I wonder if Scott is the person who stood up during Michael Levin's talk on (non genetic) bio-electric circuits storing morphological memory across time and said, “those animals can’t exist!”

Just like neuroscientists try to read out and decode the memories inside a living brain, we can now read and write (a little bit…) the anatomical goals and memories of the collective intelligence of morphogenesis. The first time I presented this at a conference – genetically wild-type worms with a drastically different, rewritten, permanent, target morphology – someone stood up and said that this was impossible and “those animals can’t exist”. Here’s a video taken by Junji Morokuma, of them hanging out.

Normies go crazy for this one neat rationalist trick!

Talk a lot about white culture, and only scarcely mention that he thinks white culture is a product of genetics.

I remember in the early days of the "culture wars" as far as political agendas going, hearing about "white/ethno-european pride," and being naively curious, I actually tried to engage these people on the topics of European culture and history, and found exactly zero engagement on these topics. Just politics abusing people's confusion of heritage with people's internal shame and lack of identity.

The paradox I've always found is that the more secure in your identity and heritage you are, the more happy you are to share, grow, and widen that. Maybe a hot take, but growing up in the south, alot of people there hide their personal internal shame and confusion in aggression and identity politics.

It's also, probably wrong. Modern views of intelligence (see Multiple realizability of cognition and Multi-level competency collective intelligence and Free Energy Principle models) suggest you are better of measuring intelligence by measuring it's metabolism or through perturbation and interactions.

Which isn't reductive enough for these people.

If only he were neither constrained by technical hurdles or resources, dang.

I don't think we would work out..

So you're saying I have a chance?

Maybe unpopular take here, but I love discord as an excellent fit for specific use cases. I think plenty of groups that should be web forums use discord wrong, but for several of my favorite communities:

1. They are better smaller, I don't necessarily want or need them to be discoverable aside from word of mouth.
2. They are better without search history, because the discussion is more ephemeral and personal instead of assuming that anyone is digging history in after hours
3. Ad hoc voice chat rooms is a useful boon because of exactly 1 and 2.
4. No ads. Yes I understand the privacy issues, but I would still prefer to have opt in subscriptions, no ads, and my chats are harvested than many alternatives for small communities that need to subsidize costs. (Again fediverse, if not ads, requires a buy in in terms of technical operational costs)
5. Trivial to build specialized addons in the case your community has a need.

Good examples for me are: Friend of Friend Groups for organizing dinners or parties Online gaming communities Book clubs Co-worker chat alternative to slack

Oddly, r/buttcoin is still doing well enough that it's one of the few places I still stop by on reddit. Can't say the same for any community still on twitter, dough.

Unfortunately such characters tend to dump stat WIS.

Yes, I agree. My personal thoughts are also that long term energy maximization is synonymous with regulatorial systems and dealing with the complications of energy use. Paradoxically long term maximization is defeated by any naive short term abuse. Only a naive understanding of physics supports the idea that you can simply, just produce and use more energy just like that.

Which is why theae takes don't mean, anything. It's a revelation to want money and do stupid without consequence.

Looking forward to when the grizzly bear grunts in his direction and he has to decide which reaction is the clear non consent one.

This whole, debate, is really just the question of closed systems vs open ones. That's it. If you want a dystopia because you see yourself as the winner of the final optimization, or you demand that outcome of the universe be knowable to you specifically, you will focus on closed system thermodynamics. If you enjoy the creative beauty of nature and have the capacity to change your perspective on response to the unforseen, you embrace open systems thermodynamics.

So yeah as with abuses of Bayesian logic, your desired outcome always reflects back on which assumptions you take. These takes tell you more about the person spouting then than any meaningful observations of life.