TinyTimmyTokyo

My attention span is not what it used to be, and I couldn't force myself to get to the end of this. A summary or TLDR (on the part of the original author) would have been helpful.

What is it with rationalists and their inability to write with concision? Is there a gene for bloviation that also predisposes them to the cult? Or are they all just mimicking Yud's irritating style?

Is it wrong to hope they manage to realize one of these libertarian paradise fantasies? I'd really love to see how quickly it devolves into a Mad Max Thunderdome situation.

What's it like to be so good at PR?

That reminds me. If the world is about to FOOM into a kill-all-humans doomscape, why is he wasting time worrying about seed oils?

Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is always a good place to start.

Random blue check spouts disinformation about "seed oils" on the internet. Same random blue check runs a company selling "safe" alternatives to seed oils. Yud spreads this huckster's disinformation further. In the process he reveals his autodidactically-obtained expertise in biology:

Are you eating animals, especially non-cows? Pigs and chickens inherit linoleic acid from their feed. (Cows reprocess it more.)

Yes, Yud, because that's how it works. People directly "inherit" organic molecules totally unmetabolized from the animals they eat.

I don't know why Yud is fat, but armchair sciencing probably isn't going to fix it.

This is good:

Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.

Also this:

If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.

And:

If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.

Now that his alter ego has been exposed, Hanania is falling back on the "stupid things I said my youth" chestnut. Here's a good response to that.

In theory, a prediction market can work. The idea is that even though there are a lot of uninformed people making bets, their bad predictions tend to cancel each other out, while the subgroup of experts within that crowd will converge on a good prediction. The problem is that prediction markets only work when they're ideal. As soon as the bettor pool becomes skewed by a biased subpopulation, they stop working. And that's exactly what happens with the rationalist crowd. The main benefit rationalists obtain from prediction markets and wagers is an unfounded confidence that their ideaas have merit. Prediction markets also have a long history in libertarian circles, which probably also helps explain why rationalists are so keen on them.

"TempleOS on the blockchain"

Ok that's some quality sneer. A bit obscure and esoteric, but otherwise perfect for those who know anything about Temple OS.

Yeah, Behe's one of the leading lights (dimmest bulbs?) of the so-called "Intelligent Design" movement: a molecular biologist who knows just enough molecular biology to construct strawmen arguments about evolution. Siskind being impressed by him tells me everything I need to know about Siskind's susceptibility to truly stupid ideas.