Another surprise is that illegal weed still has 30% of the market in Canada. I don’t know how much of that is consumer inertia (“My buddy Mike always gets me the good stuff eh”) and how much is avoiding taxes.

I didn’t know that Moray in QC was around in 2018! <Crumbles into dust.>

That is a good example because it shows the failure of imagination (can imagine the end of the world, can’t imagine working public transit and public policy to discourage driving) and because hf he thought it through he might get to “humh, some people like to drive, but its bad for public and social health, how can we discourage it while preserving liberties?”

I really wonder what he did as a medical student in Cork other than study and read racist Tumblr accounts. Did his friends never drag him to Amsterdam to ride a bike and eat an edible?

Blast from the past: in 2014, Scott Alexander posted a take on marijuana legalization which showed excellent knowledge of medical papers but huge gaps in his knowledge of what brown people or smart policy reformers have to say. David Gerard and Christopher Hallquist in the comments, digression on how pot affects your IQ with gwern chipping in. Alexander came back in 2018 promising that he was right all along with a footnote about how some people in the comments told him that people like smoking weed and he did not know how to process that because his utilitarian calculation said it was bad for society.

Baldur Bjarnason has a whole book on the business risks of LLM use https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/

bad at epistemology

Gwern once denied chaos theory in a way that Freeman Dyson called out in 1985, and as LessWrongers go he is a pretty clear thinker!

It can help to think of the current US administration as less the Third Reich, more a postcolonial dictatorship. That is also a description not a value judgement: POTUS is a reality-TV star who dreams of being a Mafia boss.

Many liked the idea in theory (the Führer was Austrian after all). They pretty quickly found that a Tiroler was not the same as a Prussian at all. Its easier to feel part of an imagined community than to actually work with people all over that community.

How the frigg does anyone in the SF Bay Area in 2026 still believe that most of what big American web service companies do is driven by the profit motive? They are more like big-talking Geniuses getting a king to give them some money and promising they will make something cool (with Google’s and Facebook’s advertising and AWS and Amazon retail standing in for taxing millions of peasants). Arms like Google ads and Amazon Web Services fund billions of dollars of money-losing nonsense.

Ngo does not seem to have been invited to speak at Hereticon 1 or 2

I have bad news for them about how German Austrians felt when suddenly their bosses were all Preuße.

/s The United Kingdom of England and Scotland, the Principality of Wales, the subject territory of Ireland (Let alone Normandy and Gascony) were famously lacking in linguistic, religious, and cultural differences back when they were a great power. /s

I feel like the answer to the first is “name one”. He can’t mean any Chinese dynasty, the Mongols, any of the Islamic caliphates, the UK, France. Maybe he means Bronze Age Egypt? They kept hiring all the Nubians they could get though.

That depends, remember that you are losing five years of growth and dividends and if you are are a wise investor every year or so you sell some of what is doing best and buy some of what has been doing worst to lock in your gains. Also remember that you have to buy back in to gain anything from that crash, and its really hard to buy stocks when the market has just lost half its value. Most people who ‘successfully predict a recession’ sell too early and buy back too late so are not very far ahead.

But if you really believe that the US economy will crash by say the end of 2027, you think other assets will do better, and there are ways to buy them.

The USA is about 60% of the global stock market by market capitalization. Right now its much less than 60% of my stock holdings.

Investing is all about relative performance. If you think ‘AI’ stocks are a bubble. you think that some other stocks will do better than them over the next five years, and you can allocate your assets accordingly.

Usually AI boosters are claiming that soon most humans will be economically useless, not that it would be terrible if there were fewer white people. One reason people avoid having children is that they feel economically insecure and doubt there will be respected places in society for their offspring.

Dwarkesh Patel is the only other Indian American I have seen who is friends with our friends.

Someone in the comments used an ?AI-powered? fact-checking tool to push back on some of the claims that inheriting an old house in Japan is a burden. I especially doubt that the land the house is on is worth nothing.

It is miserable to live in a dying town or village and many people talk about this problem in Italy, Moldova, Canada, and other countries.

It is a viable business and it fuels the spread of disinformation. Have you noticed that Old Media magazines have online wings that are full of random advertorials? That is because Google declared that they are Good Domains and upranked them so all the sleazy online marketing migrated to them.

That is also why people buy formerly respected domains and put casinos, propaganda, or virus-laden porn on them.

gutter racist and eugenicist beliefs

The Sam Kriss article in Harpers above focuses on “these people don’t know how to be happy” and never gets around to saying “Scott Alexander is gentle in person but wants to get rid of or sterilize poor brown people and helped people like Curtis Yarvin rise to power.”

Note that SlateScott’s group home is named after a Lord of the Rings location

Jessica Taylor wrote a whole other post rebutting Scott Alexander’s take on events (she seemed more friendly to Michael Vassar than he was by 2021) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards Fortunately, we can just say that both mainstream LessWrong and the splinter movements sound unsafe and avoid them both.

Emily M. Bender says its framed around doomers, boosters, “a third way,” and CEOs, “The fact that many of his interviewees are singing from the same hymnal is underscored by edits wherein he splices together clips from multiple (3? more?) speakers into one sentence.”

I have mixed feelings about her pop book.

Hippie culture had elements of entrepreneurship and self-improvement, and that was definitely a time in the USA when the boss might invite you for drinks or to a strip club while you were candidate for promotion

I think if you are comfortable saying “I use substances to turn my brain off / experiment with other ways of seeing the world / because its fun” you tend to drift away from orthodox LW