But will my insurance cover a visit to Dr. Spicy Autocomplete?

Sorry for the off-topic rant, but WTF is Emile Torres doing on twitter? Anytime I see someone creating content for that Nazi hellsite, I start looking at them differently.

I'd really like to know the back story on this interview too. I realize weirdness isn't exactly distinctive when it comes to rationalists, but Zack is in a league of his own.

I've been using DigitalOcean for years as a personal VPS box, and I've had no complaints. Not sure how well they'd scale (in terms of cost) for a site like this.

They were using immutable cache control headers on resources that were, in fact, mutable? Uh oh.

The first comment by the first commenter is "Can we suspend Godwin's Law for a moment?" followed by an explanation of the ways in which The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an accurate description of reality.

Libertarianism is never far from Nazism. The Venn diagram is a circle. The only question is which circle contains the other.

I like the way he thinks the lack of punctuation in his "joke" is the tell that it's a joke.

He's also apparently never heard the aphorism that if you have to explain the joke, it's probably not that funny.

I see him more as a dupe than a Cassandra. I heard him on a podcast a couple months ago talking about how he's been having conversations with Bay Area AI researchers who are "really scared" about what they're creating. He also spent quite a bit of time talking up Geoffrey Hinton's AI doomer tour. So while I don't think Ezra's one of the Yuddite rationalists, he's clearly been influenced by them. Given his historical ties to effective altruism, this isn't surprising to me.

Lots of fascinating links in this article. This link in particular was fascinating:

If you're searching for Scott Siskind... I am Scott Siskind from Ann Arbor, Michigan. There used to be more things on this webpage. Right now I'm using it to spread the message that there are multiple statements being falsely attributed to me on the Internet. Somebody who doesn't like me - I am not sure who, but I work in mental health and guess this is sort of a professional hazard - has been trying to systematically discredit me by posting racist and profanity-laden things under my name. Some of the comments make some effort to convince, like linking back to my website. The end result is that if you Google me to try to find out what I am like, you will probably end up seeing angry racist profanity-laden comments made under my name. These are not mine.

Does anyone know the backstory here? This reads to me like a "hackers ate my password" story -- the kind of ass-covering someone might concoct after their racist writings accidentally leaked onto the internet.

EDIT: This seems to be related to the stuff Topher Brennan revealed? Except it was written many years before Topher's revelations. It's confusing...

This is good:

Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.

Also this:

If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.

And:

If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.

"Fat people disgust me, but drugs are cool."

If Books Could Kill is great. I believe the first podcast was about Freakonomics, another one of those incredibly popular books based on behavioral economics. They took it apart.