YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

with a degree from a top-level US university I

why do people feel the need to address gwern as somebody smart?

i have never seen him say anything smart

he mostly seems angry about very autistic and occasionally racist stuff

less addled, huh?

It seems like their problem is less their quack economics and overconfidence than that learning the basics is hard, practicing them requires self-discipline and willingness to fail, and they can always talk a friend into wiring them another $100,000. So they sling the lingo but generally know less than a high-school graduate who reads books on personal finance from the library and spent a few summers running a house-painting business.

I would be really really really surprised if, on average, LWers (et al.) performed better or worse than the average schmuck who decided to take a punt on proper investing or running a business or whathaveyou.

Beating the market is extremely hard. Riding the market is unbelievably easy, and gets easier constantly. Running a successful business is nearly impossible and gets harder all the time.

For these reasons most people don’t bother, take a job in somebody else’s company, and sometimes invest their savings in something very broad and shallow and safe like an index fund.

On the other hand, rationalism is an extremely well-funded cult, so it’s top-heavy with unbelievably bad decisions made with infinite thielbucks.

——-

Probably you can find a fair few good stories which are couched as “donations” because, again, rationalism is a cult, and investments in a business are framed in terms of “donations”, or tithes, to this or that cause within the movement. It may not offer a concrete return to the tither, but as with a tithe they do actually expect to get something in return.

If Scott Siskind Alexander very publicly kicks a few bucks to Max More’s cryonics scheme every now and then alongside human enhancement research to preserve a future for our white children, and makes sure he’s picked the RIGHT AI alignment protocol, he isn’t a neutral third party to the future those decisions are helping design.

The whole architecture of the group is a speculative ponzi scheme projected far off enough into the future that nobody can complain when their abstract ideas of expected return fail to come good after all.

Indeed on another level looking for good stories about bad investments is a bit of a contradiction in the sense that what you’re looking at to begin with is, for whatever else turns up in the ‘TESCREAL’ acronym, primarily a scam dreamed up by Eliezer Yudkowsky back in the early 2000s no different from scientology and L. Ron Hubbard.

I want to adapt a now deleted comment I originally framed as a “shortcoming”

I think more can be done with this adoptive parallelism between Manifest and Davos man, which risks being artificial. There is a risk of taking both parties too much at their own word, with the former in its pre-eminence and the latter as worthy successor. Capitalism, or the neoliberal system, or whathaveyou, is ambivalent about this kind of particular (there will always be some kind of conference, does it especially matter?), so what we really want to do is find out what independent work each of these is doing, and I think it is in their similarity to one another that the two differ.

——

Regarding the essay’s closing remarks:

“Manifest Man” doesn’t differ from Davos Man in regarding knowledge as a “positional asset”. In the example given to contrast, Manifest Man’s prediction markets externalise knowledge onto markets. But this is precisely the driving vision of the World Economic Forum, where it is regularly taken into equally science fictional scenarios. I don’t have to check to know how much Ray Kurzweil malarkey was on sale at the WEF 20-30 years ago. Nor does this translate into “they’re both versions of the same old capitalism”, in fact they’re both very closely related arms of the same highly specific model for doing capitalism.

Nor is there any particular difference in preferences for and against institutional affiliation, besides the accidental. Manifest theoretically aims at more direct affiliation away from explicitly state entities, but this is only indicative of the perception that states are over - a view also promulgated most famously at Davos. Both pursue a bracingly market-first approach to statecraft, with the difference emerging that Manifest has a classically more eccentric view of the role of the state (which with deepening context disappears into the imbrication of the modern techno-state with Silicon Valley, and Peter Thiel’s shitty data-aggregation software for gullible neoliberals).

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n13/peter-geoghegan-and-lucas-amin/this-looks-absolutely-rubbish

What should emerge here is a more equivocal conclusion about any comparison: is Davos like that because it’s BETTER at courting institutional favour? Had a better start in that area? Will Manifest REALLY take over the world, or will its attendees end up at Davos or Davos 2 when they eventually grow up to be as ancient Klaus Schwab?

Davos emerged at the tail-end of the post-war consensus and the collapse of the keynesian balance of payments model of international trade. Here amongst other places around the same time the idea began to take hold that governments should voluntarily abridge their own mandate to govern in matters of the economy. As we have learned thereafter, political history is often not cyclical - it does not tend towards the mean - so much as libidinal and plural: the right kind of trend will continue until it is halted or exhausts itself into something entirely different.

Davos man seeds more aggressive children like Manifest man all over in the hope of encouraging some grim process of natural selection which will produce the most virulent next strain. What happens next is up to what people do about that

hey, that rando sure seems humble!

Frustratingly even-handed on Razib Khan and Steve Hsu

Neither of these guys was fired because of public outcry at their views, or because of perceptions of their views

They got fired, especially Khan, for being insanely dumb, and the outcry generated by that fundamental lack of being even a little bit smart about their racist opinions

People noticed that Razib Khan was unbelievably far out over his professional skis on fucking VDARE (Hsu was blogging his shit I think?) and mouthing off about racial intelligence using the standard kindergarten collage of smarmy doggerel and, like, somebody else’s GWAS scatterplot or whatever

Hsu is just a bigot, like he doesn’t even have anything to say, he’s not even passionate about it in the frightening way people like Khan project, like his opinions are cartoonish and cartoonishly under-derived

“a range of negative experiences” on our EIGHT YEAR PROJECT

nobody has “a range of negative experiences” over eight years

you have “a range of negative experiences” over about a week maybe, a month tops

when you leave a job after a year you leave with “a bunch of” or “a lot of” negative experiences, minimum, and that’s EVEN IF it was more good than bad

on an EIGHT YEAR TIMELINE you have well exceeded a “range” if things went fucking BRILLIANTLY, let alone if you got within about two hairs of jonestowning your way out of the whole thing

I think you and the replies are overthinking it, because mindfulness and meditation (not to mention yoga, which she also mentions) have been hugely influential on the entire Western/global middle class for 20-50 years

fwiw her writing here seems to me to comport with some level of undiagnosed OCD or similar as well, which doesn’t strike me as unusual for rationalist circles

The essay will include a short section at the beginning acknowledging that lots of self-identified YIMBYs are good people with some sensible ideas about getting hold of the right things, followed by a long explanation of why the essay will not allow this fact to be used to once again derail its point, already stated, that they have carted together a massive swathe of different ideas and motivations into a single huge distraction from actually thinking about politics

i very much enjoy that that quote is literally the first thing that you find when you search “zack rosen politics” to differentiate from the basketball guy, and also ain’t it a thing how goddamn these conceited assholes always sound so fucking lame / identical to one another / literally never change

https://prospect.org/2026/06/12/new-documents-detail-nine-figure-silicon-valley-funded-abundance-movement/

One day I am gonna write my essay “NIMBYism does not exist” outlining the way that self-professed YIMBYs have carted together a massive swathe of different ideas and motivations into a single huge distraction from actually thinking about politics

ah, i see the other person already made the some point

There is only one means: by commenters pointing out all the places where a post says something wrong—anything wrong. If the error wasn't "load-bearing for your argument", it's still worth pointing out in the comment section, for the benefit of readers who might otherwise be deceived. (We're not going to run out of paper.)

one day you are gonna run out of adderall