Messages

While I am working during tonight's video chat, Andrew Gelman passes along a geometry puzzle https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/02/27/geometry-corner-i-got-no-intuition-about-this-one/

Let a, b, and c be the sides of a triangle.

    Let p be perimeter of the triangle.

    Let r be the radius of the largest circle that can be inscribed in the triangle, and let R be the radius of the circle through the vertices of the triangle.

    Then all six numbers can be related in one equation:

    2prR = abc.

Feel free to work on it when you want a distraction!

I can't find this thread with Search under "space".

Ironically, having just tried it to check, this complaint now comes up as the third result, so you may have fixed the problem:)

I wonder if anyone has written in more depth (and ideally with some numbers and polling) about the social impact of things like space exploration as a sort of ideological concept: that is, there might be an interesting question as to whether a big exploration-style societal focus is easier to rally people around than "let's not burn the planet down" because people can see the big rocket go up in a way that they can't see climate change not happening, and whether that's something we need to consider when thinking about how we get public opinion behind scientific endeavours more generally.

I think there are discussions like that.  IIRC GURPS Transhuman Space postulated landing a bunch of small Internet-connected crawlers on Mars and letting people on earth control them for a fee or as a prize.

Climate change is very visible where I live and more so in the Canadian Arctic.

That would be a healthier thing for me to research than weird Internet communities, as long as I did notget sidetracked into specifically US culture and ideas such as safetyism. Thinking about US culture does not help me!

I have edited the OP.

I can't find this thread with Search under "space".

Ceglowski has a second essay about the problems with human missions to Mars with chemical rockets: it takes six months each way, and there is no abort, and the crew have to do everything themselves (currently the seven-person crew of the ISS has 80 hours for science per week, the other 1096 astronaut-hours are maintaining themselves and their environment).  One argument for a Moon mission is that it would let us see how human bodies respond to fractional gravity to reduce the chance of surprises when humans are living on Mars for 1, 2, or 17 months. https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.htm

I like being part of a species which is experimenting with this.

The phrase "you can just build things" is associated with postrationalists and some other American twitter communities with a bit more of an engineering and less of a mystical focus.  I think part of his seeming depression is related to too much Twitter although he probable hangs out with righty self-helpy tech folks in meatspace too.

My impression is that a lot of late-20th-century space advocacy focused on getting launch costs down and the possibility that NASA was bad at that (and sure the Space Shuttle was a boondoggle because they had to please too many parts of the post-FDR federal government). They were not as interested in the biomedicine, Musk's "send volunteers and let them risk it " is a counsel of despair.  The Apollo 1 fire was a good death compared to many of the ways that bodies and life support systems could fail on the way to Mars.

There is finally some grumbling in the legislature against Javier Milei the president of Argentina after he rugpulled a crypto scam https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp9x9j89evxo Someone involved did a SBF and held a long interview in which he confessed to crimes so fast that the interviewer had trouble keeping up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqizJTbxAEM

Eliezer Yudkowsky has now joined Alexander, Bostrom, and Gwern by endorsing a project to genetically engineer people for IQ and create "superbabies" (yes, he has also said that superhuman computer intelligence is coming in the next two years, and that is not many generations Yud, but don't try to understand this it will break your brain).  The project is run by a software developer who is sure that the field of genetics is too cautious and unwilling to admit the truth.  /s Sure sounds like someone I would let experiment on my future children s/.

In the original post, an academic said they were not sure what kinds of policies Cummings' rationalist sympathies would imply.  One of Dominic Cummings' twenty-something cronies proposed sterilizing the underclass! "Whoever has ears, let him hear." https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/new-downing-street-adviser-called-for-universal-contraception-to-stop-permanent-underclass

I mentioned Libertarians on the first page.

A useful way of thinking of LessWrong is comment-section Libertarians who are conning moderates and liberals and being conned by neofascists and oligarchs because that is the function of Libertarians. The British longtermists are slightly different but also into eugenics, transhumanism, etc.  I suspect that if you get them in a bar and they like you most will share the same ideas abut the poors and the coloureds that their American friends post on main, because this all comes out of the same mailing lists and early blogs.

