

Vegemite?
Iāll get my coat.
Vegemite?
Iāll get my coat.
Hereās an example of normal people using Bayes correctly (rationally assigning probabilities and acting on them) while rats Just Donāt Get Why Normies Donāt Freak Out:
For quite a while, Iāve 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 didnāt 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 āomnicideā 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 didnāt 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 āsaveā, dipshit.
yeah but have you considered how much itās worth that gramma can vibecode a todo app in seconds now???
Havenāt really kept up with the pseudo-news of VC funded companies acquiring each other, but it seems Windsurf (previously been courted by OpenAI) is now gonna be purchased by the bros behind Devin.
I found out about that too when I arrived at Reddit and it was translated to Swedish automatically.
This isnāt an original thought, but a better matrix for comparing the ideology (such as it is) of the current USG is not Nazi Germany but pre-war US right wing obsessions - anti-FDR and anti-New Deal.
This appears in weird ways, like this throwaway comment regarding the Niihau incident, where two ethnic Japanese inhabitants of Niihau helped a downed Japanese airman immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Imagine if you will, one of the 9/11 hijackers parachuting from the plane before it crashed, asking a random muslim for help, then having that muslim be willing to immediately get himself into a shootouts, commit arson, kidnappings, and misc mayhem.
Then imagine that it was covered in a media environment where the executive branch had been advocating for war for over a decade, and voices which spoke against it were systematically silenced.
(src)
Dude also credits LessOnline with saving his life due to unidentified <<<ethnics>>> shooting up his 'hood when he was there. Charming.
Edit nah heās a neo-Nazi (or at least very concerned about the fate of German PoWs after WW2):
LW:
Please consider minimizing direct use of AI chatbots (and other text-based AI) in the near-term future, if you can. The reason is very simple: your sanity may be at stake.
Perfect. No notes.
Also into Haskell. Make of that what you will.
LOL the mod gets snippy here too
This comment too is not fit for this site. What is going on with yāall? Why is fertility such a weirdly mindkilling issue?
āWhy are there so many Nazis in my Nazi bar???ā
LessWrongās descent into right-wing tradwife territory continues
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=ueRbTvnB2DJ5fJcdH
Annapurna (member for 5 years, 946 karma):
Why is there so little discussion about the loss of status of stay at home parenting?
First comment is from user Shankar Sivarajan, member for 6 years, 1227 karma
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=opzGgbqGxHrr8gvxT
Well, you could make it so the only plausible path to career advancement for women beyond, say, receptionist, is the provision of sexual favors. I expect that will lower the status of women in high-level positions sufficiently to elevate stay-at-home motherhood.
[ā¦]
EDIT: From the downvotes, I gather people want magical thinking instead of actual implementable solutions.
Granted, this got a strong disagree from the others and a tut-tut from Habryka, but itās still there as of now and not yeeted into the sun. And rats wonder why people donāt want to date them.
El Reg: At last, a use case for AI agents with sky-high ROI: Stealing crypto
Two tastes that go great together!
In the recent days thereās been a bunch of posts on LW about how consuming honey is bad because it makes bees sad, and LWers getting all hot and bothered about it. I donāt have a stinger in this fight, not least because investigations proved that basically all honey exported from outside the EU is actually just flavored sugar syrup, but I found this complaint kinda funny:
The argument deployed by individuals such as Benthamās Bulldog boils down to: āYes, the welfare of a single bee is worth 7-15% as much as that of a human. Oh, you wish to disagree with me? You must first read this 4500-word blogpost, and possibly one or two 3000-word follow-up blogpostsā.
āOf course such underhanded tactics are not present here, in the august forum promoting 10,000 word posts called Sequences!ā
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 āsad.ā
āA lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided theyād found their new home,ā he wrote in a message to me, āand some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.ā
Good news everyone, itās 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 Rokoās 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 godās sake donāt 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 āstrategic hypocrisyā: Save for retirement, have children if you want them. āYou 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. āYouāre just going to go insane.ā
Tired: the universe was created by a deity
Wired: the universe was created by physical forces
Fucking crazy: the universe was created by a figment of my imagination and Iām communicating with it using a blog post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uSTR9Awkn3gpqpSBi/dear-paperclip-maximizer-please-don-t-turn-off-the
āMusic is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Donāt listen to music.ā
Thatās it. Thatās the take.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/46xKegrH8LRYe68dF/vire-s-shortform?commentId=PGSqWbgPccQ2hog9a
Their responses in the comments are wild too.
Iām tending towards a troll. No-one can be that dumb. OTH it is LessWrong.
Maybe itās to hammer home the idea that time before DOOM is limited and you might as well get your rocks off with him before that happens.
LWronger posts article entitled
āAuthors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearlyā
OK, title case, obviously serious.
The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.
Nope heās going for satire.
And ladies, heās available!
If you donāt get it, LLMs donāt either, and Davidās work here is done.
Managers: āAI will make employees more productive!ā
WaPo: āAI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetingsā https://archive.ph/ejC53
Managers: ānot like that!!!ā
Guys, how about we made the coming computer god a fan of Robert Nozick, what could go wrong?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/us8ss79mWCgTcSKoK/a-night-watchman-asi-as-a-first-step-toward-a-great-future