvers people who bring him onto their platforms. he’s honestly brilliant at understanding who the audience is, what frame he’s appearing in, and how to signal given those circumstances. i didn’t understand until i started prepping for this episode that nick is actually lazy and incurious in almost the exact same way alex jones is. dan and jordan notice and call out how he effortlessly establishes dominance over alex, but i think there’s a subtler game going on where nick manages to appear competent and informed compared to alex, and you don’t realize that’s just an artifact of conversational skill until you hear nick on his own show.

wrt to the second part, i could not agree more and i’m very glad to hear that is a takeaway because it is absolutely something i was hoping to communicate. that’s the freudianness of it all, how these existing patterns of relations to another get played out and reenacted through the audience’s relationship to nick, and vice versa

i think this is exactly why they had to come up with - or rather, misappropriate - the concept of coupled vs decoupled thinking. when they (especially the more, ahem, human biodiversity minded of them) fold ridiculous claims about what constitutes virtuous cognition into scientific and sophisticated sounding terminology, it makes those claims seem aligned with the broader sales pitch of rationalism

also that scott quote is excellent. i hadn’t heard that one before

if we had made the podcast series on rationalists, their importance as useful idiots for billionaires was the structure i wanted to hang the whole thing on. so this is a gratifying read. that said i think the ideas here will be familiar to many stubsack readers

The rationalist view of the world assumes, at some level, that the relevant actors are optimizing for well-understood, predictable variables and a clear understanding of what best serves their self-interest. What it cannot account for is bad faith, impulsiveness, ideological motivation untethered from evidence, random instances of force majeure, and personal whims and petty rivalries.

i will go further and say that not accounting for such things is considered virtuous in rationalist ideology

new episode of odium symposium. it’s a tribute to knowledge fight, in which we dissect an episode of nick fuentes’s show. i was nervous about how this would turn out but i think it’s actually my favorite episode yet.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/11-groyper-151852222 (links to other platforms at www.odiumsymposium.com)

just got a job in mathematical publishing. it’s work i think i’ll actually enjoy and expect to be very good at, it pays much better than any other job i’ve had previously (and they maxed out the position’s pay range, which i wasn’t expecting) and it has about a month of paid leave a year. such a relief

friend of a friend who works for meta was just ignoring the mandate to use ai. apparently this was happening enough that they’ve now implemented per character provenance tracing, and you get ranked according to how much AI is in your code

robin hanson blocked me for referring to him as aella with tenure. now i think that he’s ghislaine maxwell with tenure

new odium symposium episode. this one is a lot lighter than the previous two. we went back and looked at joseph swetnam, the guy the word misogyny was coined to describe, and how he got relentlessly dunked on by his peers.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/9-first-149546072, or on any platform

new epstein doc release. crashed out for like an hour last night after finding out jeffrey epstein may have plausibly founded /pol/ and that he listened to the nazi “the right stuff” podcast. he had a meeting with m00t and the same day moot opened /pol/

you have to make your ai antiwoke because otherwise it gets drapetomania

i actually find the content pretty amusing, since it amounts to “have you guys tried using words correctly every once in a while?”

“you should watch [Steven Pinker’s] podcast with Richard Hanania” cool suggestion scott

this happens like clockwork

I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn’t.

hard to think of anything more dreary and whimsyless than shoving a rainforest into the gas tank of an llm

New episode of odium symposium, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/8-ceci-nest-pas-148404664

we look at a particular book by french philosopher and murderer louis althusser, and talk about what it can say about femicide

this is so cool

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this is very insightful, and it sheds some light for me on something underappreciated: the way in which inceldom is not the same as not having sex. it’s an ideology characterized by misogyny, misanthropy, and a sense of one’s own brokenness, and in particular by a fixation on the sense of unrectifiable loss you describe. people really struggle with the idea that there are incels who have had sex or that someone can not have had sex and not qualify for the label incel.

more generally, chan culture and its offshoots really successfully capitalized upon these tendencies in ways that seem to be underexamined. there’s a reason /lgbt/ attracted so many trans people. if you went through the wrong puberty, you have suffered actual, extremely painful unrectifiable loss, and a culture that recognizes that and encourages wallowing in it can serve an oppositional role to a broader culture that just lies to you about what you’ve experienced. i rarely hear about this and when i do it comes wrapped in moralizing terms like “brain poison” which are in their own way accurate and useful, but which are not sufficient for a complete examination

my experience has been that it’s actually driven primarily by the absolute weirdest ppl you will ever meet, these people having overlap with anything weird you can think of, including antisemitism, wellness fascism, inceldom, MRAs, etc, but not tending to be based particularly in any of those groups.

all of which is unfortunate because i also think they are just correct in their claims that this is a real bodily autonomy issue