The billionaire initiation ritual is that scene from Kingsman where

I saw glimpses of someone playing some weird shit on a mobile phone, so I texted my bff group chat that it looks like someone’s playing a pokemon game but it’s anime girls racing around a track or something, but it was 18:30 in public transit, hard day at work, really hot, so I was like probably I’m hallucinating something

Then the responses I got were like “ye it’s probably this very popular Umami Horny Derby game where you date horse waifus, everyone’s been playing it for weeks” and I haven’t been more depressed in ages

The Player of Games in which a smart nerd like themselves get recruited as an agent to bring down an empire a bit like our own by being really really good at games.

I’m sorry, I have no idea what this book is, but calling it “The Player of Games” is so funny to me.

adjust fedora I am not a gamer, I am A Player of Games

Exactly, like the whole point of their schtick is that they want to legitimise plain old racism as something more sophisticated, so I don’t see a reason to entertain them as such.

I really don’t see a reason for us making a linguistic distinction between “low-brow bigotry” and “high-brow bigotry”, which is essentially what this is in practice.

When my uncle drunkenly complains about how “those stupid immigrants are everywhere and they ain’t even speaking our language” - it’s racism; but when a guy with a university degree writes a treatsie about how immigrants will take over and that’s a problem because his bayesian priors say they’re statistically less intelligent - then it’s suddenly “race pseudoscience”. No, both of them are the same breed of racist, the only difference is the latter had enough money to attend Yale.

but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience

I think the word you’re looking for is “racism”

I think the end is way too generous. I don’t think we deserve an end.

I’ve been thinking about this post for a full day now. It’s truly bizzare, in a “I’d like to talk to this person and study their brain” kind of way.

Put aside the technical impossibility of LLMs acting as the agents he describes. That’s small potatoes. The only thing that stays in my mind is this:

take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need

I can’t even put into words the full nonsense of this statement. How do you think this would work? This is not how learning works. This is not how research works. This is not how anything works.

I can’t understand this. Like yes, of course, some times there’s this moment where you think “god I remember there was this particular chart I saw” or “how many people lived in Tokio again?” or “I read exactly the solution to this problem on StackOverflow once”. In the days of yore you’d write one Google query and you’d get it. Nowadays maybe you can find it on Wikipedia. Sure. But that doesn’t actually take two minutes either, it’s like an instant one-second thought of “oh I know I saw exactly this factoid somewhere”. You don’t read books for that though. Does this person think books are just sequences of facts you’re supposed to memorise?

How on earth do you think of “precisely the information you need”. What does that mean? How many problems are there in your life where you precisely know how the solution would look like, you just need an elaborate query through an encyclopedia to get it? Maybe this is useful if your entire goal is creating a survey of existing research into a topic, but that’s a really small fraction of applications for reading a fucking book. How often do you precisely know what you don’t know? Like genuinely. How can your curiosity be distilled into a precise, well-structured query? Don’t you ever read something and go “oh, I never even thought about this”, “I didn’t know this was a problem”, “I wouldn’t have thought of this myself”. If not then what the fuck are you reading??

I am also presuming this is about purely non-fiction technical books, because otherwise this gets more nonsensical. Like what do you ask your agents for, “did they indeed take the hobbits to Isengard? Prepare a comprehensive review of conflicting points of view.”

This single point presumes that none of the reasons for you absorbing knowledge from other people is to use it in a creative way, get inspired by something, or just find out about something you didn’t know you didn’t know. It’s something so alien to me, so detached from what I consider the human experience, I simply don’t comprehend this. Is this a real person? How does the day-to-day life of this person look like? What goes on in their head when they read a book? What are we moving towards as a species?

Changes during the day but it’s always > 0.

Lol, I’m a decision theorist because I had to decide whether I should take a shit or shave first today. I am also an author of a forthcoming book because, get this, you’re not gonna believe, here’s something Big Book doesn’t want you to know:

literally anyone can write a book. They don’t even check if you’re smart. I know, shocking.

Plus “forthcoming” can mean anything, Winds of Winter has also been a “forthcoming” book for quite a while

I agree with him insofar as Trump and his lackeys definitely think and act as if it was the “autocratic branch” and both the legislature and judiciary don’t seem to be interested in disabusing them of that notion

OpenBrain “responsibly” elects not to release its model publicly to avoid it being called “underwhelming” and, to use a technical term, “gobshite”.

It’s eugenics but as a religious cult for reactionaries

Yud is that creepy nerd from your middle school who wrote disturbing fan fiction, but it wasn’t just a phase and now he has the aforementioned cult

Still better than my proposal, Pedo Copilot, or Copedo for short

Ye, so essentially a wireless Avada Kedavra, cool cool cool, completely chill and sane thing to believe

195 IQ and suddenly get someone who just sits in their room for a decade and then speaks gibberish into a youtube livestream and everyone dies, or whatever.

I can’t even decipher what this is about. Like if you’re 195IQ you can invent Avada Kedavra in a decade?

I don’t think Harry was much of a genius, unless you mean Harriezer from MoR in which case lol, lmao

I think it forces us all to ask an important introspective question – if I were to become the target of a national manhunt, would my posting history look cringe?

Salvation Army

they are certainly mostly doing worthwhile things

No. Nope. Not in the slightest. Crucially, they’re not even a charity! They don’t get any financial transparency scrutiny a charity gets! It’s a church! We don’t even know how to evaluate them because there’s literally no way to check what percentage of it is actually spent on charity. Their primary mission is to evangelise!

Also Chick’fil’A had to distance themselves from SA because of their egregious track record with gay rights. The Bigotry Chicken deemed them too bigoted.

Wait so it’s a decentralised network with a rigid authoritative hierarchy?