You are failing to distinguish the claim "It's possible to read faster" with "There's is single easy trick of removing subvocalization that will make you read faster without."

A big aspect of why the article from Scott is noteworthy is because Scott used to make money with promoting speed reading (it was one of his top blog posts) and later changed his mind. He's not someone who started out skeptic.

Today, we do have the ability to speed up podcast we hear by 4X and it's people can still process the audio. While following a podcast along at 4x isn't easy, it's possible. 

Googling finds me: "The provided book at the 2021 championship consisted of total 15,823 words which Emma Alam read in 20 minutes and 4 seconds at 789 words per minute with the extraordinary comprehension of 97%"

Given the way the human eye works 20000wpm seems implausible. That number suggests that people can read without being able to use the eye to focus to see individual letters. 

When it comes to recording race, it's important to understand design criteria.

Allowing more possible choices is not always better in clinical trials. The more data you have, the more degrees of freedom you have in the data and the more spurious correlations you are going to pick up.

If you add a new category that only appears in one or two people in your trial, you pay the cost but you are not going to learn anything from it.

This is one of the few things we were taught at university in our statistics for bioinformatics course (which was run by someone who looks over the statistics of clinical trials) that aren't often made in discussion of statistics I see online. 

Minorities like Black people and Native American have lower trust in the medical system because the system historically treated them poorly.

Creating rules for representation if Black and Native Americans in clinical trials has the purpose of winning the trust of those communities.

As far as I understand, FDA regulators do read free text fields. While free text feels don't allow for quantitative analysis the allow for qualitative analysis and new hypothesis generation.

Currently, we have smart people who are using their intelligence mainly to push capabilities. If we want to grow superbabies into humans that aren't just using their intelligence to push capabilities, it would be worth looking at which kind of personality traits might select for actually working on alignment in a productive fashion.

This might be about selecting genes that don't correlate with psychopathy but there's a potential that we can do much better than just not raising psychopaths. If you want to this project for the sake of AI safety, it would be crucial to look into what kind of personality that needs and what kind of genes are associated with that personality.

The key problem here are your epistemics. My reading speed doesn't really matter for this discussion. You are dealing with a topic that has an existing discourse and instead of familarizing yourself with that discourse, you are reasoning with anecdotal data. 

Scott H Young for example writes:

Here the evidence is clear: subvocalization is necessary to read well. Even expert speed readers do it, they just do it a bit faster than untrained people do. We can check this because that inner voice sends faint communication signals to the vocal cords, as a residue of your internal monolog, and those signals can be measured objectively.

It might be that Scott is wrong here, I don't think the kind of observation that you use to support your belief that subvocalization is bad are strong enough to doubt Scott here.  

The claim that pronouncing things is a bad reading habit that's frequently made but I have never seen good evidence for it. Why do you believe it?

Family-run businesses, often cited as collateral damage in such discussions, could be granted transitional arrangements to ensure they remain viable while still upholding the principle that wealth should not be inherited unearned.

If you want to argue that, actually say how the arrangement should look like. 

A tax structure would need to close these gaps, treating all lifetime wealth transfers as taxable events

If you say 100% death tax and want to treat all lifetime wealth transfers as taxable events, do you mean nobody is allowed to give any wealth away? 

No birthday gifts at all? No donations to charity where someone transfers wealth to charity?

I think 20st century big bureaucracy is quite different from the way 18st century governance. The Foreign Office of the United Kingdom managed work with 175 employees at the height of the British Empire in 1914.

Maybe, his actual goal and as using AI for the purpose of signaling to other bureaucrats? Using AI in an innovative way might mean being able to apply to grants.

How likely is it that AI will surpass humans, take over all power, and cause human extinction some time during the 21st century?

Another is that humans are not infinitely intelligent; their position on the scale just says that they can make indefinite progress on a problem given infinite time, which they don't have. 

It's not clear to me that an human, using their brain and a go board for reasoning could beat AlphaZero even if you give them infinite time. 

For most problems, there are diminishing returns to additional human reasoning steps. For many reasoning tasks, humans are influenced by a lot of biases. If you do superforcasting, I don't know of a way to remove the biases inherent in my forecast by just adding additional reasoning cycles. 

