She also has a post about meditation and mindfulness. I did not expect the thick Western Buddhist strand in this movement.

Scott Alexander funded a prediction-market startup which uses points not dollars. I think many of our friends lack the ovaries to bet significant numbers of real dollars on Kalshi or Polymarket.

I think the term came specifically from the problem “what to do with a windfall?” Since a diversified portfolio of conventional assets will tend to grow, the theoretical optimum is to invest it all today, but if there is a stock market crash or a spike in interest rates tomorrow this can lead to regrets. If you have trouble with this, a common strategy is to commit to investing 10-20% a month so you will get some high prices and some low prices. The same if you inherit some shares which are too much of your net worth and are worried about selling them before the price rises or keeping them until the price crashes: commit to selling a certain amount once per week or month and follow that. In casual language it gets conflated with the principle that a regular schedule of saving and investing is better than waiting until you get a raise or find the ‘right time’ to buy in.

I think the OP thought he understood this concept from reading Internet posts on crypto spaces and a better way to learn is a book or at least a blog by a trained and certified professional.

So this is the most reliable way to grow your capital in conventional assets. If you put 10% of every paycheque into a mix of stocks and bonds, not worrying too much about whether stock prices seem high or low, you will almost certainly have enough to generate a meaningful income after twenty years. The problems with this strategy in crypto seem many, including “no reason to expect that crypto prices will grow forever” “massive price manipulation by insiders” and “omnipresent theft and fraud.” That is like how quantum mechanics is powerful for manipulating the world, but quantum woo just lets you manipulate people. It would not make sense to read a Deepak Chopra book and say that physicists made up quantum mechanics to con people onto buying their self-help courses and fake medicine.

I think that backwards (like 1950s and earlier) views of autism are common in American psychiatry, but would love to hear more about his ideas from someone with relevant training. AFAIK no peer has ever commented on his biomedical blogging, like experts have commented on his eugenics promotion and cozy relationship with white supremacists and neoreactionaries. He never seems to have written for any professional venue either.

I think magazines like Liberal Currents, for a generally politically and culturally engaged white-collar audience, have been like this since they were printed on rag paper. The only difference between it and fandom drama is that the participants can rationalize it in fancier language.

The alleged victims from that time don’t seem to want to go public except one who is still on twitter and one who took her own life (and the Mittenscautious blog posts and the mainstream media articles on sexism in EA and LessWrong). I would not recommend putting anyone who was prominent at MIRI or CFAR or the related parties and group homes in the 2010s in a position of responsibility.

Edit / CFAR’s take after they were forced to expel Brent was that “we believe that Brent routinely manipulated those around him, and that he physically, sexually, and emotionally abused at least two of his partners.” Their updates and the blog posts by ‘Mittenscautious’ seem as close as we can get to what he was accused of by insiders without a lot of archive-diving.

I don’t understand the American social media and Old Media practice of everyone talking about some representative or candidate for the legislature. The only people who should be talking about a candidate for a district in New York State live in New York State.

The three American ratings agencies all decided that SpaceX bonds meet the minimum standards to be investment grade. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spacex-gets-investment-grade-ratings-with-stable-outlook-top-agencies-2026-06-18/ I don’t own any American bonds and many people have a ‘government bonds only’ policy for reasons.

The moderators don’t exist. Sole moderator Oliver Habryka hasn’t commented on Reddit in 3 years, and is extremely busy with vastly more important things like AI safety, Lighthaven, and the actual LessWrong. Spammers continue indefinitely for months until, presumably, they earn a site-wide ban.

The guy who objects to delegating? I guess he decided that nobody on a forum can handle the responsibility of moderation?

Broadcom, Micron Technologies, and Intel too. NVIDIA is on the order of 7.5% of the S&P500 by market cap today. I would not bet real money that it will be there or above in 2029.

A Liberal Currents article talks about Steven Pinker, Dan Dennet, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and The Edge (a series of talks similar to Thiel’s Dialog).

I have no idea what dollar-cost averaging means to bitcoiners so I asked for an explanation. I think bitcoiners should read finance textbooks too.

(sarcasm) I’m saying that just because I get sucked off by guys does not mean I’m one of those queers! I don’t go to pride parades or leather bars or have fashion sense and everyone knows that is what ‘gay’ means. I’m as heterosexual as Ted Haggard. (end sarcasm)

Its a good idea to think of investing as an activity with a timeline in decades. If I buy a ten-year bond at 4% annual interest today, and a year later the same government is selling nine-year bonds at 5% interest, nobody will pay me the face value of my first bond. A year after that, maybe an eight-year bond is yielding 3%, and people will pay me more than face value for the first bond. I only know how much I made after inflation when ten years are up.

So the error there is that purchases are not actually independent. If say dot com stocks have been growing ten times as fast as the rest of the stock market, they can’t do that forever (eventually they will become the whole stock market, then the whole economy). If a government keeps offering higher and higher real interest on bonds, eventually it will default or trigger high inflation. So the wise investor buys lots of different things, knowing that today’s darling will be tomorrow’s ugly sister. I recommend a good textbook.

Could you explain? Dollar-cost averaging is a mainstream and effective concept in investing (if you buy investments with a series of contributions over time, you will get some when price are high and others when they are low, and the average price you pay will be in between). Traditional investments are cyclical, so one part of your portfolio will do poorly for 5 or 15 years, then suddenly it grows quickly while the things which were growing shrink.

Its like he wrote “many of my friends identify as heterosexual, and they say I might be heterosexual too, but in my work as a forensic psychiatrist my heterosexual patients are accused rapists and sex pests and people who got arrested with a suitcase full of cocaine and a phone full of texts from a 'Brazilian model.” and never tried to reconcile the two or thought through the Bayesian logic.

Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015):

I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors.

So he can’t be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can’t have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker:

But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it.

As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And Scott Alexander wants children, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED losers.

Scott Alexander literally says this before his story about ‘Henry’ the patient who beat his fifth wife because she objected to him cheating with the ex who had left him after he beat her:

I feel obligated to say at this point that the specific details of these patient stories are made up, and several of them are composites of multiple different people, in order to protect confidentiality. I’m preserving the general gist, nothing more)

/s And male rationalists would never, ever hang out with an edgy scary person like Yarvin, Sailer, or Vassar for the thrill and bragging rights! Only teh fe-males would do such a thing. /s