I don't think it's going to be very difficult to discover Eugene's new account once he makes it. The real difficulty is making it not worth his while to keep coming back.

Seconded.

I don't count myself as either a rationalist or a community member here,

FWIW, I think of anyone who posts here regularly as a Wronger! (I know, I know, you disagree with other people here about how to do causal inference and about the insightfulness/worthiness of academics — but disagreeing with the rest of the gang on some specific topic is pretty common, I reckon, and not nearly enough to get you kicked out of the treehouse.)

I think you guys should find a way to throw the nrx out, and let them start their own community. I think they are going to do more harm than good in the long run.

This I disagree with. The only neoreactionaries I remember being obnoxious enough here to raise a real stink are Eugine_Nier and Jim, and Jim hasn't posted here since 2012. That's too thin a basis for kicking out a particular political group, especially since Eugine_Nier being here has had some benefit. (I have occasionally seen them shake people out of misconceptions.) It's just that Eugine_Nier's abuse of the voting system outweighed/outweighs that benefit. (That wasn't Eugine_Nier's only downside, but it was the big one.)

I don't think HungryHobo meant it to go anywhere in particular. It looks like a dummy link with the spoiler in its title attribute so the spoiler appears when the link's hovered over.

LW used to be politically neutral; I'm not sure it is so anymore.

I reckon LW's more politically neutral (in kilobug's apparent sense) now than it was in 2014, but that that's mainly attributable to the fall in traffic. (I'd guess LW's less politically-neutral-in-the-apparent-kilobug-sense than I felt it was in 2013.)

(I also think that as I understand the term "politically neutral", LW was never politically neutral, because the idea of a politically neutral institution is probably incoherent in the first place. I upvoted kilobug anyway because I think they mean something else by "politically neutral", and in any case I agree with the rest of their comment.)

And the current wave of populist, nationalistic, libertarian/individualist ideology which seems to be very popular in the USA is being represented in the general atmosphere of LW.

LW's always had a big, big libertarian/individualist streak. In the first survey back in '09, a plurality (45%) called themselves libertarians. That's actually been diluted over the years as more conventional left-wingers have drifted in.

Although if we go looking for descendants rather than ancestors...

Irène Joliot-Curie (12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French scientist, the daughter of Marie Curie and Pierre Curie and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date.[1] Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also esteemed scientists.[2]

I know I could check; I was more wondering whether you, or someone you knew, had checked yourself/themselves.

I think it's quite possible that Discussion has had a higher maths density over the last two or three months, mainly because of Stuart Armstrong posting his run of ideas from his AI risk retreat. Aside from that, though, I'm doubtful that LW's had a strong rise in maths density over the last few years. To me it feels like an idea that's probably more truthy than true.

It's possible the LW diaspora has concrete evidence on this and I haven't encountered it. I look at rationalist Tumblr only intermittently and I don't have Facebook, so I would likely have missed it.

The usual formulation has "irresistible" rather than "unstoppable"

You forgot the citation!

Is that true? How do we know?

Um, no. The US was actually extremely soft in Vietnam.

Um, no. The US actually dropped "one million tons of ordnance" on North Vietnam (where US air strikes killed "approximately 52,000 civilians") and "some four million tons of bombs" on South Vietnam ("the most bombed country in the history of aerial warfare—a dubious distinction for an ally"). The US actually supplemented those bombs by dropping about 70 million litres of herbicides on Vietnam, including over 40 million litres of Agent Orange and Agent Orange II, such that "millions of Vietnamese were likely to have been sprayed upon directly" and over 2 million hectares of Vietnam were sprayed repeatedly. (This excludes the anti-personnel gases and tens of thousands of tons of napalm the US employed during the 1960s alone.) And a working group in the US Department of Defense actually reckoned it could substantiate hundreds of reports of US war crimes.

My point is that using the exchange rate to compute how many dollars a day someone makes in a country in which the exchange rate is only used to price things that the locals don't buy is very misleading.

I believe the World Bank defines poverty in terms of PPP-adjusted incomes for that reason.

Fair enough, haha. I figured there was a non-trivial chance you were right and I was wrong, because it's been years since I studied this stuff systematically and my memory of it isn't great.