Ok, yes, he's making it all up to look cool, but the idea of dorky rationalists mixing pills, booze and ket is really, really funny. If you really want to be good at code, you should be drinking and drugging like you're Lemmy in 1971....

Another good comment:

sounds like the officers didn't know that the amount taken was so small. From the post:

After many more attempts to intimidate me, I was finally informed of the charge: “that smoothie place over there says you the stole cash from their tip jar.” Huh? How much? One of the officers returned from the smoothie bar, and said, a bit sheepishly: “they say it was $4.”

So the most likely scenario was a comedy of errors. All the cops know is that the manager of the smoothie place ran up to them and said "that guy just robbed our tip jar!" They interpret this to mean he emptied out the entire tip jar, which would be a pretty brazen thing to do, so they roll up on him hard out of disgust that anyone would do such a thing. Then they talk to him and discover that what actually happened is that he absent-mindedly took $4. That's a very different class of violation, but it's not like they can take back the aggressiveness of their initial approach. The damage was done.

In theory, the officers could have avoided the mistake by questioning the manager for more details before making the stop. Look at it from their perspective, though -- one of the people you're employed to protect is telling you that he's just been robbed, and if you futz around too long, the perpetrator gets on his plane and gets away with it. It's not surprising they would decide to stop the guy first and work out the details once they could be confident he wasn't going anywhere.

But no, it's just that the world is against Scott. It's not just feminist bloggers from the early 2010s, it's the cops, it's everyone.

That drug science webpage that PJ Coffey linked above notes that:

Long-term amphetamine use is associated with anhedonia; a general difficulty in finding pleasure in life without the drug, which may persist for some time after quitting the drug.

They're specifically referring to recreational amphetamine use here, I think. Needing to use a substance just to make you feel normal? Needing to use higher and higher doses of the same substance to feel the same effect? Aren't those the classic symptoms of addiction, and the drivers of the negative behaviours people associate with addiction?

The problem is not that people who don't have health insurance can't get Adderall. The problem is that there are people who cannot get regular healthcare because they don't have health insurance. If you made adhd medication (adderall isn't the only one) available over the counter tomorrow, there would still be deaths, damage, disablement and addiction caused by drug use unless all those users also had access to decent harm reduction based healthcare.

not really relevant, but: a quote from an interview with hard-living 60s rock band the Pretty Things:

"..microdosing LSD [is] a practice May thinks may have been invented by a keyboard player who performed with the band in the 70s. “He used to have a little lick of acid every morning while standing on his head, doing his yoga exercises.” And did it help him psychologically, as latterday devotees of microdosing claim it can? “Well, no, not really,” sighs May. “He went pretty loony, to be honest.”"

Source: this article

Also all of their promo-images were AI generated which bodes really well.

God, I didn't even notice that. A pack of millionaires but they're too cheap to pay a concept artist.

Pity bout ya! I hope your private plane sinks in the mud

Way before Disney. Le Corbusier. The Garden City movement. It goes back to the Renaissance, really.

Napoleon III appointed Haussmann to redesign Paris, and he did a good job (although some aspects of the design were intended to prevent civil unrest). But Paris was already a major city. They didn't decide to build a totally new capital 60 miles from Paris. I guess St. Petersburg is a closer analogy?

A sidenote: the brothers who made Stripe are involved. One of them (John I think?) was complaining on Twitter recently about all the unnecessary "environmental red tape" in Ireland.

That's the Amanda Marcotte incident. Here's an article about the incident (from the Atlantic's regular series, "annals of the nerd blogs we feel the need to share with the nation"). The article is very sympathetic to Scott A but some of it just cannot be made to sound sympathetic. He unironically believes (believed?) that nerd men are "some of society's least privileged males". He also refers to all non-nerd men as neanderthals....

What? I was describing how cults/high-control groups react to criticism. I wasn't trying to assess how accurate their beliefs are. Cults rely on having some beliefs which reasonable people might agree with. Those are the beliefs they present to the public. Cult literature often sounds plausible or benign even if it's not factually accurate.