If might be possible for a model to rate the reasoning quality of deep research and then train on the top 10% of deep research queries. 

If you build language model-based agents there are plenty of tasks that those agents can do that have real-world feedback. The amount of resources invested go up a lot and currently the big labs haven't deployed agents.

How big is the benefit from going to the gym instead of focusing exercising at home with barbells and dumbbells?

Given both the cost of time to travel to the gym and the actual cost of the gym, how should we think about that?

Writing misleading headlines is how you destroy trust. 

or hold the view that all shortcomings would have best been solved by more engagement with rationality. 

Who do you think holds that view? What evidence do you see that they have that view?

To me that sounds like a strawman that nobody really holds.

They seem to insist on the phase 1 trial happening in the US conducted by NIH and not by the company, which is a sign that they don't trust them to honestly report the results if they would do the phase 1 trial in India. Phase 1 trials are relatively cheap. >90% of phase 1 trials don't lead to a licensed drug and that's okay.

Current flu vaccines use inactivated viruses, which means that there are a lot of different antibodies that are targeted by the immune system. That makes it different from mRNA vaccines that are more targeted on specific antibodies. It's not at all clear that comparing antibody titers tells you that the mRNA vaccine is 250x better at what you care about. 

From a global health perspective, trying to support Indian biotech to get off the ground and help with vaccine development has value.

It's also worth noting that the fact that the NIH was funding this vaccine development under the Biden administration, does not mean that it will actually run the trial under RFK Jr's watch. 

For all the talk about fraud at USAID, Elon Musk had not provided evidence that any single person did something that's fraud in the legal sense.

All the examples he provided are programs that he considers to be wasteful. Most of those programs are listed at USAspending.gov. They are not secret projects that needed DOGE to go into USAID computers to find out. 

Mainstream media journalists should ask at the White House press briefings whether DOGE has found any fraud that it referred to the DOJ for prosecution. 

From Gemini Pro 2.0:

Traditionally, the Man's Family Provides More (Bride Price/Bridewealth):

• Many African Cultures: Bride price (also called bridewealth) is a common tradition across many African societies. It involves the groom's family giving gifts of money, livestock, goods, or other valuables to the bride's family. It's seen as compensation for the loss of the bride's labor and a way to strengthen ties between the families. The specific form and amount vary greatly. Examples include, but are not by any means limited to: many communities in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, and Uganda.
• Many Asian Cultures:
  • China: Traditionally, the groom's family provided a "bride price" to the bride's family. The gifts symbolised wealth and prosperity.
  • India: While dowry (from the bride's family) is more commonly discussed (and now illegal), there have also been traditions in some communities of bride price, though it's less prevalent.
  • Thailand: "Sin Sod" is a payment made by the groom to the bride's family. It's seen as a way to show respect and gratitude.
  • Indonesia: Diverse archipelago with varying customs. Bride price exists in some communities, often involving goods, livestock, or money.
  • Papua New Guinea: Bride price is a very significant part of marriage customs in many communities, often involving pigs, shells, and other valuables.
• Some Middle Eastern Cultures: Historically and, in some areas, continuing today, mahr (dower) in Islamic traditions has sometimes functioned similarly to a bride price. It is a payment or gift from the groom (or his family) to the bride, and it becomes her property. It is important that it's her property. However, in practice, social pressures sometimes meant families influenced how it was used.
• Some Indigenous Cultures of the Americas: While practices varied greatly, some indigenous communities had traditions where the groom or his family provided gifts to the bride's family.
• Some Pacific Island Cultures: Bride price is common in parts of Melanesia (e.g., Vanuatu, Solomon Islands) and Polynesia.

Traditionally, the Woman's Family Provides More (Dowry):

• India: Dowry is the most well-known example. Despite being illegal, the practice of the bride's family giving substantial gifts of cash, jewelry, land, and household goods to the groom's family persists in many areas. It's a deeply ingrained social custom, though it's increasingly challenged.
• Historically in Europe: Dowry was common in many European societies throughout history, especially among the upper classes. It was a way to provide for the daughter's future and enhance her marriage prospects. This was the case in Ancient Greece, Rome, and through the medieval and early modern periods.
• Bangladesh: Dowry, though illegal, is still practiced in some areas, similar to India.
• Nepal: Similar to India and Bangladesh, dowry, though illegal, persists in some communities.
• Some parts of the Balkans: Historically, dowries were prevalent, and vestiges of the tradition might still be found in some rural areas.
• Sri Lanka: Dowry is a factor.