All of this (waves with immense fatigue) is old and moderate compared to what was bubbling on Twitter and whatever is replacing it.  I just talk about it because I knew about some of these people ten or fifteen years ago and saw them being promoted on Hacker News and American right-wing twitter, and because its so easy to pull strings because they all post like they are getting paid by the word.  Nazis and eugenicists are not interesting, you mock them mercilessly, you fight them in the courts, and if necessary you liquidate them with naval blockades, air strikes, and Ordnance QF 25-pounder fire.

Yeah, part of America's malaise is that it seems to be asking people at times to vote on "do you want a government that does things", and then whether what the government is doing is corruption and drone strikes on middle-eastern weddings or what the government is doing is restraining oligarchy and funding healthcare research and food stamps gets weirdly sidelined. So the Democrats become the party of the state (in all its aspects) and the Republicans become the party of the oligarchs carving up the state (and so a potential repository for votes against the state).

I don't think that's a fully accurate picture of what's actually happening, because the Democrat and Republican coalitions don't fit those buckets coherently, but I think it's a framing that sometimes helps explain bits of Americans' electoral reactions.

Another part of the Zeitgeist is that many tech billionaires feel kind of meh about having built payment processors and social networks and spreadsheets. Jaan Tallinn didn't write a Bachelor's thesis on how to develop a distributed digital video-phone, he wrote it on interstellar travel. When did John W.I. Campbell Jr. publish a story about heroic software engineers?

So many of them want to build rocket ships or laser guns or seasteads or giant pipelines to direct water to an atomic desalination plant in Colorado (seriously!), something HARD with MECHANICAL ENGINEERING that sucks down MORE POWER.  For some reason, subways or artificial reefs or water treatment plants do not count, and they can't just take up wood turning or bicycle repair like a normal ageing techie.

Re the original piece, I'm not familiar with the author's work more generally, but nosing through some of it, it seems to be its own sort of Very Online (the sort that imagines itself to be Sensible And Moderate And In Touch whilst believing that what disaffected voters want is less economic interventionism and that the left are institutionally in control) whilst also spending a lot of time criticising the Very Online for being Too Online. But that brings us back into the Weird Internet Communities thread...

Tracing Woodgrains is also an anti-anti LessWronger (wrote a long criticism of David Gerard's activism) and law student who just launched the Centre for Educational Progress "to orient education towards a culture of excellence" (sounds good if you know anything about public education in the USA) with Lillian Tara, Harvard graduate student, self-proclaimed eugenicist and former CEO of Prontalist.org, founded by Simone and Malcolm Collins (oh crap).  But a lot of people in the USA won't post specifics about corruption and bad government because they are scared of empowering the far right, so I have trouble finding details from savory sources.

Edit: TW was also an admin on r/theMotte, an offshoot of the Slate Star Codex for culture war threads which was created that part of the original subreddit got too spicy for Scott Alexander. https://reflectivealtruism.com/2025/02/20/human-biodiversity-part-6-the-motte/

As early as 2015, The Atlantic published a story on how computer science professor Scott Aaronson blogged about how a younger self had felt there was no acceptable feminist way to express sexual interest in a woman, then writers Laurie Penny and Amanda Marcotte made a snarky reply, then Scott Alexander replied with frustration to them, and many were the posts that followed.

Aaronson, Penny, and Alexander are all Jewish by ancestry, blazingly neurodivergent, and very clever.  All had white-collar careers with a lot of autonomy (professor, writer for chattering magazines and news outlets for the educated, psychiatrist).  Marcotte went to university in Austin TX, the same city where Aaronson worked.  One of the Zizians was educated at Oxford, Nick Bostrom's employer and sometimes William MacAskill's.  Penny recently thanked Scott Alexander on her blog for endorsing Kamala Harris so they still follow each other's writing.

So even back then this was a small world. What changed is that a few businessmen, fraudsters, and cryptocurrency speculators have put billions of dollars behind all this and now what was just interpersonal drama or an excuse to post and post and post has bigger consequences.  David Gerard likes to tell the story that Grimes and Elon Musk first bonded over the story of Roco's Basilisk, and the breakup of that relationship has something to do with Musk's radicalization.  Peter Thiel saw something of value in the LessWrongers back in 2012, and bankrupted another chattering web magazine with snarky feminist writing (Gawker Media, host of Jezebel).  Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Tallinn, and Zuckerberg (the five billionaires who have expressed interets in this space) are obviously part of another small world (I note without comment that Tallinn has six children and wrote a Bachelor's thesis about the physics of interstellar travel, let him who is brave pull those strings).

