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Has anyone else encountered the idea of "the big sort" or "the great sort" on American right-wing social media?  The idea that the Invisible Hand of the Market just alots capable people to good jobs? (And don't talk about the state of public education and public health in many places, or how many jobs in say high-status journalism are for the children of the last generation of celebrities and elected officials- people like that also tend to be anxious about chatbots taking jobs).

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who claimed he performed human genetic engineering with CRISPR and spent three years in prison for his trouble, is moving to America:

"My new lab in Austin, Texas is being prepared and I'll be settling down there," he said. ... "My mission is still in the field of embryonic genetic editing." ... The controversial figure said he had given up trying to win over conventional academia and intended to spread his influence among his online fans instead. ... His growing rejection of mainstream academia has largely been attributed to his second wife, Cathy Tie – a 29-year-old Chinese-Canadian bioinformatician and entrepreneur who founded Ranomics, a genetic screening company, and Locke Bio, a telemedicine company, in Toronto. ... He also said that Tie had helped to create a cryptocurrency called meme coin to enable public support of his research.

Elon Musk has connections to Austin and several figures in this thread live or have lived there.

At least the Kaiser just let portugaling Lenin out! Would be funny if ICE deports He to a gulag in Honduras for stealing jobs from American mad scientists.

"The only basement abominations i have are old artworks and abandoned hobbies."

"Certified 100% non-Communist by four Communist parties!"

"The most damaging animal to people and livestock is the portugaling Goose"

"Do I need to quote Procopius' Secret History? Because I can quote Procopius' Secret History."

"is that a hard exoskeleton in your pants or are you just happy to see me "

"(Sentimental voice) It was Exilian where I first learned what an ovipositor was."

"So what I am hearing is that you have a catalogue of abominations on your laptop, subcategory Duck."

"You can't unfortunately remove your own skin. Not reversibly."

Unfortunately, the refusal of Americans to control their oligarchs means that you just need to amuse one rich person to make a fringe Internet idea into a global sensation.  And Amazon etc. don't care what they publish or advertise as long as it does not cross a few simple lines.

As far as I am concerned, the whole country is like a pet owner that lets their pit bull chase all the smaller dogs and people at the park.  Utter abandonment of personal responsibility.

An Old Media article on Curtis Yarvin mentions that after his wife died suddenly, in 2021 and 2022 he dated people including Caroline Ellison.  People involved in the community say that while Scott Alexander was writing a Neo-Reactionary FAQ he attended events with Curtis Yarvin who does not have a day job so had lots of time to hang around blathering. Yarvin also dated a feminist sex blogger who went by the handle Clarisse Thorn (RationalWiki has an article on a similar type of person called Ozy Brennan). My Early Social Media community was mostly people 1000 km or more away so this merging of meatspace and IRL (and different communities) feels alien.

According to the article Yarvin knows Razib Khan, Steve Sailer, and many other cranks well.

What about archive of our own?  Magazines and web magazines too obviously.

There are definitely online communities for sharing specific genres eg. fantasy, erotica, political writing.

The Economist had an article a year ago with some details
https://archive.is/5sdci The major EA organizations had spent perhaps $2-3 billion by the end of 2022. That year was the only year where spending on longtermist causes was comparable to spending on global poverty reduction (animal welfare can be in between, it can mean "humane farming" or it can mean sitting and talking about genetically engineering lions to eat grass). A major donor is Dustin Moskovitz a Facebook founder whose publicist decided not to make him famous like Zuck (he runs something called Open Philanthropy).  The Economist estimates about 10,000 core EA members, GiveWell reported around 40,000 donors in 2022.

They don't spell out that the movement looks big on social media because it spends money on paying people to post on the Internet, not organize prayer breakfasts or art gallery cocktail parties or golf tournaments. And its connected to social media companies like Substack, Twitter, and Facebook.

These days a lot of the people who used to call themselves rationalists or Effective Altruists are trying not to use labels in public eg. Rethink Priorities which funds something called Apollo Research https://rethinkpriorities.org/about-us/ (earlier charitable filings are very honest that they are a longtermist Effective Altruist organization). A lot of scare stories about "AI" are funded by rationalist and longtermist EA organizations.

This space has lots of organizations, which sometimes change names, but staffers and money mostly move between them.

Caroline Ellision the fraudster, incidentally, was a regular face-to-face and Internet contact of Scott Alexander and friends, and SBF sometimes posted on Alexander's blog.  She will be out of prison by the end of 2026.