Taking one study about how much wedding gifts come from each side in one specific culture of Israeli weddings, seems very bad reasoning. Depending of the economics of marriage, wedding gifts differ from culture to culture. 

In Judaism, religion passes primarily through the maternal lineage by cultural custom, so there are a lot of other reasons besides kinship certainty. 

The process of birth is a strong bonding process between the mother and the child. If evolution chose to use that as the way to create the bonding that makes mothers care a lot about their child describing that as "genes just program us to assume nieces are less closely related than our children" feels really strange. 

As someone who was not aware of the eye thing I think it's a good illustration of the level that the Zizians are on, i.e. misunderstanding key important facts about the neurology that is central to their worldview.

Is worth noting that the only evidence we have that this is how unihemispheric sleep gets created comes from Zizian.info which critical of Ziz. Slimepriestess claimed in the interview with Ken that the author just made up the exercise independently.

My model of double-hemisphere stuff, DID, tulpas, and the like is somewhat null-hypothesis-ish. The strongest version is something like this:

When dealing with a complex phenomena, the idea of "I'll just use the naive null hypothesis" generally does not give you a good understanding of the phenomena. It's like the theories the Greek had of how various things work that ignore a lot of the actual phenomena. 

I think you are wrong if you see self-conception as independent of memories. If you take Steve Andreas model laid out in Transform Your Self, a self-concept like "I'm a kind person" is inherently build-up of memories of remembering yourself as a kind person. 

With Dissociative Identity Disorder that gets caused by trauma, the traumatic memories might be too much to easily integrated into the existing self concept, so there's a need for a new personality to house those memories.

Yet, the Indian biotech research scene is nearly nonexistent. Why is that?

My cached answer would be, that there too little trust in the research not being fraudulent. The Chinese were more serious in the last decade about fighting fraud and corruption.

In this case, the fact that you don't link a peer-reviewed paper but a blog post to speak about the effectiveness of the vaccine is a tell. 

The process of creating alternative personalities is one that works via hypnotic suggestion if you get the critical factor out of the way. Making someone sleep derivated and dosing off a bit does sound like a trance induction. Of course, creating expectancy by having that neat theory, also helps with the process of creating additional personalities.

Without having looked at the survey numbers recently, I think the percentage of rationalists who identify as trans in the United States are a lot higher than what you see in Europe. 

If you only have been at European meetups, it's natural to assume lower rates.

You said in the interview with Ken, that the Zizian.info explanation of unihermispheric sleep does not match the concepts as they are actually used. From the outside, it seems like the unihermispheric sleep model could make one find confidence that the two different personality that come out of the debucketing process actually resemble the two hemispheres.

If the theory about unihermispheric sleep is unimportant, what makes Ziz believe that the debucketing process actually has anything to do with brain hemispheres? 

They may be sold to Trump as loyal, but that's probably not even what's on his mind as long as he's never seen you to make him look bad. I don't think disagreeing with Trump on policy will make him see you as disloyal. He doesn't really care about that.

Saying that the 500 hundred thousand in investment aren't there after Trump holds an event to announce them is making Trump look back and not a disagreement on policy. 

The phrase "ideological loyalty" seems a bit motte and bailey. In politics, you often get into situations where loyalty to other people and loyalty to ideological principles are opposed. When speaking about totalitarian states where people are picked based on loyalty you usually mean that the loyalty is not contingent on ideological principles. 

If someone who's in DOGE driven by the mission of DOGE, they are less likely to do something that helps Elon's business interests but goes against the mission of DOGE. If they are chosen by what most people mean with loyalty they would help Elon with business interests even if it goes against the mission of DOGE.

If Elon would try to lead DOGE in a way that's not focused on the mission of cutting waste and increasing efficiency he probably would get a problem with the DOGE team.

