Oh, I’ve seen this one before. At least we know where the LLM who gave them this pitch scraped the idea from.

Novara published a gushing profile of MacAskill a while ago, so no surprises there.

Yeah, the party-line was far from realistic and reflected the West’s own imperial hubris, but there’s a spectrum there. When the fullscale invasion finally happened, the Jake Sullivans weren’t going around for weeks about how Ukraine is doomed. And again, there was at least some room in the mainstream for eastern europeans or even just people who had traveled in Ukraine and understood the country & the people. In that regard Samo shares much more with the vatniks (sorry, the “realists”) like John Mearsheimer and The Economist, who kept (and still keep) telling people Russia would win any day now.

He runs an analytics company and was specifically touting how his models showed a quick Russian victory, even weeks into the invasion, which was more than just the usual Besserwisserism among western europeans towards eastern Europe. If the whole shtick is that the mainstream is lame but my patented crystal ball actually tells the future from first principles and you then tank even harder than the mainstream, you not only embarrass yourself but reveal your own preferences as well.

And the mainstream predictions in the West of Ukrainian resistance weren’t as negative as what he advanced, which is precisely why many refused to believe the Kremlin would actually step on this rake of a war. That he wholeheartedly defended a quick Russian victory made him seem steeped more in the Kremlin’s narratives than the West’s, even as all imperial powers tend to be hubristic.

I remember him tweeting in February 2022 where immediately after the invasion he confidently predicted that Russia would gobble up all of Ukraine in a matter of weeks. Unlike all those legacy academics with their degrees he really see into the future of governance, you see.

Time to resurrect this thread with some campy German eurodance!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E6MulYo5U4

This gave me more value than the last decade of tech-industry output combined. 😄 Silicon Valley could never make Mrs. Robota!

It’s striking how inimical to life itself the first statement is on its own. The people most obsessed with living for an eternity seem to be having the worst time of it. Yes, the Musks & Thiels are ungodly rich, but do they ever seem even basically well-adjusted? Inordinate wealth seems to come with commensurate insecurity.

well, Zen buddhism

Yeah, this is the Valley after all. Some have used Buddhism as a building block for constructing “metarationality”.

The irony being that rather than writing good SCP themselves, they’d make for even better subjects of containment & study.

Oh you thought TESCREAL sounded fancy huh? Well I’ll raise you a BIGGER word!

Searching Reddit has really become standard practice for me, a testament to how inhuman the web as a whole has gotten. What a shame.

Many ordinary people lost their jobs and homes during the Great Recession, while no one at the top was ever held individually accountable. Knowing the dynamics of the tech world, a hard crash would likely end up playing out the same way.

Absolutely. We already sanction Russian oligarchs for the same reasons, why should we treat the American ones any different honestly.

Wow, the term ‘epistemically humble’ is ingenious really. I don’t have to listen to any critics at all, not because I’m a narcissist, oh no, but because I’m so ‘epistemically humble’ no one could possibly have anything left to teach me!

How much money would be saved by just funneling the students of these endless ‘AI x’ programs back to the humanities where they can learn to write (actually good) science fiction to their heart’s content? Hey, finally a way AI actually lead to some savings!

That’s an AI governance PhD right there!

Bill Gates is having a normal one.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/26/bill-gates-on-ai-humans-wont-be-needed-for-most-things.html

Yeah, I suppose academia and the tech industry are quite different things, for all their problems.

Still, there’s a way to critique systemic issues without mixing it up with self-aggrandizement and the implication that all your coworkers except a few friends are idiots. He really reminds me of Nassim Taleb in that regard, who (among other things) has made some valid criticisms of IQ but whose style is just a bit too much for my sensibilities. ‘Benevolent griftiness’ seems just the right descriptor here. =)

Wanting to escape the fact that we are beings of the flesh seems to be behind so much of the rationalist-reactionary impulse – a desire to one-up our mortal shells by eugenics, weird diets, ‘brain uploading’ and something like vampirism with the Bryan Johnson guy. It’s wonderful you found a way to embrace and express yourself instead! Yes, in a healthier relationship with our bodies – which is what we are – such changes would be considered part of general healthcare. It sometimes appears particularly extreme in the US from here from Europe at least, maybe a heritage of puritanical norms.

Reminds me of the stories of how Soviet peasants during the rapid industrialization drive under Stalin, who’d never before seen any machinery in their lives, would get emotional with and try to coax faulty machines like they were their farm animals. But these were Soviet peasants! What are structural forces stopping Yud & co outgrowing their childish mystifications? Deeply misplaced religious needs?