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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Here’s an example of normal people using Bayes correctly (rationally assigning probabilities and acting on them) while rats Just Don’t Get Why Normies Don’t Freak Out:

    For quite a while, I’ve been quite confused why (sweet nonexistent God, whyyyyy) so many people intuitively believe that any risk of a genocide of some ethnicity is unacceptable while being… at best lukewarm against the idea of humanity going extinct.

    (Dude then goes on to try to game-theorize this, I didn’t bother to poke holes in it)

    The thing is, genocides have happened, and people around the world are perfectly happy to advocate for it in diverse situations. Probability wise, the risk of genocide somewhere is very close to 1, while the risk of ā€œomnicideā€ is much closer to zero. If you want to advocate for eliminating something, working to eliminating the risk of genocide is much more rational than working to eliminate the risk of everyone dying.

    At least on commenter gets it:

    Most people distinguish between intentional acts and shit that happens.

    (source)

    Edit never read the comments (again). The commenter referenced above obviously didn’t feel like a pithy one liner adhered to the LW ethos, and instead added an addendum wondering why people were more upset about police brutality killing people than traffic fatalities. Nice ā€œsaveā€, dipshit.












  • NYT covers the Zizians

    Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/business/ziz-lasota-zizians-rationalists.html

    Archive link: https://archive.is/9ZI2c

    Choice quotes:

    Big Yud is shocked and surprised that craziness is happening in this casino:

    Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer whose warnings about A.I. are canonical to the movement, called the story of the Zizians ā€œsad.ā€

    ā€œA lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home,ā€ he wrote in a message to me, ā€œand some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.ā€

    Good news everyone, it’s popular to discuss the Basilisk and not at all a profundly weird incident which first led peopel to discover the crazy among Rats

    Rationalists like to talk about a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. The theory imagines a future superintelligence that will dedicate itself to torturing anyone who did not help bring it into existence. By this logic, engineers should drop everything and build it now so as not to suffer later.

    Keep saving money for retirement and keep having kids, but for god’s sake don’t stop blogging about how AI is gonna kill us all in 5 years:

    To Brennan, the Rationalist writer, the healthy response to fears of an A.I. apocalypse is to embrace ā€œstrategic hypocrisyā€: Save for retirement, have children if you want them. ā€œYou cannot live in the world acting like the world is going to end in five years, even if it is, in fact, going to end in five years,ā€ they said. ā€œYou’re just going to go insane.ā€