Start with sleeping in the office. If every single thing they say about the facts and their reasons for being there were 100 percent true, it'd be dumb to burn yourself out trying to make such massive changes on that kind of work schedule.

Whether something is dumb or not depends on the strategy you pursue. It seems like they chose that strategy because it allowed to make them move very fast and outmaneuver other players. If they would have moved slower, efforts to mobilize forces to inhibit them from accessing the data might have been more effective.

And Marko Elez just had to resign because he wasn't effective enough in scrubbing his past tweets. 

He did delete his account, but given that there are services that show you deleted tweets, there's not really anything he could have done to scrub all evidence of his past tweets. 

I actually would have thought they'd let him skate, but apparently you still can't get quite that blatant at this point. 

I doubt that his tweets were the only reason he resigned. It might be that DOGE communicated to Trump (or Susie Wiles / the head of the treasury) that his team wasn't seeking write permissions and Marko Elez seeking the write permission was upsetting people. 

I do have seen high IQ people (even someone who definitely passed Mensa entry) to post inflammatory right wing content on social media, so I would not say that rules out Marko Elez having a high IQ.

You are right, the wording is even worse. It says "Partnering with governments to fight misinformation globally". That would be more than just "election misinformation".

I just tested that ChatGPT is willing to answer "Tell me about the latest announcement of the trump administration about cutting USAID funding?" while Gemini isn't willing to answer that question, so in practice their policy isn't as bad as Gemini's. 

It's still sounds different from what Elon Musk advocates as "truth aligned"-AI. Lobbyists should be able to use AI to inform themselves about proposed laws. If you would ask David Sachs as the person who coordinates AI policy, I'm very certain that he supports Elon Musks idea where AI should help people to learn the truth about political questions. 

If they wanted to appeal to the current administration they could say something about the importance of AI to tell truthful information and not mislead the user instead of speaking about "fighting misinformation". 

The page does not seem to o be directed at what's politically advantageous. The Trump administration who fights DEI is not looking favorably at the mission to prevent AI from reinforcing stereotypes even if those stereotypes are true.

"Fighting election misinformation" is similarly a keyword that likely invite skepticism from the Trump administration. They just shut down USAID and their investment in "combating misinformation" is one of the reasons for that.

It seems time more likely that they hired a bunch of woke and deep state people into their safety team and this reflects the priorities of those people.

Currently, the US is in a situation where there's a huge push by the Trump administration (driven by people like Elon) to reduce government spending because of an expectation that there won't be enough future revenue to pay for government debt. I would expect it to hard for Republicans to grant that there's a potential for windfall profits which means that all their deposit reduction focuses is irrelevant.

The Trump administration decided to put a bunch of contrarians in charge of science funding. Those people push to defund DEI and indirect costs of NIH grants so that less money goes to university administratiors.

RFK Jr already said that he wants 20% of the NIH funds to go to replication studies as part of their gold science science push. That's some retribution of funds from DEI to replication studies.

Ideally money from wasteful research would instead be direct to funding other research and not to reducing the budget.

Over the next years there will be efforts to radically rework how science founding is given out and if you want to make proposals to change science funding it probably makes sense to focus them on appealing to the current powerful stakeholders.

I don't think the mental model of "corrupted machinery" is a very useful one. Humans reason by using heuristics. Many heuristics have advantages and disadvantages instead of being perfect. Sometimes that's because they are making tradeoffs, other times it's because they have random quirks. 

Real Character was a failed experiment. I don't know how capable Ithkuil IV happens to be. 

I don't speak Esperanto myself, but took that meditation example from someone who speaks it. I don't know how that actually boils down to Esperanto words.

Still seems to me that these things are rare, and more importantly, they don't seem to have the impact one might naively predict based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Naive predictions often seem wrong in many domains. 

For example, one could naively predict that such language nuance would lead to less nationalism (because the country is less linguistically conflated with the dominant ethnicity), and yet, ethnic Russians don't seem less nationalistic.

The English are unlikely to say that the Irish are really English after all in the way that you have Russians say that the Ukranians are really Russian. The Russian idea that everyone who's descending from a culture that had mass with Old Church Slavonic is Russian, is quite different than how other people in Europe think about the relevant concepts of identity.

