I have an ATProto login and am skimming the threads before I have to go and do other stuff for a few hours. I came across a link to this podcast, which looks interesting. The transcript of the first episode (I’m more of a reader than a listener) barely gets going before (content warning for sexual assault by intoxication) this:

E: … right after I graduated from undergrad, I went on a date in San Francisco with a Harvey Mudd alum who revealed to me over the course of the date, which is at like a fancy prohibition style whiskey bar. That part was cool. You had to make a reservation. So I thought that was, I was like, that’s a good sign. That’s really that’s cool of him. He revealed that he and his friend had written a musical based on Harry Potter and the methods of rationality. And I said, Oh, well, I don’t want to brag, but I’ve written a pretty highly acclaimed The Dark Knight Rises fanfic, and he broke in and said, It’s not a fanfic.

A: Were they saying their musical wasn’t a fanfic, or that rationality wasn’t a fanfic?

E: The musical was not a fanfic. And I didn’t know what to say to that. […] And then he also, this is the guy who he tried to get me drunk when I didn’t want to. Uh, super rational. Very rational. Yeah, rational. I want to have sex with this girl and she doesn’t want to have sex with me. The rational thing to do is to change one of those conditions, and I can’t not want to have sex with her. Um, and told me that he did not ask his female friends for dating advice because if you’re a hunter, you ask a hunter and not a deer. These were the same guys. He was the same guy.

Snacks were set out on a stovetop.

Incompetence kink

Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience. No one seems to be interested in the most interesting applications of their research. […] The scientific establishment, however, seems to not have gotten the memo. […] I remember sitting through three days of talks at a hotel in Boston, watching prominent tenured professors in the field of genetics take turns misrepresenting their own data […] It is difficult to convey the actual level of insanity if you haven’t seen it yourself.

Like Yudkowsky writing about quantum mechanics, this is cult shit. “The scientists refuse to see the conclusion in front of their faces! We and we alone are sufficiently Rational to embrace the truth! Listen to us, not to scientists!”

Gene editing scales much, much better than embryo selection.

“… Mister Bond.”

The graphs look like they were made in Matplotlib, but on another level, they’re giving big crayon energy.

Winning sentences of the day so far:

Conservapedia is 100% true and correct. Evidence: https://www.conservapedia.com/Garfield_(comic_strip)

Whoever wrote that deffo wants to fuck Nermal.

OK, I just spent 10 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back clicking around Wikipedia edit histories, and it seems that LessWrongers are really unhappy about the LessWrong article saying anything about neoreactionaries. And they’re willing to say why at typical length.

“Specialist terminology” like… the word edit?

Not sure writing an encyclopedia is a good hobby for you, bro.