Looks like Andrea Rossi's E-Cat cold fusion scam is finally reaching its end-phase. Some previous LW discussion here, here and here.

Sorry for mindkilling content, but I remember reading on LW long ago that the political left is supposedly morally different, because it doesn't use the "purity/disgust" moral axis.

Then I found these photos online, and I wonder whether that is the microexpression (except there seems to be nothing "micro" when these people do it) of disgust. Or am I reading the expression wrong?

My point is that if someone has this expression pretty much stuck on their face, I find it quite difficult to believe that they don't care about the "purity/disgust" axis.

So what exactly is the lesson here?

• Is the hypothesis about the political left not using the "purity/disgust" axis wrong?
• Are SJWs psychologically very different from the typical left?
• Are the people on the photo very different from typical SJWs, or are their expressions very unrepresentative of their usual behavior?
• Any other explanation?

So I was wondering what career is best in terms of being able to accumulate wealth and having a decent quality of life. I've heard finance jobs are good.

Cebcurpl nobhg Uneel raqvat gur jbeyq vf haerfbyirq, cebcurpl nobhg qrsrngvat qrngu vf haerfbyirq, rirelguvat nobhg Ngynagvf naq gur angher bs zntvp vf haerfbyirq. Vs gurfr jrera'g gur znva dhrfgvbaf va lbhe zvaq juvyr ernqvat UCZBE, vqx jung gb fnl. Nyfb, ab zntvpny erfrnepu unccraf.

We have a lot more infrastructure than Europe had at the time of the Black Death. If we lost 75% of the population, it might devastate things like the power grid, water supply and purification, etc.

We have (I think) more complicatedly interdependent institutions than Europe at the time of the Black Death. Relatively small upheavals in, e.g., our financial systems can cause a lot of chaos, as shown by our occasional financial crises. If 75% of the population died, how robust would those systems be?

The following feels like at least a semi-plausible story. Some natural or unnatural disaster wipes out 75% of the population. This leads to widescale failure of infrastructure, finance, and companies. In particular, we lose a lot of chip factories and oil wells. And then we no longer have the equipment we need to make new ones that work as well as the old ones did, and we run out of sufficiently-accessible oil and cannot make fast enough technological progress to replace it with solar or nuclear energy on a large scale, nor to find other ways of making plastics. And then we can no longer make the energy or the hardware to keep our civilization running, and handling that the best we can takes up all our (human and other) resources, and even if in principle there are scientific or technological breakthroughs that would solve that problem we no longer have the bandwidth to make them.

The human race would survive, of course. But the modern highly technology-dependent world would be pretty much screwed.

(I am not claiming that the loss of 75% of the population would definitely do that. But it seems like it sure might.)

Hey, it worked for Harper Lee, didn't it?

I simply assume that almost everything they say is a metaphor for something (usually for their feelings).

It has taken me many years to realize that, but the more I look for it the more I notice it. I have a friend on Facebook who's a Syrian living in NYC, she keeps posting things like "Here's the proof Assad is actually a spy planted by the Israeli Mossad to cause genocide in Syria". I kept asking her how she could possibly believe it and got very confusing responses that didn't really address the question. And then it hit me: for her and for many Arabs "X is a Mossad spy" is simply an eloquent way of saying "I hate X", it has literally nothing to do with the Mossad at all. My friend was confused why I even bring facts about the Mossad into a discussion of whether Assad is a Mossad spy.

Viliam gave enough SJ examples, so I'll give one from the other side: there was a campaign by some famous PUA to boycott Mad Max: Fury Road because it's feminist propaganda. Hold on, isn't that the movie where the attractive women in skimpy clothes are called "breeders" whose job is to make babies? And then I realized:

• For PUAs "X is feminist propaganda" = "I hate X"
• For some Russians "X is a CIA plot" = "I hate X"
• For some Evangelical Christians "X is from the Devil" = "I hate X"
• For some communists "X is capitalist" = "I hate X"
• For some capitalists "X is communist" = "I hate X"

Etcetera, etcetera.

Yudkowsky explicitly doesn't believe in rapid technical progress.

Links? What is "rapid"? Did he look at his phone recently?

The Great Stagnation is phenomenon on the time scale of decades. How about the time scale of centuries?

Trend extrapolation is more reasonable than invoking something that hasn't happened at all yet, and then claiming, "When this happens, it will become an unstoppable trend."

You are right about the singularity, but the underlying trend extrapolation is that of technical progress and, specifically, of software getting smarter.

Nowadays people got used to rapid technical progress and often consider it, um, inevitable. A look at history should disabuse one of that notion, though.