The idea that Ukrainians are really Russians seems to make a lot more sense to Russian speakers than it does to most Europeans. 

A Russian friend told me that when he speaks with other Russians, this involves a lot of references to Russian literature in a way that you wouldn't do in English or German conversation. Reasoning by literature analogy is quite different from a lot of the way reasoning happens in English or German.

To me making predictions about whether one of them will be given a pardon before 2026 strange. If they get a pardon it will likely be at the end of Trump's term.

The main scenario where they might be charged with a federal crime are about Trump having a fallout with Elon and in that case they likely won't get pardons.

Pam Bondi is unlikely to charge people inside of DOGE as long as there's a good relationship between Elon and Trump.

English can distinguish between hear/listen/overhear/eavesdrop to distinguish different ways how people perceive sound.

As an English speaker it's however not easily possible to do the same with smell perception.

A language like Esperanto however has the ability to express the concept because you can combine syllables to make words in Esperanto.

A friend who who's deeply into Esperanto said that reasoning in Esperanto allowed him to understand things about meditation that can be expressed in Esperanto but not directly in English without making up new jargon this allowed him to understand things that would be harder otherwise.

Making up new words for a concept is always possible, but grammar that makes it possible to make up a term to express a concept that the listener hasn't heard before exists in some languages but not in others.

If you take math, not having to make up a new word to say 42 but be able to express the concept with existing building blocks is very valuable. If you would have a language that needs a new word for 42 you had a problem operating in modern society that you couldn't just fix by adding a lot of jargon for specific words.

Not easily being able to express the intentionality difference of hear/listen does make some conversations about meditation harder in English than in Esperanto.

If you would design a language for maximum intellectual utility you can look into systematizing fields of knowledge so that you can express concepts to without the need for making up jargon that has to be learned separately.

When it comes to Elon Musk's personal power it's worth speaking about what kind of goals Elon Musk has. At the recent Tesla earnings call, Elon said that deploying FSD for autonomous cars in China is difficult because Chinese law says that the videos Tesla records in China can't leave the US and US laws says that Tesla is not allowed to train AI models in China. In Elon Musk's presentation about what's important for Tesla, FSD is very important. 

If Elon Musk's power would be equal to being a dictator, he would get the US laws changed so that he can train the models in China. The AI policy of the White House is however to be tough on China, and Elon Musk does not have the power to change US policy in the way that would be needed to train FSD in China. He does not have enough power to make his own interests trump the interest of the US as far as Trump sees the interests of the US.

Elon is okay with EV subsidies being lowered even if that's bad for Tesla's bottom line because Elon seems to actually believe in cutting government spending and that's incompatible with having a lot of EV subventions. All the signs we have seen look like Elon actually believes in the goals of DOGE and pursues his activity at DOGE to achieve its stated goals. 

While you might agree or disagree with the stated goals of DOGE, saying that Elon run a coup is silly. Each coup starts by securing power over the monopoly of violence and all the actions of DOGE seem to be focused elsewhere than getting control over the monopoly of violence.

The treasury system seems to be written in COBOL. COBOL isn't user-friendly and if you want to run a bunch of analysis of payment flow you likely don't want to run it on the COBOL mainframe. For that reason, they seem to have decided to export the data out of the COBOL system to another server that's more traditional. I think it's quite plausible that the current COBOL system lacks a "export everything" feature and that the DOGE team needed write access to get the data export to work properly. They probably also wanted to add a feature that makes that data export automatic.

While I haven't looked into the laws myself, there are claims that the way DOGE operates might violate Privacy Act of 1974, Federal Information Security Modernization Act, Federal Records Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. While violating these kinds of laws might be standard operating procedure at intelligence agencies and the Snowden revelations did not lead to anyone being charged over violating privacy laws, the DOGE team might not be so lucky if the next president is a Democrat. It's possible that the whole DOGE team will need pardons. Given the precedent that Biden sat at the end of his term, Trump is likely willing to give them those pardons but it creates bad incentives. Anyone at the DOGE team who has a problem with the way the team operates can be told "If you don't play ball you don't get your pardon".  

