Then 9/11 happened and melted their brains.

Many such cases

I definitely impress on my students that Plato was a goddamn fascist whenever I teach his stuff.

Nothing more unamerican than paying non-American companies to house our undesirables for life. True patriots would make sure that money was going to our precious private prison CEOs.

He is the collective manifestation of every trope ever. He has deliberately constructed his personality this way because Reddit broadly thought he was cool in the 2010s, so he decided to lean into everything they loved until he became a Reddit tulpa. It’s deeply pathetic.

It’s so fucking obvious. There’s absolutely no other plausible explanation for this shit. Even if you think (correctly) that Trump is dumb as fuck and incapable of planning, people close to him are absolutely nudging him back and forth on this and cleaning up on every move. It’s completely transparent.

Trump posted that it was a “great time to buy” a few hours before he reversed. Transparent market manipulation, for which there will surely be consequences.

Thanks, Jar Jar. You’re right.

Someone with the username CommunistCop posted am “I’m a cop AMA” thread. He claimed to be an MTA cop (NYPD on the subway) and admitted to helping suppress protests, but claimed he was actually a communist who was just doing a job and was a “good cop.” He got dunked on hard, then banned.

This follows Trump’s deeply held belief–perhaps his only deeply held belief–that every single interaction is zero-sum and has a winner and a loser. His base has bought into that wholeheartedly. The idea that multiple parties can win (or lose) in a given interaction is totally anathema to this worldview. If another country is mad about it, the US must be winning.

Tariffs are Hamas.

They hate us for:

Our freedom

Our beautiful beef

If they want to disregard their safety, let them. Who cares about these fucking ghouls - they’re treating people like cargo. Especially if you have a conscience and are quitting this awful fucking job.

That compromises everyone’s safety though, not just the cop’s. Having 350 pounds of subprime midwestern hogcop and his loaded gun bouncing around the cabin during unexpected turbulence is a danger to everyone on the flight (and possibly on the ground).

The one and only politician I ever volunteered for. 2016 seems centuries away.

I guess the Bellingcat stuff just doesn’t bother me that much, and the (pretty mild) criticisms of AES just don’t come up much. I enjoy a lot of the content he makes, and I don’t have to agree with him about everything in order to listen and get something out of it. I don’t really buy that he’s on the CIA payroll or anything like that. I’m also an anarchist, so maybe I’m more sympathetic to where he’s coming from.

Chapo has some dumbass takes sometimes and I still (sometimes) enjoy them as well. As someone else said in this thread, I don’t know that I’d want to organize with any of the left podcast guys, but that’s not what I’m doing. I’m listening to podcasts.

Yeah, James Stout is extremely legit. He’s done a bunch of on the ground praxis relating to migrants, and he’s a hell of a journalist.

He used to do some work with Bellingcat, which has three-letter agency ties. He’s also very critical of China and the USSR (especially under Stalin), and claims to be an anarchist. I don’t really find him all that objectionable, but lots of folks here do.

I teach an introductory science writing & communication course for folks just getting started on the path to being scientists. Lots of over the last few weeks. Really freaking people who have just started on the career path out.

My goal here isn’t to actually find the exact probability of an AI apocalypse, it’s to raise a warning flag that says “hey, this is more plausible than you might initially think!”

That’s fair enough as far as it goes, but I think you’re in the minority about being explicit about that. It’s also important to really be precise here: the claim this kind of reasoning lets you defend isn’t “this is more probable than you think” but rather “if you examine your beliefs carefully, you’ll see that you actually think this is more plausible than you might be aware of.” That’s a very important distinction. It’s fine–good, even–to help people try to sort out their own subjective probabilities in a more systematic way, but we should be really careful to remember that that’s what’s going on here, not an objective assessment of probability. I think many (most) Rationalists and x-risk people elide that distinction, and either make it sound like or themselves believe that they’re putting a real objective numerical probability on these kinds of events. As I said, that’s not something you can do without rigorously derived and justified priors. We simply don’t have that for things like this. It’s easy to either delude yourself or give the wrong impression when you’re using the Bayesian framework in a way that looks objective but pulling numbers out of thin air for your priors.