AFAIK the USA is the only country where programmers make very high wages compared to other college-educated people in a profession anyone can enter. Its a myth that so-called STEM majors earn much more than others, although people with a professional degree often launch their careers quicker than people without (but if you really want to launch your career quickly, learn a trade or work in an extractive industry somewhere remote). So I think for a long time programmers in the USA made peace with FAANG because they got a share of the booty.

Piper’s self-described many unpopular beliefs that the rest of society considers loathsome

If Piper ever starts to publish essays on what goals and policy positions she thinks make her or SlateScott “sincere centre-leftists” they are going to be a trip. Just the explanation why she feels more comfortable saying what she believes under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Big Balls than under Biden’s centrist technocrats would require a few doses of my favourite substance to get through.

Edit: I would also love to hear “so you agree that the talking head on Fox News who suggested executing the homeless is despicable, what about your friend Scott Alexander proposing to sterilize the poor and substance users before they receive help?”

When you are running a con like crypto or chatbot companies, it helps to know someone who is utterly naive and can’t stop talking about whatever line you feed him. If this were the middle ages Kevin Roose would have an excellent collection of pigges bones and scraps of linen that the nice friar promised were relics of St Margaret of Antioch.

unethical

His post on a woman in the EA/LW world who took her own life after saying she had been sexually harassed is https://archive.is/I85mC and there are discussions on Old! SneerClub here and there. I am not comfortable going into this without training in how to talk about self-harm and first-hand knowledge but yeesh.

The Tumblr he cites belongs to Kelsey Piper, a self-identified journalist and meatspace friend who receives donations from people and orgs in the Effective Altruism world and keeps reporting on how EA ideas and people are great.

Good point that SlateScott commented on accusations of abuse in rationalist and adjacent organizations. Would the Goldwater Rule have applied? At least there has been some reporting on those accusations but I don’t know if it was on the ground or just phoning and emailing people from NYC, Chicago, or LA.

Someone with biochem, pharmacy, or psychology training could comment on some things SlateScott has written.

So Hanson is dissing one of the few movements that supports his pet contrarian policy? After the Defence Department lost interest the only people who like prediction markets seem to be LessWrongers / EAs / tech libertarians / crypto bros / worshippers of Friend Computer.

The Manifest networking event in Berkeley combines prediction markets, race cranks, EA, and LessWrong. Scott Alexander likes prediction markets, does Yud?

Amanda Marcotte remembers that but I don’t see examples in her link https://www.salon.com/2025/02/24/what-elon-musks-on-workers-owes-to-gamergate/ It looks like the Wikipedia page was written by someone who noticed the slur on Twitter in 2018 or later, and its focused on the meme graphic not the slur “you are just a mindless machine that exists for my pleasure or as an obstacle to overcome.” I think Marcotte served in the Internet Feminism Wars on the feminist side.

The reporting on Gamergate that I can find focuses on the death threats and doxing not insults but “NPC” sounds like the kind of slur that the anti-feminists would have used.

We have some threads of Vaccinations in Book/Article Form which try to share good pop science and textbooks without the cult shit and Dunning-Kruger. People who think they know everything and are mysteriously underemployed tend to have the most time to post though.

When it started in ’06, this blog was near the center of the origin of a “rationalist” movement, wherein idealistic youths tried to adapt rational styles and methods. While these habits did often impress, and bond this community together, they alas came to trust that their leaders had in fact achieved unusual rationality, and on that basis embraced many contrarian but not especially rational conclusions of those leaders. - Robin Hanson, 2025

I hear that even though Yud started blogging on his site, and even though George Mason University type economics is trendy with EA and LessWrong, Hanson never identified himself with EA or LessWrong as movements. So this is like Gabriele D’Annunzio insisting he is a nationalist not a fascist, not Nicholas Taleb denouncing phrenology.

Seems like it only makes sense if you played CRPGS but not TTRPGS, LARP, or participatory fiction online? Yud is in to sex games but maybe he does not see it as playing a role?

HPMOR chapter 88 from 2010 has the line

Harry’s brain flagged this as I’m talking to NPCs again and he spun on his heel and dashed back for the broomstick.

Someone who thinks like that will lose in the long run, but they can do a hell of a lot of damage in the short run.

On the enshittified site someone posted this take on Alexander’s take on the kabbalah and Jewish thought https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/unsong-a-study-in-misrepresentation

I think Hallquist had a short-lived blog with criticisms of LessWrong and EA between his time on FreethoughtBlogs/Pantheos and his run for office and Medium blog. Possibly https://topherhallquist.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/reply-to-scott-alexander/ In the original Twitter post, Hallquist described Alexander as “a vague internet acquaintance at the time (when he sent the emails)” and it sounds like after 2014 Hallquist explored LW and EA and decided they were messed up. (Hallquist’s post also suggests that if you want to sound like a bold contrarian, see what a median expert at a university think about a topic rather than reading blogs).

I like to remind myself that I see what happens online, but the offers of money and the sexual propositions probably mostly happen in person or between people who have met in person. So I don’t know as much about the LessWrong or EA communities as I think.

Making general statements about the risks and benefits of medication is different from proscribing them. The George K. Lerner, MD who was FTX’s resident pill-pusher seems to be based in San Francisco and wants potential patients to know that inter alia “Dr. Lerner specializes in the treatment of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD) in adults. He has extensive experience in treating adults who have been successful in their professional endeavors but have found attention deficit symptoms to be an impediment to achieving their full potential.” (nudge nudge)

His website does not mention a connection with the hospital in Michigan which is the only one where I know Alexander worked. I would like to know more about possible connections other than their mutual connections to the FTX gang. I have not done shoe-leather reporting in SoCal and almost all of the things we know about Alexander are things he posted voluntarily under his main handle.

Lerner’s site shows what Alexander’s site might look like if he were focused on psychiatry rather than writing and peddling racist lies.

That is very possible although I would guess that was earlier in his career given that he does not advertise as treating ADHD or similar. He has two small children, a writing job, and side projects like writing end-of-the-world stories for AI 2027. His practice has a name drawn from Lord of the Rings like other things in the Thielsphere.

Yes, Scott Alexander is an unusual rationalist blogger who had a credentialed professional career as a psychiatrist. After Substack became his patron, he opened his own medical practice, but the website has said “not accepting new patients at this time” since 2022. So he seems to live off gifts from fellow travelers with a side hustle in psychiatry.

In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound (he went overseas for medical school, and failed to get medical residency on his first try, ending up in a small Midwestern city). So I wonder why he is sure that in a world with fewer university degrees, he would have gotten as far as he did (medical schools in the USA used to limit admissions from people of his ethnicity).

Likewise with immigration restrictions: he knows that they often blocked Jews, many Europeans. and East Asians not just brown people right?

I know that on the American right, every accusation is a confession, but I never thought I would read a scheming cartoon villain accusing his enemies of being the Antichrist! He is even queer-coded, would do great on TV in the 1990s.

Hossenfelder seemed like a normal science blogger and critic of string theory until some recent videos, and most people don’t update their blogroll every year. And Woit links her sensible (but defunct) blog, not her out-there videos.

A lot of people in this world have connections going back 15 or 30 years but ended up on opposite sides (eg. Charlie Stross and Curtis Yarvin, or Laurie Penny and Scott Aaronson)