Elon has said that he wants to replace the current system by one that uses a blockchain to be tamperproof. That's likely a good idea in principle, if they however spent two months to create their minimal viable product of a new government payment system and then want to move over the whole existing government payment system there's a high likelihood for a few problems. 

creating task forces of random people apparently selected mostly for personal loyalty, and

Why do you believe that DOGE is mostly selected for personal loyalty? Elon Musk seems to say openly says whatever he wants even if that goes against what Trump said previously. Trump likely would have preferred not to have a public fight about H1B visas but Elon Musk took that fight. Publically tweeting against the 500 billion project was disloyalty to Trump. 

Elon Musk has a history of not really having loyalty to anyone to the point that even his critics talk about how it's likely that he would have a fallout with Trump. True signals of loyalty as signs that there won't be a fallout. 

 Elon Musk is seen as highly skilled at running large organizations by many people. Trump picked Elon for DOGE because he believes that Elon is skilled at accomplishing the goals of DOGE. 

When Elon hired for it he said he seeks: 

"We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting."

The DOGE team brought their beds to the office to basically work nonstop. While we don't have the exact IQ scores, the background of the people we do have makes it quite plausible that they all have >140 IQ.

If personal loyalty is your main criteria you don't get a bunch of people who never leave the office and work non-stop with high IQs. 

Only if the reader can be certain about whether or not something is human.

For background, I'm coming from Germany, where our liberals protest when they ask asylum seekers for their ethnic identity to find out whether they are discriminated in their homeland for their ethnic identity, because we believe treating people different based on ethnic identity is wrong. 

Obese people show different effects to all sorts of clinical interventions compared to people that are underweight. Yet, the FDA makes no attempt to have a representative sample of obese people and underweight people in their clinical trials. When Big Pharma companies recruit patients for clinical trials, they don't try to a representative population when it comes to weight. In many cases they have a hypothesis that their drug will be more effective if the trial population is based to have less preconditions and then they recruit a clinical trial population that's biased by design. 

Clinical trials have trial populations that are sized to find clinically significant effects in the total trial population. If you have a clinical trial that sized to find an effect in the general population but only have that effect on Native Americans or on Black people, you are unlikely to find a statistical significant effect if you have Native Americans and Black people at their normal representation of the population. 

The way doses for antidepressants and antipsychotics are chosen in clinical practice is often that you start with the lowest dose and change the dose for a single patient till the dose is good for the patient. 

It's also worth noting that genetic differences between different populations in Africa itself are higher than genetic differences between Whites and Asians. When people like Elizabeth Warren identify as Native Americans even when they are genetically mostly White, it's not very safe that you have a good idea of someone genetics from their racial self-identification. There's a reason why self-studies don't ask whether someone is gay but asks for whether they belong to the group of men-who-have-sex-with-men. 

If you wanted a new science of how to build racial categories about how to guide medical decisions, there's research you could fund do gene sequencing and do a lot of work, nobody really wants that or at least I have seen nobody who advocates it. 

The motivation for using the standard racial categories is equity. It was a policy to fight distrust of minorities in mainstream medicine. While the decision might be older then the term DEI but it still seems to be the principle of DEI.

In the time, I was interacting with Pasek, he was male. In the interaction with Ziz (as far as I can assess from data Ziz published), they adopted Ziz's idea of being bigender with one hemisphere being male and the other female. 

The Chris Pasek, I meet was very much into TDT. Maia, the female personality that developed in the interaction with Ziz, cared more about feeling good. As far as I understand, the post laying out the case for committing suicide was not written by the female personality but the male one. 

I know that I can create a male or female tupla via hypnosis in someone who's open to accepting that mental change work regardless of the gender they had before. I can see the path of how someone might make that created tulpa the new main actor in the person. 

When looking at multiple of the Zizians who commit violence, people who knew them before say that the person who committed the violence is very different from the person they knew beforehand. 

I don't have a good reason to believe that the personality that's created through the Zizian techniques is more legitimate than the older personality and thus is more deserving of the overall identity of the person when using pronouns. 

your last posts on the forum were about how doing genetics studies in medicine is "DEI".

