Could be a LLM, could be a call-center worker in Kenya or Mumbai or Manilla. Its an old move.

People have told me their organizations are like this with cloud spending (no curiosity about how to reduce it and measure ROI, until someone orders cuts).

Unfortunately with mass media and social media you just have to accept that the people who get the biggest audiences will like attention and get some of the details wrong. They are built to create stars not spread facts.

The last few years have showed many disadvantages of the ‘AGI’ quest which were not widely foreseen. Those disadvantages do not depend on the technology.

RationalWiki no longer has technical staff, just a bit of help from @davidgerard@circumstances.run. To deal with bot swarms, possibly launched by Emil Kirkegaard’s gang of racists with sensitive egos, they blocked some of the scrapers which Bing and Google rely on. Since 2022 DuckDuckGo is a front-end for Bing.

Here is a (partially paywalled) blog post on why the indexes started to bend the rules https://rupakghose.substack.com/p/s-and-p-nasdaq-and-the-spacex-ipo

Willo2 writes:

I supported Polymarket for years because I believed they represented crypto values.

In fact, their platform is simply another bucketshop where if you bet too much, you’re going to get cleaned.

“I’m shocked, shocked! to find that gambling is going on in here”

A company has to disclose a lot of numbers backed by serious legal penalties before an IPO.

Whenever a stock market has gone up 29% in a year and a New Era story is circulating, people with corner offices and Savile Row suite start to do stupid ****. I think that is why financiers started to bend the rules.

S&P have decided not to allow SpaceX early entry into the index after all https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/

“To ​be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as ​well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged.”

Edit / the author of the article “is an economics student at George Mason University with interests in tax policy, immigration, and housing. He normally posts about politics on X and Bluesky and occasionally writes long-form articles and essays on his Substack.” So he has probably taken a class with Robin Hanson.

As a palette cleanser to the messed up people on social media and in web magazines, I recommend reading Bob Altemeyer’s book on the sex lives of students at a minor Canadian university. https://www.lulu.com/shop/bob-altemeyer/sex-and-youth/paperback/product-4414777.html People who search tube sites or fill out sexuality quizzes from an influencer are not typical people any more than Wikipedia editors are.

“EA and Rationalist policy organizations are scaling in DC”

Just a reminder that the rationalists already own two event spaces in the Bay Area and the Effective Altruists briefly owned one in England and one in the Czech Republic as well as an institute at Oxford University. Both of their existing spaces are losing money and had to beg for it last winter.

Jeffrey Epstein fantasized about something very similar. Gwern has a blog post about a sperm bank which promised to accept only the highest-quality donations.

someone patiently explaining to a bunch of people who really should know better that they shouldn’t do obviously bad and wrong things.

In March 2025, someone skeeted that “Master Sun says: do not lead your troops into land where there is nothing for them to eat” seems obvious but Pete Hegseth would not remember that his troops needed food. One year later his aircraft carriers were feeding sailors spoiled meat and had a shortage of working toilets.

Major investment analysis firm Morningstar is looking for words on the SpaceX IPO and picked “We think the company has been significantly overvalued and investors will have opportunities to buy the stock at more attractive levels after the IPO” (Independent UK).

Even something as simple as picking a Total US Stock Market index fund instead of a S&P500 fund or NASDAQ-100 fund would reduce your exposure. If you control your investments, disinvesting is not that hard.

I never heard of Justine Tunney before but she has a Wikipedia page.

Who’s going to buy this profit-free stock selling for 100 times earnings?

I think its worse than a P/E ratio of 100. It is 100 times revenue. Earnings in this context mean profits, so a company which is losing money has no P/E ratio. The argument is that if $100 of stock corresponds to $10 of profit last year (P/E 10), that is probably a better buy than if $100 of stock corresponds to $5 of profit last year (P/E 20).

And yes, this looks to me like a crypto rugpull crossed with all the tricks which keep Tether prices and Tesla shares floating in midair.

Ouch, “picking up a cute young thing at the bar and hot tub at the ski resort” “building a happy working relationship with a sex worker” and “romantic pair-bonding” are three different skills! No wonder he thinks looks and body language are so important if he is trying to take women straight to bed.

RMN is a pro wrestling event, but he probably means Red Means No, Aella’s consensual-nonconsent orgies.

Did you try RationalWiki or the page for Hanson himself? Read it next to Taleb’s The Black Swan patiently explaining to clever but inexperienced young men that you cannot perfectly predict the future just diversify and prepare for different scenarios.

A lot of rats give Robin Hanson credit for things which are much older (prediction markets for elections are recorded back to the 16th century, The Great Filter was huge in Cold War pop culture). Werner Antweiler at UBC ran a prediction market from 1993 to 2008.

At minute 8 of “SpaceX IPO: Nice Try Though” Patrick Boyle mentions some circular finance: some of the banks which lent SpaceX $29 billion in March will be guaranteeing the IPO by promising to buy some shares to stabilize the price. Later he also points out that the banks financing the IPO have to buy Grok services and may be its main paying customers. Musk has done this sort of thing before eg. using Tesla (shareholder-owned) money to buy SolarCity which he partially owned. I knew a serial fraudster who moved to Texas for its business-friendly laws and courts.

He liked the piss-tinged blog post by Cape Fear Advisors and estimates that the Muskrat wants to raise $50-75 billion in the IPO.

It took Kaiser Bill to break the economic power of London and Paris, but the Muskrat thinks he can speedrun that game for the New York City map.

Pope Leo and Brad DeLong are great examples of people we can make tactical alliances with on single issues

Michael Burry is one of the investors who is shorting big tech. (Business Insider - paywalled Substack). I just invest much less in the USA than its 60% share of the global stock market, and less than 40% of that in big tech.