Unfortunately with mass media and social media you just have to accept that the people who get the biggest audiences will like attention and get some of the details wrong. They are built to create stars not spread facts.
The last few years have showed many disadvantages of the ‘AGI’ quest which were not widely foreseen. Those disadvantages do not depend on the technology.
RationalWiki no longer has technical staff, just a bit of help from @davidgerard@circumstances.run. To deal with bot swarms, possibly launched by Emil Kirkegaard’s gang of racists with sensitive egos, they blocked some of the scrapers which Bing and Google rely on. Since 2022 DuckDuckGo is a front-end for Bing.
Here is a (partially paywalled) blog post on why the indexes started to bend the rules https://rupakghose.substack.com/p/s-and-p-nasdaq-and-the-spacex-ipo
Willo2 writes:
I supported Polymarket for years because I believed they represented crypto values.
In fact, their platform is simply another bucketshop where if you bet too much, you’re going to get cleaned.
“I’m shocked, shocked! to find that gambling is going on in here”
A company has to disclose a lot of numbers backed by serious legal penalties before an IPO.
Whenever a stock market has gone up 29% in a year and a New Era story is circulating, people with corner offices and Savile Row suite start to do stupid ****. I think that is why financiers started to bend the rules.
S&P have decided not to allow SpaceX early entry into the index after all https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/
“To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged.”
I am divided on how to 1) document social context which is not obvious if you just watch a podcast with someone talking about alignment, but 2) not stick my nose in other people’s business. I can pass on stories of abuse from you and some of the anonymous sources in mainstream media articles.
I think that most kinkersters would recommend playing with these fantasies in a much more structured environment (eg. we rent the AirBNB and leave the door unlocked and a distinctive sign in the window, at some point after 8 pm you arrive and ravage us, or a rigger restrains the center of attention on his/her bed than people take advantage of him/her)
A slop post on reddit claims that the application questionnaire sounds a lot like Ziz Lasota’s story of the questions she was asked at a Rationalist event.
5% a year is not interest either, it is a 20-year repayment plan on an interest-free loan. Jaan Tallinn is losing half a million dollars a year just to inflation. Ignoring 2025 property taxes because they hope to be exempted sounds like our dear friends.
Edit / habryka calls the installment payments “interest” too. These people need a few semesters of business education from their local community college.
Edit / I agree with you, by my reading in 2025 Lighthaven had $3.2m revenue, $4.6m expenses, but $1m of expenses was an overdue installment payment and they hope that $250k of property tax will be refunded.
Edit / the author of the article “is an economics student at George Mason University with interests in tax policy, immigration, and housing. He normally posts about politics on X and Bluesky and occasionally writes long-form articles and essays on his Substack.” So he has probably taken a class with Robin Hanson.
As a palette cleanser to the messed up people on social media and in web magazines, I recommend reading Bob Altemeyer’s book on the sex lives of students at a minor Canadian university. https://www.lulu.com/shop/bob-altemeyer/sex-and-youth/paperback/product-4414777.html People who search tube sites or fill out sexuality quizzes from an influencer are not typical people any more than Wikipedia editors are.
In June 2026, a LessWrong post claimed:
The property is owned by Lighthaven LLC and financed by an interest-only mortgage held by a philanthropist. The LLC runs the property, hosts internal events, rents conference and office space to external customers, and sells hotel stays. Lighthaven LLC is itself owned by Lightcone Infrastructure, a non-profit that among other things runs LessWrong. … Economically, Lighthaven LLC generates an operating profit comparable to its cost of capital. The mortgage is $20 million at 5% interest, for an annual interest payment of $1 million. Lighthaven LLC had $3.25 million in revenue in 2025. Events and hotel stays generated an operating profit of roughly $850k, almost enough to pay the $1 million annual interest payment. Office space seems to be offered at cost. Lighthaven LLC’s projections of $3.5 million revenue in 2026 should generate an operating profit sufficient to fully fund its annual interest payment, though bookings are currently sparse for this fall.
His evidence for the “almost pays for itself” is the very same blog post which threatened to sell the site if Lighthaven did not receive millions of dollars of donations (and we know that Tallinn just let them not pay for a whole year as long as they made it up later). The loan is also not technically a mortgage.
“EA and Rationalist policy organizations are scaling in DC”
Just a reminder that the rationalists already own two event spaces in the Bay Area and the Effective Altruists briefly owned one in England and one in the Czech Republic as well as an institute at Oxford University. Both of their existing spaces are losing money and had to beg for it last winter.
“This project needs a champion, but it’s a thing someone can simply choose to do” sounds very different when it means “you can actually try slacklining with the cool strangers in the park” and when it means “someone could lend us another $20 million for 20 years on easy terms.” And seeing the lesson of FTX as “don’t look weird” not “effective altruists are fraudsters and hypocrites” is a take.
Jeffrey Epstein fantasized about something very similar. Gwern has a blog post about a sperm bank which promised to accept only the highest-quality donations.
someone patiently explaining to a bunch of people who really should know better that they shouldn’t do obviously bad and wrong things.
In March 2025, someone skeeted that “Master Sun says: do not lead your troops into land where there is nothing for them to eat” seems obvious but Pete Hegseth would not remember that his troops needed food. One year later his aircraft carriers were feeding sailors spoiled meat and had a shortage of working toilets.
Major investment analysis firm Morningstar is looking for words on the SpaceX IPO and picked “We think the company has been significantly overvalued and investors will have opportunities to buy the stock at more attractive levels after the IPO” (Independent UK).
Even something as simple as picking a Total US Stock Market index fund instead of a S&P500 fund or NASDAQ-100 fund would reduce your exposure. If you control your investments, disinvesting is not that hard.
Ivy Astrix has followed up with a blog post.
A male kinkster and coder responded: “This is a tough one, but I’m going to fall on the side of the OP because the event is heavily gendered. Any event that embraces the concept that men are inherently predatory and women are inherently prey teaches the wrong things about roleplay, or human beings.”
I hope that anyone who wants to explore rape fantasies finds people who can help them explore safely, and that anyone who gets physically or emotionally hurt at one of these events can find help and support.
DMed a link to the ex-spouse’s webpage. They (not sure of the ex-spouse’s preferred pronouns) seem happy with their partner and their new gender identity but not well in general.
She could be raising children or organizing local events. If she is disillusioned I would have expected her to reappear somewhere else with a new cause (she explored skepticism, EA, and rationalism, and dropped out of several graduate programs when she decided that the field was not rigorous enough).
I would have hoped she would say something about so many of her friends turning out to be embezzlers and Nazis.
I have noticed that the same rationalists who think Sam Altman is building Skynet are totally fearless about an ex getting access to their home address through an adtech data-broker or a friend at Google. They are sometimes paranoid about reporters getting information, but not as worried about who collects it in the first place.
People have told me their organizations are like this with cloud spending (no curiosity about how to reduce it and measure ROI, until someone orders cuts).