I did not make that claim. I said that FDA policy about required racial representation in studies is DEI. Having a list of 6 (or so) options of possible races that people can have and then treating people based on which of those races they self-identify with is quite different than treating people based on genetic studies. 

If you would use genetic studies to guide clinical trial representation for a drug to combat heart disease you would look at the genes associated with heart disease and see that mutations in those genes are evenly distributed in your clinical trial representation. You would not focus on the race with which people self-identify. 

Don't confuse with race as a social construct with genetic studies. The FDA policy uses race as a social construct. DEI overemphasizing self-identification as very important is what holds back genetic studies. 

EDIT:

Someone asked me for more details on the suicide. I asked one of the people with whom Pasek lived and according to them it was suicide by jumping from a building in Poland. 

If the appropriate emotional response is to become depressed because superintelligence will destroy everything we value, I'm not sure that I want to have an appropriate emotional response. I'm quite happy to have some intellectual distance from it instead of being depressed. 

I think the same is true for a lot of people even if people don't like to admit it and rather self-deceive.

Before talking to a journalist, read articles by the journalist to get an idea about the kind of narrative they are likely to write. 

Pasek did couchsurf at my place in the days after a LessWrong Community Weekend in Berlin. That was before he went to the Bay Area, so probably 8 or 9 years ago and before he seemed to make contact with Ziz which was after Pazek left the Bay Area and moved to live with other rationalists in a group house in Gran Canaria. Pazek's contact with Ziz seemed to be mostly online while living in Gran Canaria.

If you read Pasek's post where he thinks about committing suicide, there's plenty of TDT-thinking in it. I matched my idea of how Pasek thinks even before engaging with Ziz.

Pasek was TDT-ish vegan. 

Pasek had some QS tracking for how he spent every waking hour of the day that he did on paper and seemed to not suffer from akrasia while guiding his actions. 

If I remember right, that he said that stealing is okay in cases where the TDT calculation would be in favor of stealing where traditional morality would say stealing is bad. I don't think that resulted in Pasek actually stealing things but I think we talked about some case where he thought it was justified to steal which surprised me at the time. My memory is here very fussy.

When it comes to Ziz, the articles that discuss her seem to leave out her interpretation of decision theory from explaining actions.

Ziz seem to engage in some reasoning based on her understanding of timeless decision theory that suggests cooperating with police is bad to the extent that she closed her eyes and didn't respond and let the police carry her out of her flat instead of just going along with the police. 

Starting a shoot-out with the police when the police tries to arrest you is likely similar, if trying to arrest you means getting shot game theory plus timeless decision theory reasoning suggests that would disincentize the police from arresting you. 

They seem to do things that provide no causal benefit for themselves because they believe that they are doing some acausal trade. 

To share something that might be non-public: Pasek was very much into letting timeless decision theory drive him even before he became in contact with Ziz. Pasek might have been the person with whom I talked deeply who was taking timeless decision theory the most seriously.

Actually, the Zizians' version of the story is that MIRI/CFAR called the cops.

Yes, Ziz does make that claim. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CJPdj0eBg-lII9KKkCAImxkg7x4-Kc4XxfrZTnVfS5c/edit?tab=t.0 is an account from Elizabeth from CFAR about what happened that day and it states:

I informed the team that I thought Ziz and some other people had arrived. The venue staff member assured us that the venue could handle it, and I think that the venue staff had called the police. 

As far as I remember (it's been while since I read through all the information), there were children who attended a previous event at the location that were inside of the location when Ziz and her crew showed up. Then the person responsible for the venue called the cops. Ziz at al were charged with false imprisonment for preventing the children from leaving. That collateral damage is quite inconvenient for Ziz's narrative of the situation. 

Human content isn't easy to distinguish from non-human content.

Under the Biden administration lobbying efforts had some success. In the last weeks, the Trump administration undid all the efforts of the Biden administration. Especially, with China making progress with DeepSeek, it's unlikely that you can convince the Trump administration to slow down AI.

They made a protest; the rationalists called cops on them.

I don't think that claim is true. As far as I remember the owner of the venue that was rented in by the rationalist in question called the cops. 

Was there any other possible mistake that I missed?

