An aging population too. Young people commit more violence, use more substances, and get into more accidents. The Boomers still have massive influence on culture even though its not cool to market to them.

My understand that the decline of tobacco use, alcohol use, sex, and pregnancy among youth in the USA are well-established (but how many young US people are sharing naughty texts or photos when before the smartphone they would be making out?)

And isn’t the trans and nonbinary stuff a norm that teh yoofs are enthusiastically breaking while people over 50 fret?

Adam Mastroianni has the audacity to claim that people don’t seem to join phygs any more, gets clip art from Astral Codex Ten and hosts a vlog for Inkhaven guests https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance

Pepper

That post does sound like she thinks race and sex determine mathematical ability a la James Damore, Larry Summers, or Charles Murray and other backwards Americans.

Automattic has a budget for sponsoring events https://automattic.com/events/ but a web host based in San Francisco does not sponsor Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, and Gwern by accident.

I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.

I’m not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And “no worse than the average psychology paper” is not high praise.

So pre-teen me reading the Biggles books with the gag about the pilot who tries to do ballistic calculations during a dogfight was saving me from being as stupid as a Californian?

Show them the RationalWiki page where Scott Alexander promised that he could only absorb the smart racism from crazy bloggers and ignore the stupid stuff, Elizabeth Sandifer warned him this was like drinking sewer water with just one filter, and then Alexander posted about how all of a sudden he was feeling more conservative and maybe the things he was reading were connected to that

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander (also archive.is and other backups)

An obit for James Watson and his Dawkins- or Pinker-like path from a scientist to a bitter reactionary https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-watson-remembrance-from-dna-pioneer-to-pariah/

Sure, saying that about being in the wrong body was a dick move. You don’t have to accept all the theory to see that many people are in bodies that feel wrong to them, and many people are expected to present in ways that feel wrong to them. The quote implies that they should just try harder to perform the gender they were assigned at birth.

People who get angry about trans people and trans theory remind me of Dawkins and friends, because what starts as a factual/philosophical concern (there are probably no gods / the idea that people have a true gender inside them sounds mystical) gets twisted in a reactionary direction. I don’t have to understand why trans or nonbinary people feel the way they do to support them as they explore ways of being humans in the world.

I think that gender is a collection of roles in a specific society which people perform and have performed on them. Its not something which exists outside that context, any more than “being the king” exists outside of a legal system. Of the three statements on BlueSky, its the third (the statement about sterilizing children) which makes me think he has been consuming angry things about trans people online.

Grimes was married to Elon Musk and performs at events for ‘heretical truth-tellers’ sponsored by Peter Thiel

I think he is stating that people don’t have an invisible eternal Gender like a Christian thinks people have an invisible eternal Soul. I am a materialist so I don’t think either exists. Shazeer goes on to complain about “sterilizing children” which is a red flag of transphobia (ie. people who post a lot about that tend to have a screw loose).

Meanwhile he objects to people theorycrafting objections (Tessa’s dialogue about the midwit trap and an article for the Cato Institute called “Is that your true rejection?”) That is an issue in casual conversations, but professionals work through these possibilities in detail and make a case that they can be overcome. Those cases often include past experience completing similar projects as well as theory. A very important part of becoming a professional is learning to spot “that requires a perpetual motion machine,” “that implies P = NP,” “that requires assuming that the sources we have are a random sample of what once existed” and not getting lost in the details; another is becoming part of a community of practitioners who criticize each other.

eugenics

Yes, the bit about John von Neumann sounds like he is stuck in the 1990s: “there must be a gene for everything!” not today “wow genomes are vast interconnected systems and individual genes get turned on and off by environmental factors and interventions often have the reverse effect we expect.” Scott Alexander wrote an essay admiring the Hungarian physics geniuses and tutoring.

Sounds like the thing to do is to say yes boss, get Baldur Bjarnason’s book on business risks and talk to legal, then discover some concerns that just need the boss’ sign-off in writing.

The author’s previous article on the topic sounds like a newspaper article from the late 20th century: sources disagree, far be it for me to decide.

Proponents say this represents a natural step in the evolution of moving heavy industry off the planet’s surface and a solution for the ravenous energy needs of artificial intelligence. Critics say building data centers in space is technically very challenging and cite major hurdles, such as radiating away large amounts of heat and the cost of accessing space.

It is unclear who is right, but one thing is certain: Such facilities would need to be massive to support artificial intelligence.

Starcloud’s fantasy would be thousands of times bigger than the largest existing space-based solar array (the ISS) and hundreds of times bigger than those ground-based data centers.

Someone seeded Ars Technica with another article on the data-centers-in-space proposal which asks no questions about the practicalities other than cost, or why all three billionaires who they quote have big investments in chatbots which they need to talk up. AFAIK all data centers on earth are smaller than a gigawatt, a few months ago McKinsey talked about tens of MW as the current standard and hundreds of MW as the next step. So proposing to build the biggest data center in history in orbit is madness.

I think Zitron has some important analysis mixed up with the clickbait and the populist rhetoric. I thought he was trying to be a full-time blogger but now I see he runs a one-person PR business (!)