Longtermists tend to poo-poo climate change because its unlikely to make humans extinct and actions to reduce it might prevent us from building the cosmic computer. A Vox article has some dismissing antibotic resistance because genetically engineered bioweapons invented by friend computer are more exciting https://www.vox.com/2015/4/24/8457895/givewell-open-philanthropy-charity (warning: author is funded by EA foundations and self-identifies as an EA https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/dylan-matthews-1) This is obviously totally opposed to the logic of empirical, shorttermist Effective Altruism because you can't measure hypothetical future threats.

At current count, the winning candidate in one riding (Terrebonne, QC) is ahead by one (1) vote.  Another thing that would not matter with a better electoral system than first past the post!

I would like to know where "twelve seats for official party status" is defined.  Currently three parties have it, down from four in the last election (out of five parties with seats).

More about the late Edmonton landlord Abdullah Shah and the law's delays (Shah was murdered in 2022, a case about a 2005 arson has just made its way through the courts) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-landlord-abdullah-shah-allegedly-directed-man-charged-in-alberta-avenue-arsons-1.7523404 Canada's courts are notoriously understaffed even though our culture is not very litigious.

One thing that differentiates the Conservative Party of Canada from their international equivalents is that they are not the party of racism or xenophobia. There are elements of the Conservative coalition that want to be, spurred by American and Americanized propaganda over social media, but Barack Obama would have been satisfied as a Tory backbencher if he had grown up in Toronto instead of Chicago.

In addition, the rules for creating ridings in Canada ensure that they are diverse (often lumping parts of smaller cities with larger rural areas).

Edit: example story https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/prince-george-kamloops-riding-size-1.7510314

Rural seats in Canada are traditionally contested between the NDP and the Conservatives (or their offshoots such as Reform). A third of the population of Canada lives in three metropolitan areas so its hard for the big parties (especially the party of the credentialed professional class) to represent the rest of the country.

A lot of first- and second-generation immigrants are obviously very conservative (and because of Canada's discriminatory labour market, first-generation immigrants tend to be in jobs that don't require academic and pseudoacademic credentials like construction trades, driving, or real estate rather than engineering, teaching, or accounting).

The Green Party of Canada appears to have lost one of its two seats, and the remaining MP is age 71.

Kashmiri saffron crops are being ravaged by hungry porcupines https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/4/16/kashmirs-famed-saffron-faces-devastating-new-terror-porcupines

A business book on OpenAI suggests that Sam Altman was chronically lying to the board of OpenAI (or doing things without telling them) because they were LessWrong type doomers and their understanding of AI safety was getting in the way of making all the money (OpenAI dominates the chatbot business even though it does not own the best technology for some use cases and is losing billions of dollars a year; but Sam Altman knows that if enough money passes through your hands you can make some stick to your fingers) https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/04/06/how-sam-altman-got-fired-from-openai-in-2023-not-being-an-ai-doom-crank-and-lying-a-lot/

Almost everyone in these spaces is crazy, greedy, or a Nazi. So whichever faction wins the results will be bad.  About the least harmful result is the chatbot companies which take rich people's money and spend it building nothing (one company borrowed $2 billion on a promise not to release technology before they have superintelligence which is very South Sea Bubble).

And people at chatbot companies lie like the Hells Angels are at their door about a debt they can't pay.

Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic the chatbot company (ClaudeAI), is married to Holden Karnofsky, founder of an EA spending organization GiveWell and Anthropic staffer.  Amanda Askell was an early employee at Anthropic; her ex-husband is William MacAskell. Daniella's brother Dario Amodei is CEO of Anthropic and once shared a group house with Karnofsky while both worked for Open Philanthropy, another EA organization. So the org charts of these companies and foundations look more like Saudi Arabia or Qing China than contemporary Canada, its all roommates and lovers and members of secret societies hiring each other. The closest thing I can think of in respectable circles in the USA is Old Media journalism. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/53Gc35vDLK2u5nBxP/anthropic-is-not-being-consistently-candid-about-their  See previous discussion about how all this (gestures) has social dynamics similar to geeky subcultures but much more ambitious goals and bigger budgets or influence (although a $20 million endowment and some six-figure to low-seven-figure grants to fund EA propaganda on Vox Media is not that much in absolute terms! Just big by the standards of FOSS or the SCA or your local amateur dramatic society).

Many people in these spaces hate public universities and civil servants, and I note that those are institutions in the USA which were dragged kicking and screaming away from hiring your friend's failson and your ex-wife's bridge partner.  Publicly-traded companies can't get away with this easily any more either.  But American so-called Libertarians tend to be very comfortable with organizing a country like one patriarchal family, and IQ-fetishists and believers in secret revelations can also be persuaded that clearly they know best and rules are for lesser creatures.

I note without further comment that there is a Mormon tranhumanist association if Czarist Russian cosmicists are not your jam https://www.transfigurism.org/