I think they took the rather elementary fact about random walks that the variance grows linearly with time and, in trying to make a profundity, got the math wrong and invented a silly meaning for “in retrospect”.

Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:

Scott Alexander was accused of being secretly a right-wing racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled, and I think a bunch of his followers believed it, and now they’re shocked and hurt that he’s actually the sincere center left guy he said he was the whole time.

(Via.)

(For convenience: The leaked e-mails in which he admits to being secretly racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled. And his endorsement of super-racist Richard Lynn from last month.)

Over on Bluesky, Mike Drucker sneers this as “German scientists in 1945 filling out their job application for Operation Paperclip”.

I’d swear I’ve seen that exact same “realization” from Aella before, when she posted something like “I got really into tradcath practices for [the writer’s barely disguised fetish] reasons, and now I’m shocked that they really actually do hate sex work.”

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sT5MX8jK9tHiBM5NK/re-taste

A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.

No it doesn’t, you fools, you absolute rubes

If you consider your normative values to be true, then everything looks like progress.

wat

Scott Alexander was a founding though-leader behind the Lightcone salon.

Your future region of the spacetime diagram is inside a locker, nerd

https://xcancel.com/tsarnick/status/1882927003508359242

Eliezer Yudkowsky says he would like to be a post-human some day, but the way to get there is by experimenting on augmenting biological intelligence through adult gene therapy targeting the human brain with suicide volunteers who may end up schizophrenic rather than taking a “leap of death” into unconstrained AI development

(found via flipping through LW for sneerable posts/comments)

A relevant earlier thread

And I’m sure that your snide remark will both tell them what to simplify and explain how to do so.

Enjoy your free trip to the egress.

Ick.

I mean, no, not really? “New AI is not as energy-efficient as first advertised” is just a special case of “AI is not as advertised”, i.e., the least surprising turn of events.

It’s true: The sneerclub mod interface is a replica of the mummification machine from Young Sherlock Holmes, and when we ban people, we actually drown them in wax.

It only works with the chanting, of course.

Given the … calibre of thinking on display in his other tweets (xharts?), I wouldn’t be surprised if he just typed “Zizians” into Reddit’s search box; /r/sneerclub currently comes up a few times near the top of results there.

second warning: an xcancel search for “zizians” turns up so much transphobia that you’ll feel like it’s a late night on the Nebuchadnezzar and Tank accidentally loaded your brain with JK Rowling instead of kung fu.

Here’s one that an xcancel search turned up (warning: is in Andy Ngo’s replies)

Link to previous thread so it’s less likely to get lost

Demonstrating once again that Twitter is the damp locker-room floor of ideas.

Do the Zizians fit in the “rationalist/EA/risk community”? Gosh and golly gee.

Yuddites and Zizians are a better example of the “narcissism of small differences” than any of the ones that Siskind propped up.

From the comments:

Sounds like it could be the plot of a mystery novel akin to JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series.

The author is very much that type of guy:

Florida Man. Individualist. Free minds and free markets. Distrustful of ideologies, whether left or right.

Kelsey Piper bluechecks thusly:

James Damore was egregiously wronged.

I mean, maybe? But the amount of trust I put in a description from “GeekWire” written by “an investor at Madrona Venture Group and a former leader at Amazon Web Services” who uncritically declares that spicy autocomplete “achieved strong reasoning capabilities” is … appropriately small.