It’s pretty rare you see two bullets dodge each other.

The most talented writers of our generation are burning out from both ends living in a rape van

We are 6 weeks out from the midterms. The Dems know they are wiped out for decades if they lose in 2026. They are throwing everything they have at the midterms to avoid existential defeat. Accordingly, you are going to experience a level of propaganda not seen since COVID. The media will do everything they can to convince you the situation is hopeless for Republicans and there's no point in voting or canvassing. Their goal is to demoralize you and convince you to sit on your ass the next 6 weeks. You need to calm your mind and harden your heart against the propaganda the next 6 weeks. Yes yes gas prices and Iran. But Dems are still historically unpopular, broke, and their ballot harvesting machine has been nuked. I'd much rather be James Blair than Ken Martin right now. Keep your head on for the next 6 weeks. Play as if the score is 0-0, because it is. Go canvas, put up yard signs, and make sure all your family and friends have a plan to vote. And stop blackpilling.

"We are 6 weeks out from the midterms. The Dems know they are wiped out for decades if they lose in 2026. They are throwing everything they have at the midterms to avoid existential defeat. Accordingly, you are going to experience a level of propaganda not seen since COVID. The media will do everything they can to convince you the situation is hopeless for Republicans and there's no point in voting or canvassing. Their goal is to demoralize you and convince you to sit on your ass the next 6 weeks."

Checking in on Bronze Age Shawty

Thought about this again, for no particular reason. The soul demands punishment for its transgressions but everywhere it's withheld from us. I worry we hurtle subconsciously toward a catastrophe that allows us that collective, expiative pant

>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why only count people alive today >huh >future people matter too >obviously >my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet >reasonable.jpg >keep following logic >what about their grandchildren >also yes >what about people in 500 years >sure >5000 years >why not >500 million years >starting to get weird but morality is morality >open calculator >humanity could survive for an astronomically long time >could colonize galaxy >could have trillions upon trillions of descendants >maybe digital people too >maybe simulated civilizations >maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds >calculator starts smoking >realize currently living humans are rounding error >8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta >future contains potentially 10^something people >can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets >new moral priority unlocked >protect the long-term future >stop thinking in units of "people helped" >start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved" >malaria? >terrible >but only kills existing humans >AI extinction could delete the entire light cone >nuclear war could permanently derail civilization >bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years >someone invents wrong constitution in 2140 >quadrillions suffer >better fund governance workshop now >friend says maybe we should improve hospitals >explain opportunity cost >friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people >explain scope sensitivity >friend stops inviting me to dinner >need to decide what to fund >easy >expected value >suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction >sounds tiny >but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives >multiply >mother of god >$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies >charity evaluation complete >someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from >expert judgement >which expert >us >how calibrated >extremely thoughtfully >reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative >still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude >epistemic robustness achieved >someone says maybe project doesn't work >assign 20% chance >still astronomical >maybe project makes problem worse >assign 5% chance >still astronomical >why 5 >because 30 felt pessimistic >publish 46-page report >contains seventeen sensitivity analyses >every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign >critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities >yes >that's literally why it's important >critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical >make probability smaller >critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong >make probability smaller again >critic begins rubbing temples >discover AI safety >perfect longtermist cause >AI might kill everyone >or create utopia >or seize galaxy >or tile universe with paperclips >or create billions of conscious software minds >finally a problem with numbers big enough for me >start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting >we must understand capabilities to understand safety >we must scale models to study alignment >we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first >we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong >we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous >outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies >complicated field >company releases stronger model >very concerned >company begins training even stronger model >extremely concerned >company raises $14 billion >concern reaches unprecedented levels >need to influence government >future is at stake >normal democratic process too slow >politicians don't understand exponential curves >public doesn't understand x-risk >experts must guide them >who counts as expert >people who understand x-risk >who understands x-risk >our friends >someone objects that this seems politically convenient >explain we're representing future generations >future generations unavailable for comment >develop concept of value lock-in >terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever >therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in >whose values >let's circle back >begin with impartial morality >end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want >beautiful arc >meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things >voting wrong >having parochial attachments >loving family more than strangers >caring about local community >getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible >evolutionary biases everywhere >explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted >except intuition that future digital people count >and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad >and intuition that our probability estimates are sane >and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future >those intuitions survived peer review >someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter >inefficient >could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher >think of all the simulated people you just killed >okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly >PR team says "future generations deserve a voice" >much better >journalist asks what longtermism means >say "future people matter" >everyone agrees >great >journalist asks what follows from that >well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures >journalist raises eyebrow >return to "future people matter" >motte has entered the chat >critic: of course future people matter >me: glad we agree >critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them >me: why do you hate our grandchildren >eventually notice uncomfortable implication >if future value dominates everything >then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future >education matters because future institutions >health matters because future productivity >democracy matters because future trajectory >human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy >see starving child >feel compassion >check spreadsheet >child's direct welfare contribution negligible >but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality >compassion restored >tell myself this is impartial altruism >one day assistant asks obvious question >"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?" >silence >open spreadsheet >increase column width >add confidence interval >assistant asks again >"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?" >stare into cosmic light cone >10^50 people staring back >none of them exist >none of them can tell me >none of them can falsify my assumptions >realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me

