One thing to keep in mind about Ptacek is that he will die on the stupidest of hills. Back when Y Combinator president Garry Tan tweeted that members of the San Francisco board of supervisors should be killed, Ptacek defended him to the extent that the mouth-breathers on HN even turned on him.

Let them fight. https://openai.com/index/elon-musk-wanted-an-openai-for-profit/

Same. I’m not being critical of lab-grown meat. I think it’s a great idea.

But the pattern of things he’s got an opinion on suggests a familiarity with rationalist/EA/accelerationist/TPOT ideas.

Do you have a link? I’m interested. (Also, I see you posted something similar a couple hours before I did. Sorry I missed that!)

So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some… boutique… views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:

• Lab-grown meat
• Modern architecture is rotten
• Population decline is an existential threat
• Elon Musk and Peter Thiel

How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?

I’m noticing that people who criticize him on that subreddit are being downvoted, while he’s being upvoted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, as part of his prodigious self-promotion of this overlong and tendentious screed, he’s steered some of his more sympathetic followers to some of these forums.

Actually it’s the wikipedia subreddit thread I meant to refer to.

So now Steve Sailer has shown up in this essay’s comments, complaining about how Wikipedia has been unfairly stifling scientific racism.

Birds of a feather and all that, I guess.

This is good:

Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.

Also this:

If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.

And:

If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.