I can’t think of a more productive charity for helping make-a-wish donors and the parents of dying children feel better about the world.

Also with Desert Bus for Hope on the horizon I want to use this space to (probably unnecessarily) point to Child’s Play. It’s almost not utilmaxxing, but I know when I was in hospital as a kid the little cart with a Nintendo 64 on it was the only time I felt like an actual kid instead of a science experiment or hurt. I’m willing to forgive a lot of lost net utils to give that to others going through it.

It was possible to take things away from that movie other than “Lmao these names are silly” and “Channing Tatum is a puppy?”

I agree that being a self-aggrandizing dick is probably on the lower end of the harms Bostrom has inflicted upon the world, but I think it’s worth calling out, especially because it runs counter to the narrative that the people who are working to advance the bigger harms use to advance their agenda.

Minor point, but I do want to spotlight this footnote for how clearly it echoes the opposite (and superior) attitude to Bostrom’s:

3. Note that there is no such thing as a “supervolcano,” despite what Wikipedia says. There are, however, some volcanoes capable of producing supereruptions. I was corrected by one of the leading volcanologists in the world after he read portions of my 2024 book!

Not gonna lie: I have definitely taken advantage of various academic’s (including some of our regulars here) patience and willingness to write out elementary explanations of the stuff they do with a similar “omg senpai noticed me” kind of glee.

You know, somehow I had managed to avoid connecting the abhorrent views in that footnote with Robin Hanson specifically. The abyss never ends. Also I think it connects back to the biggest missing piece of this assessment. Their anti-authority authoritarianism, their anti-journalism but pro-transparency thing, etc. all come from the same place: they believe that there should be no limits on their own power and very little else.

I can’t think of any catastrophic global upheavals in or shortly after that era that might have given people reason to rethink the ideas that were in vogue at the time.

Nope.

Look, if our founder was abusing his power and influence over the organization to manipulate his underlings into sexual relationships and/or reward those who agreed to such, would he really have done it three times?

Thank you for your service in writing up this sneer-a-long and in unearthing this maddening artifact from the unseen cyclopean depths of substack. Zoe Cursi’s account seems like a far more sober examination of the dynamic and at least has the decency to treat the extreme distress that this whole thing caused as a problem rather than a sign that there was something powerful at work (that something obviously being the cult dynamic itself). But it’s rare to be able to see the inside of a cult from the perspective of a believer like this, and the way that manifests here is fascinating.

Actually, taking a closer look at this line:

Connection Theory, which he describes as “a theory of belief and behavior that postulates that people have basic goals, and act for the sake of achieving those basic goals.” What follows, then, is that any person’s problematic behavior can be changed, because “if you actually get the logic of what’s producing the problematic set of beliefs or actions,” then you can intervene in that logic.

So unless we’re already getting into some very culty language where words like “Basic Goals” or “logic” are cult jargon that only loosely resemble their more general use this sounds less like an overview of a theory and more like an incredibly obvious statement that would have to fit into basically any psychological paradigm other than maybe hard behaviorism.

It’s weird to see the Great Founder Theory laid out so clearly because it’s basically explicitly declaring allegiance to what I was starting to call the Great Man Theory of Everything - the belief that rather than being historically contingent and reliant on circumstances as much as any personal characteristics some people are just innately “agentic” in a way that others aren’t and the key to success isn’t in finding a way to navigate the world but in unlocking this “agentic” quality in yourself. Notably the corollary of doing this (or of being one of those special innately “agentic” people) is that you have the right and duty to impose your will on the malleable clay of the world and people around you. I maintain that this is the rotten kernel at the heart of so many of the batshit weird things that the rats believe and do, and the fact that it simply isn’t true is why their broader schemes keep sputtering out or failing, though with enough money and power behind them that they continue to leave a frankly impressive amount of human suffering in their wake.

I imagine there’s a certain level of generic fringe attraction at work here too. Some people are just particularly drawn to hidden knowledge or forbidden arcane arts or secrets of the universe or whatever you want to call it. Places like SFZC appear to be at the outer edges of the broader cultic milieu.