I suppose I could apply for a grant funded by some software billionaire ... oh, bother.

I wonder if you actually could get a billionaire to pay for it by enthusing about it as a "social chain powered networking display tool" or something! The right buzzwords can get one surprisingly far with these things...

Let me shelve that for a moment.

Scott Alexander published http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/05/mapmaker-mapmaker-make-me-a-map/ but its about websites and social media accounts not who is living in whose spare bedroom.  Many of these people had pseudonymous Tumblrs, LessWrong profiles, etc.  Its also from before they got very rich people to bankroll them, back then a million or so was big money in these circles.

Has anyone done a proper network graph of these people?

I suppose I could apply for a grant funded by some software billionaire ... oh, bother.

The long blog series on the Extropians was by a fellow traveler but OK, and the paper on the Effective Altruists by an academic in Amsterdam, but neither had a visual display let alone an editable one.  The paper clued me in that her job with Vox is paid for by a donation by one of the big Effective Altruism sponsors.

On 29 January LessWronger, Effective Altruist, and (Effective-Altruism-funded) journalist Kelsey Piper https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper mentioned that she helped James Damore get a job after Google. 

https://xcancel.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1884702831451754548#m

James Damore was a Google software engineer who wrote a memo arguing that, while diversity and inclusion were good goals, bias was not the main reason there weren't more women in tech, and differences in personality between men and women probably explained a lot of it.  ... The internet was outraged. He got fired from Google. And he applied to the tech hiring startup I worked at, Triplebyte, which offered background-blind screening to anyone who wanted to be a software engineer. We really believed in the mission, at Triplebyte. I think I ended up kind of badly calibrated about how earnest to expect people to be everywhere else. We found people working as janitors and line cooks and homemakers who could code, and we got them 6 figure jobs, and we were proud of it. ... I'd been at Triplebyte for like six months at this point, it was my first job after graduation, and I was honestly way out of my lane, but I made a pretty big fuss internally. (It helped that I suspected a lot of people agreed with me but I was a woman and it was safer for me to say it.) I said that we were not in the business of deciding who had good politics, that we shared this country with many people who profoundly disagreed with each other, that companies could assess for themselves if he worked respectfully with female engineers, and that we should put him on the site and let them decide. We did. ... James Damore was egregiously wronged. To my knowledge he's a good software engineer with extremely reasonable, approximately accurate opinions about the reasons there were fewer women in software engineering, which he shared in good faith, and a lot of people who should've known better really did try to drive him out of the industry for it. It was wrong.

Piper consulted with Scott Alexander on how to get proscription medication (I hope she was not a patient since he shared her name and diagnosis), and a confidant of Sam Bankman-Fried until he confessed his crimes.  She is also one of the few women whose ideas Scott Alexander acknowledges.  So this is a very small world, and everyone dates, hires, parties with, or exchanges messages with everyone else.  The only special thing is that they got the attention of big money which is now trying to bring some of their weird Internet ideas to life.

Why does all of this matter? First, these movements still control billions of dollars and have the ear of oligarchs.  Vitalik Buterin gave one EA organization cryptocurrency which they were able to sell for USD 658m through FTX because of price fluctuations. The collapse of FTX cost them some funds and donors but they have not burned through everything. They are very active in the Internet for young smart technical people, so if you read a forum like this its wise to learn the signs that something is a LessWronger/Longtermist project so you know what to do when you are talking to a new student group and they start to use buzzwords.

Second, as power centralizes and the media are defunded the world today is full of shadowy forces manipulating policy and the media.  Most of us can't attend a prayer breakfast in Washington or an Institute for Social Justice soiree in Ottawa, but these movements post endlessly online and move their money in the form of cryptocurrency the least discreet means of payment since we stopped rolling giant stone wheels from village to village.  So you can study how some of these people used GiveWell EA as a milk-before-meat scam, or how Timnit Gebru, Emile P. Torres, and David Gerard tried to push a counter-message on the media in the service of a higher truth and their own passions, and think about how much else that you read on your feeds or hear on the radio comes out of shadow battles like that which are not planned on web forums and in comment threads.

Justin Trudeau attended a conference in Paris on AI policy recently and I promise that representatives of some of these movements were speaking there and looking serious and respectable.