Before there was greater awareness of what cults are and how they work, it wasn't uncommon for early press about cult groups to conclude that while some of the cult's beliefs were strange, they had good values and were doing good things for their communities so they were probably harmless. It was only later that stories begin to emerge about the extreme levels of control that cults were exercising over their members, how that control led to the exploitation and abuse of members, and how limited and transactional their "good works" were.

If a group with that model of control and exploitation claimed to have access to a source of genuinely new and scientifically significant knowledge, they are the worst people to be in control of it, because: a) Cults keep back the larger part of their beliefs from the public in order to extract as much in money, volunteer time and other resources from their members. If a cult did have a direct line to Xenu, it would be directly in their interests to strictly limit how much other people can know about Xenu without paying exorbitant fees and submitting to cult authority. b) Cults are run by people whose ethics are compromised. Cult leaders believe above all else in their right to power and/or wealth and everything else including the health and safety of others comes second. They bully and indoctrinate their subordinates until cult members believe that there is no good and bad so much as there are things that are good for the cult and things that are bad for the cult. If people with such compromised ethics gain access to Xenu's special information (why are we assuming Xenu will be wise and helpful anyway? In Scientology mythos, Xenu is evil. And also dead.) they will use it to improve the position of the cult and impose their beliefs on as many people as possible. c) due to the above mentioned, it will be extremely difficult for non-members to assess the accuracy of information provided by the cult.

If anything, this is an example of a situation in which talking to the cops is actually your best option. If he'd sullenly plead the 5th there's a good chance they'd have arrested him properly and maybe even charged him, causing him to miss his flight.

I can admit this sounds like a fairly unpleasant experience, but airports are high security, unpleasant environments. I'm still not sure how someone could accidentally take a tip jar despite paying with card. Did he black out for 30 seconds?

"It’s like: my accusers arrive on the scene committed to a specific, hostile theory of me: that I’m a petty thief of smoothie bars, let’s say, or a sexual-harassment-loving misogynist."

But he did take the smoothie bar money. He might not have realized he was doing it, he might not have done it on purpose, but he did take the money. In this metaphor, he commits sexual harrassment but it's ok because he's too gormless to realize what he's doing.

Yeah it is the classic cult characteristic. Synanon members putting a snake in someone's letterbox is another example. Also Hare Krishnas, MOVE, etc etc.

The description of how utopians see critics ("profoundly immoral people who block the path to utopia, threatening to impede the march toward paradise, arguably the greatest moral crime one could commit") is extremely similar to the way scientologists see their critics and ex-members. I suppose at least TESCREALists have a slightly higher measure of independence than scientologists and are thus less likely to be convinced to poison a critic's dog or send them threatening letters.

Wouldn't there be a negative feedback loop where the genetically prone to illness can only get crap insurance and due to crap healthcare die younger and live more unhealthy years, which makes them poorer? And their kids can also only get crap insurance due to loss of generational wealth and/or inherited disease until eventually family members are dying of diseases of poverty?

And a positive feedback loop for the healthy middle classes, whose sick kids get improved care?

Same business model of every tech startups of the late 20 years - use investor cash to pull through years of making no money until you either crash & burn or eliminate all traditional competition and can start charging customers bullshit prices

So the cars are running people over and drifting between lanes on purpose? I suppose if I woke up and realised I was a Tesla car, I'd develop homicidal impulses too.

If you're going to hiring discrimination*, don't talk about your discrimination strategy in public.

*(I assume the lesswrongeurs are assuming that IQ tests are going to be made illegal because black IQ test scores (on average) are lower than white IQ test scores (on average) and rather than interrogate this weird data the lesswrongeurs seem to have accepted as gospel that this test gap is immutable and possibly just the natural side effect of having melanin rather than a product of 100s of variables that had nothing to do with biology)

Who decided that this point on the climate change graph was a good point at which to spend millions of dollars on AI.

Innit. Any word on him having links to satanists? At least those 50s cults inspired some interesting art. Can the same be said for the wonkish cult of EA?