If anything I would expect the nonexistence of NIMBYs to be a good sign for the good-faith YIMBYs because it suggests that the opposition to their preferred policies are both more reasonable and less unified than the existence of a coherent NIMBY ideology would suggest. Of course if your YIMBYism is just a subset of technocratic authoritarianism then the fact that NIMBYs aren’t an actual thing is both convenient but hard to acknowledge. Crushing a mirage under your boot in the name of Progress and Civilization is easier than crushing actual people, but if that reality becomes too obvious you start looking like Star Wars kid.

If they were so good at investing money in the public good then how come they still have so much money and so much time to bitch about unhoused people?

The goal now is “operationalizing it into a powerful political faction that drives public outcomes at scale.”

I’m pretty sure I read this exact justification in a document from management explaining why they were simultaneously laying off 20% of total headcount and doing a massive stock buyback.

I try again every couple of years to see if my fascination with terrible people and bad ideas has crossed into straight-up digital self-harm. Bounced off every time so far, so I think I’m okay!

Sometimes I sincerely wish I could go back to the like 20 minutes some years ago when I was confused about why everyone was making such a fuss about computer numeric control.

Even in the magical fantasy land where this works exactly as well as Scott intends, there’s something deeply depressing - to say nothing of antidemocratic - about saying what amounts to “Please do my thinking about what I value in society and how much I should trust the people seeking power for me because I’m no good at it.” Even more so when you’re encouraging other folks to do it.

My God, it’s like if Mark Rosewater was also a Nazi.

Cards on the table, I love M:tG as a game design nerd, and the color pie is a really well-done tool for keeping the game interesting and fun over it’s very long history and even longer list of expansions and extensions. From a mechanical perspective, it strikes a beautiful balance between allowing the player to do exactly what they want and preventing the player from just doing everything. Without the color pie, it’s easy to see deck building descend into an attempt to assemble the strongest individual cards. It’s telling that basically every other CCG has some kind of mechanism to solve the same problem, but I don’t think any of them have done it as cleanly or in a way that so smoothly enables players to combine mechanics and elements from different colors.

From a narrative perspective it’s a great story engine that allows for all the disparate settings, characters, even genres that the game has explored over its life to still have a cohesive identity - to rhyme. I would argue that part of why the world’s beyond sets have seemed wrong is because the settings weren’t designed from the ground up to align with that narrative tool, and no matter how good the actual card designers at WotC are it just isn’t going to rhyme properly, like trying to translate poetry to a different language family. But that’s beside the point.

As a psychological model of the world? I mean I guess it’s a tool for categorizing and narrowing down the ways that different people interact with each other or the world or whatever. But that’s fundamentally not what it’s for! Even as bad as the science behind the MBTI or whatever might be, at least they were designed from looking at actual people and intended to categorize them and understand them. This is the equivalent of trying to do therapy based on people’s fucking Hogwarts house. Hell, even that was actually intended to fucking categorize people. Like, even without getting into all the ways that he’s extending and distorting the actual color pie as used in Magic to match his own fixations, the whole project is so blindingly wrong-headed from the start that it ought to be an old BuzzFeed listicle and not something that people actually use in any clinical setting, even if it is just his wacko girlfriend.

[To save space, the following several paragraphs of increasingly incoherent ranting and raving are to be filled in by your own imagination. If you do not have an imagination you can consider using an LLM of your choice before going off to fuck yourself]

One thing I found really interesting in your recent more reflective writing was part of your experience with hereticon 1:

I think one of the hardest things you can do, and the greatest gifts you can give someone, is give the situation to them straight when they invite you somewhere. I would realize later that the ‘protection’ I felt in a lot of left-leaning circles was a lot more transitory and a lot less honest than what the supposedly irredeemable far-right conference had done for me.

One thing that I see in some broadly left-leaning communities when engaging with some of these concerns is to effectively dismiss the women who have been victimized, often with some reference to the face-eating leopard party. (This doesn’t seem to happen as much here at awful.systems, which is one of many things I’ll say in favor of our community’s standards and practices of moderation and whatever else). This is obviously cruel and unfair to those women, but I want to ask about the underlying idea that the way that these social groups or organizations treat women who talk about SA in those communities is consistent with their general political ideologies, since it seems like there’s something missing from that idea beyond the simple lack of empathy.

I actually didn’t refresh to see this until after I had read the pair of “A Normie Girl in Rationalist America” posts (Part 1) (Part 2) and wanted to echo the thanks for sharing your experiences.