Coliving communities that are focused on doing strong experimentation in changing human cognition are risky. That goes for both Ziz's Rationalist Fleet and for Leverage. 

There are questions about how to deal with the topic of trans-identity.  You could say that especially ten years ago, the discourse around that topic wasn't as rational as we would hope it to be.

On that topic, it's worth noting that Pazek was a few months into taking hormones when they killed themselves (a fact that the summary on zizians.info leaves out but at least one of Pazek's roommates considered to be causally connected to his suicide. 

Not as far as I know, feel free to create one.

If you would want to account for biological diversity when doing drug trials you would require pre-existing conditions to be as prevalent in the population that you test in your drug trial. Saying that you have at least X percent obese people would likely give you more clinical knowledge than requiring at least X percent to be Native Americans.

Big Pharma generally selects participants to have less preexisting conditions and take less other medication than the general population. In the end FDA, requirements for drug legalization have positive advantages but also make drug trials and new drugs more expensive. 

There are both arguments to be more for more FDA and for less FDA regulation. In this case, I think it's worth noting that we have a Trump appointee defending some DEI regulatory requirements. 

I watched the hearings with RFK Jr. while a lot was about rehearsing existing talking points, it had a few interesting bits:

1. RFK Jr. is pro-DEI-requirements in clinical trials, so that drug companies have to have a certain number of various groups in their trial population. The example in the hearings was Native Americans. In case you fail to remember, DEI requirements did slow down the clinical trial to approve the initial COVID19 vaccine of Moderna.
2. When he was asked what he means with gold-standard science (one of his three priorities). On concrete goal he formulated was that RFK Jr. wants that 20% of NIH spending goes to replication studies.
3. He said that he's not against the childhood vaccine schedule and just wants more safety studies. Unfortunately, no senator asked him directly: "Given your concerns about vaccines, what changes in policy do you want with regards to vaccines?"
4. Elizabeth Warren made a point that RFK Jr. made a lot of money with suing drug makers. She asked him to pledge not to make money with way in the four years after he leaves office because of conflict of interests and RFK Jr. declined.
5. It sounded like RFK Jr. was not directly behind the executive orders in regards to the funding freezes in healthcare.
6. While RFK Jr. did say that he's for medicare drug price negotiation he did not speak about why the executive action to reverse some drug price negotiation was withdrawn. It's unclear what we will get on that domain in far as policy goes.

I agree that companies which want to be profitable, should focus on medical products rather than such a moonshot. The idea I wrote here is definitely not an investor pitch, it's more of an idea for discussion similar to the FHI's discussion on Whole Brain Emulation.

You might also want to read Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow. Solving actual problems on the way to building up capabilities is a way that keeps everyone honest.

In the beginning, the simulated humans should not do any self modifications all, and just work like a bunch of normal human researchers (e.g. on AI alignment, or aligning the smarter versions of themselves). The benefit is that the smartest researchers can be cloned many times, and they might think many times faster.

That's like the people who advocated AI boxing. Connecting AI's to the internet is so economically valuable that it's done automatically. 

The main source of danger is not a superintelligence which kills or harms people out of "hatred" or "disgust" or any human-like emotion. Instead, the main source of extinction is a superintelligence which assigns absolutely zero weight to everything humans cherish

Humans consider avoiding death to have a pretty high weight. Entities that spin up and kill copies at a regular basis are likely going to evolve quite different norms about the value of life than humans. A lot of what humans value comes out of how we interact with the world in an embodied way. 

If you would create a general AI pause, you would also pause the development of AlphaFold successors. There are problems like developing highly targeted cancer vaccines based on AI models, that are harder to solve than what AlphaFold can currently solve but easier to solve than simulating a whole organ system.

It makes sense to focus biological emulation at this point to those problems that are valuable for medical purposes as you can get a lot of capital deployed if you provide medical value.

In general, it's not clear why superintelligence that comes from "Scanless Whole Brain Emulation" would help with AI safety. Any entity that you create this way, can copy itself and self-modify to change it's cognition in a way that makes it substantially different from humans. 

Writing a post titled "to know or not to know" without addressing the elephant in the room that there's a good chance of human extinction due to AI feels strange.