I agree that if money and power were not so centralized, this would all be of no importance to people outside SoCal, NYC, Boston, and Oxford, because these people agree that their full program has no appeal to most people.  But we live in a world where you can get billions of dollars by impressing a few rich people.

Edit: a characteristic of the early smartphone age is online movements optimized for social media bursting into meatspace which works differently. We saw that with the Tiki-Torch Brigade and Tumblr-flavoured social justice eight years ago, this is one of the latest outbreaks.  And because longtermists and LessWrongers write so much in public (so very very much), they may be easier to understand than whatever has been festering on whatever replaced 4chan (one theory that maybe focuses too much on the people who really really like party politics on their smartphones).

I was trying to remember the group associated with Bay Area LessWrongers which reinvented scientology and came up with Leverage Research and this (rambling, not wholly substantiated, Substack) blog post https://www.aipanic.news/p/when-effective-altruism-takes-a-dark  Leverage Research had communal living, a process like Scientology auditing or Maoist self-criticism, warnings that the End of Times is Nigh and actions today will determine the fate of humanity, and a Leader who allegedly bedded at least three disciples.



The blogger also claims that 'bednetting' Effective Altruism was always just a cover for longtermist/Skynet EA (milk before meat).  She cites a young researcher named Mollie Gleiberman in Antwerp. https://ideas.repec.org/p/iob/dpaper/2023.01.html The people from the movement who I heard back then seemed sincere about causes like giving money to poor people in Africa and Asia and showed no sign of worries about AI. I remember criticisms that all their money seemed to go to a few projects like fighting malaria and parasites in Africa which had measurable immediate impact. Its good to assume that your enemies are as confused and divided as the people you know.  I don't think Yudkowski talks about racial hierarchies or yells about feminists, and Scott Alexander wants the Internet to know that despite being high status in this sexually-charged subculture he only recently found a long-term relationship.

The blogger has some gossip about Michael Vassar who founded MetaMed, one of the first LessWrong projects to find wealthy patrons including Estonian software developer Jaan Tallinn and Xanatos cosplayer Peter Thiel.  Tallinn also sponsors the Centre for Applied Rationality with $100,000 in scholarships a year and became a billionaire with help from cryptocurrency speculation.  Let people familiar with Scientology read Scott Alexander's description of Vassar and his disciples and ponder (although this is a tiff among former friends, and Alexander is a very clever very twisted person).

Occasionally it would also cause full-blown psychosis, which they would discourage people from seeking treatment for, because they thought psychiatrists were especially evil and corrupt and traumatizing and unable to understand that psychosis is just breaking mental shackles.

As someone on Hacker News said, the LessWrong cultural norm of open-mindedly considering any idea (especially any idea in the form of a rambling Internet essay with colourful language) makes them very vulnerable to recruitment by cults and white supremacists.  And Scott Alexander has been very interested in putting a selection of ideas from the Alt Right in front of his audience since 2014, and Yudkowski slowed down after he had groupies and an admiring audience for his speeches.  So the idea that this was deliberately built into their culture to create a pool of recruits should not be rejected offhand. 

I have talked about projection (every accusation is a confession, Nick Bostrom the longtermist seems to have invented the term Pascal's Mugging for how long chains of logic based on made-up numbers can go astray) and how many people in California are acting the way they imagine a superintelligence would act, and a lot of AI-foom discourse is about how to create an army of mechanical servants with hidden flaws which let the wise manipulate them.   And an awful lot of human culture is an excuse to gather money or adoration, and Sam Bankman-Fried admitted that he attached himself to Effective Altruism for the money and kudos.

BC United, the onetime party of capital supplanted by a more populist and reactionary party, can't decide whether to dissolve itself or try to recover.  It owed $930,000 in December 2024, not sure if that is net or if some of that is balanced with assets. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/kevin-falcon-resignation-calls-1.7452616

In a tale as old as time, the people who said "we need to unite to defeat that other party" are finding that many voters and activists respond "hold on, if its a choice between the other party and your movement I will vote for a third party or stay home."

I was able to get through to a person at PayPal eventually when I tried a few years ago.  They are notorious for poor customer service.  Does Stripe work in Austria?

I especially hate site which add mandatory SMS authentification.  I live somewhere with poor cell reception even from the top floor, and I have moved internationally and changed cell phone numbers in the past.