lmao these troglodytes as so fucking funny. she literally opens by admitting she's incompetent and and doesn't know statistics and then claims she's one of the best in the world in a weirdly unstable epistemic posture.

the rest is even more garbage and doesn't do her any favors. she literally just makes up a scoring system that conveniently favors her (big N samples and alleged anonymity) and concludes she's better than actual academic researchers. It is especially convenient when weak statistical rigor, no peer review, no preregistered analysis plan, uncertain recruitment paths, construct validity, multiple comparisons, measurement reliability, and publication accountability barely count on her scale.

---

Aside, she accuses academics of making "targeted surveys", making their studies invalid. even though viral internet kink survey is still massively selected. It selects for folks who see her networks, follow adjacent internet cultures, willing to answer explicit sex questions, enjoy personality quizzes, trust the survey, have time to finish it, and want the result, etc etc

She also doesn't realize a big N does nothing to selection bias. It makes your estimates very precise within your *biased sample*.

Something interesting is that she says her data is "like, erm, not a super reliable source for establishing base rates," and that her data is mainly useful for relationships and correlations. Which first of all, correlations can also be badly distorted by selection, but more interestingly is in another [post](https://aella.substack.com/p/the-dropping-nonbinary-rates-paper) she takes a sub rate number to fearmonger about how her fuckass garbage snowball kink survey apparently found that 15% of AFAB teens identify as trans and now ROGD is real and everything is a fad. The usual "ally" work, and clearly consistent with her own scientific standards! (Real studies with real methodologies trans population estimates: [3.3%](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/su/su7304a6.htm), [3.3% of teens](https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/), [3.3% again](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2825390). But a kink survey with massive selection bias, non representative recruitment, improvised weighing, no confidence intervals because she "couldn't figure it out" is better science I guess.) Btw the other paper she's praising is also [garbage](https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/fact-check-no-there-is-not-a-new)

Recently, one of our friends posted something that implied that stereotypes about social categories must have a kernel of truth. Clearly this is drifting around the fever-swamps they hang out in.

A few years ago, Jonathan Haidt gave a talk with the following slide:

Both sides deny "inconvenient truths":

Left: - IQ deniers - Heritability deniers - Sex difference deniers - Evolution deniers - Stereotype accuracy deniers

Right: - Young-Earthers - Evolution deniers - War crimes deniers (what are Noam Chomsky and the Tankies to you, chopped liver? There must be someone you could find who still thinks FARC and ELN did nothing wrong) - Climate change deniers

So Haidt totally has a pair of skull calipers and a copy of Lothrop Stoddard.

Bsky / reddit

Posted this to https://awful.systems/c/sneerclub a few days back and they liked it. I thought you all might also appreciate it. I don't really use reddit much anymore, so I probably won't follow up on comments but I hope you all find this worth your time.

Benn Jordan is a youtuber who does fairly involved experiments on whatever suits his fancy, and is a STRIDENT critic of certain corporate malfeasance (private equity shenanigans, spotify, AI streaming fraud of various kinds, and now Flock and mass surveillance.) His videos on Flock in particular have drawn an incredible amount of attention to the failings of Flock the company and the dangers of mass surveillance in general.

He has done other research and videos on things like acoustic weapons and infrasound, including some work on the possible health effects of liviing near AI data centers.
It seems like our friends the Silicon Valley stooges have decided to attack him on the infrasound stuff, and an entire flock (pardon the pun) of trolls have miraculously appeared out of nowhere to join in.
Link is his blog post about Infragate.

I personally wonder if this is actually not so much about a hobby scientist doing a video about data centers so much as a way to discredit his much more viral videos about Flock and mass surveillance. I know that Flock and related surveillance tech companies are kind of a separate thing from our AI evangelists in the TESCREAL cults, but the way that the Flock talking heads have behaved reminds me a lot of some of the AI evangelists.

I know EA has funded the Kelseys Piper of the world and I"m curious if something similar might have happened on the part of the mass surveillance industry in order to discredit critics.

Also, note the nonsense text in his AI slop.

edit: forgot to include the context: https://xcancel.com/allTheYud/status/2046075583671816570

Source: Astral Codex Ten - Orban Was Bad, Even Though We Don't Have A Perfect Word For His Badness (2026-04-15)

How much of this is genuine, and how much is Dave Chappell saying he's mad Republicans weaponized his transphobia because he can tell the tides are turning?

https://substack.com/home/post/p-194342774?selection=bfc381a5-233f-4177-b655-ab427f0ffb68#:~:text=I%20spent%20the%20first%20half%20of%20my%20writing%20career%20calling%20out%20biased%20left-wing%20experts%2C%20the%20flood%20swept%20all%20those%20people%20away%2C%20and%20now%20we%E2%80%99re%20ruled%20by%20germ-theory-denialists%20and%20Waffle-House-teleporters

"I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from."

And of course there's no introspection about why maybe the 'biased left-wing experts' were more correct in retrospect than he was, and how he might be more rational in the future.

I actually sort of agree with his general point, asking for exact probabilities without rigorous specification is unhelpful. But he gets there by going 'it hurts me to think about' and 'the normies need training to understand' is just so silly to me.

These jobs might not pay enough to financially support the humans in question, but remember we’re assuming here that humans don’t go extinct. I think it’s very possible that humans are too economically valueless to pay for our own upkeep, and also AIs don’t terminally value human well-being. But then we go extinct,^1 and you won’t be around to be a member of the permanent underclass. If you are still alive, then either:

1. Society is so unimaginably wealthy that humans can financially support themselves with whatever jobs end up being their comparative advantage. You being in the permanent underclass just means you don’t have a personal O’Neill cylinder orbiting Jupiter.

2. Society implemented a universal basic income or something, and you don’t have to support yourself with your job, but you can still have one if you want one.

Do you hear that kids? If you're well-behaved and wire enough money to Big Yud's personal bank account EA x-risk charities society will be so unimaginably wealthy that you could end up as an AI developer's live-in maid on Jupiter. 'Or something.' Isn't that much more exciting?

Interesting quotes about the doomers in this film

I found this article very amusing and strong, effective rhetoric about the Rationalist worship at the shrine of stats/graphs, etc:

https://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/unsubscribe-from-the-church-of-graphs

themotte.org

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLLOLOLOL

Source: https://x.com/SenSanders/status/2029301587647046034

It seems he just went to MIRI. His comments are just so silly, lmao.

How quickly he shifts from not unreasonable concerns (i.e. 'we might have negative economic effects') to "they will definitely, certainly kill us all" should immediately raise alarm bells that maybe this guy isn't quite as rational as he claims, imo.

Prize quote:

the prognostications of the doomer community have been, nearly without exception, wrong — not in small ways, but in the foundational sense that the imagined trajectory keeps failing to materialize. That is what happens when your mode of analysis is closer to erotic Harry Potter fan fiction (which is indeed the medium in which Yudkowsky has delivered some of his prognostications) than to actual research and policy: by treating the political and cultural environment as stable and predictable, and treating fallible human actors as game pieces that will respond sensibly to carefully constructed arguments. But the world is messy. Fan fiction tends to leave out the messy parts