Any "broader community" built on a foundation of "intentionally make life worse for your own children" should not exist and people who work in those directions should not be allowed into society. If you believe harming children "for the greater good" is justifiable you are evil.

You're having a lot of trouble understanding the issues here, so let's take a step back, and look again at "racism." Above, you said you wanted to convince "moderates" that leftist use of the term "racism" is itself racist. This suggests you agree that there is something bad or deplorable about "racism." When we look at "racism," we see the word has a long and rich history. It went through roughly four stages of changing meaning and increasing political significance over the centuries. 1) "Race" was originally a neutral concept developed in the context of animal husbandry. 2) Eventually the notion of horse or dog "races" was applied to human subpopulations, and various theories on this front were referred to (at first neutrally) as "racialism" or – in French – "racisme" 3) By the early 20th century, leftists started using "racism" as a parallel to "classism" – a pejorative term for something like "racial chauvinism." This is your preferred sense of "racism," the one you want to win over the moderates with. 4) Since the later 20th century, leftists began using "racism" in a narrower sense, to mean (in their words) "prejudice combined with power." This latter definition was deployed to make racism something only Euro-descended people may be guilty of. It is this definition that most bothers you. You seem to believe that if you could just wind back the tape to step 3) in the semantic evolution of "racism", you could cut off the leftist attacks at step 4) and rescue the situation. You don't realise that step 4) is already baked in to step 3) and was in fact inevitable as soon as the left decided to attack the intellectual processes that gave rise to the semantics at step 2). The only stable position here, is an insistence that there is nothing wrong with "racism" and that all anxieties associated with "racism" are dumb. Humans indeed exist in different descent groups with different trait distributions ("races"), they generally prefer their own descent groups to other descent groups, there is nothing wrong with this, and no reason Euro-descended peoples should be uniquely required to overlook race while the rest of the world's peoples seek their own group's advantage with nakedly "racist" perspectives and politics.

This is redundant we already know he's black

This is fucking amazing.

Human resources meme where it's romantasy book dialogue vs B-tier Howling Mutant tweets

Indians can prevent all those things by just going home. Build families and careers in India, you parasites.

Quite possibly the funniest thing I have seen on the internet this year.

The autistic qt architecture grill blocked me for making too many foid jokes and now there is nothing left for me in Ohio

peak dad text

It's funny hearing people talk about race science as a "pseudoscience" and then cite that humans share 99.9% of DNA. We also share about 50% of our DNA with a banana and 98.8% with chimpanzees. Why? Because we are all eukaryotic organisms and most DNA is very old biological machinery that is responsible for the functions of life (copying DNA, making RNA, building proteins, generating and using energy, dividing cells and repairing damage, regulating metabolism, etc). We share that in common with all eukaryotic life. But the human genome is enormous. Over 3 billion base pairs. Even a small percentage difference still represents millions of base pairs. Further, where those differences occur matters a great deal more than simply counting them. If some of those DNA differences result in instructions that say something like "develop this tissue in this way, at this stage, for this long", you can end up with resulting organisms that are dramatically different. So it's not really about "percentage difference" when talking about genetic difference. A big part of the discussion must be about what genes switch on, where and how strongly they switch on, how long they stay on, what types of cells are expressing that, and at what developmental stage they are expressed. Consider embryonic development. A single, small, regulatory alteration early in fetal development could produce a cascade of downstream consequences. If something were to, say, alter how neural progenitor cells proliferate during fetal development, you would not need thousands of new "brain genes" to produce a substantially different type of brain. You just need one single gene that changes the genetic instructions that govern how an organism develops. So yes, humans are 99.9% genetically identical to each other in the ordinary single-nucleotide sense, but the remaining variation contributes to real and sometimes stark differences in physiology, appearance, temperament, etc. Even a tiny fraction of a percent has a lot of wiggle room and what can be done in that wiggle room is substantial. Next time you see someone parroting the line that race doesn't exist because we are 99.9% genetically the same, you will know that person doesn't know shit about genetics and is just repeating a talking point they heard from someone else who doesn't know shit about genetics. They are not qualified to be part of the conversation.