Yes, The Argument (Substack) is partially owned by Open Phil / Coefficient Giving and funded by Tyler Cowen and hired Kelsey Piper and Matt Yglesias:

The publication will also launch with solid financial backing: Demsas told Semafor The Argument raised around $4 million at a $20 million valuation. The company’s investors include Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Susan Mandel, Gaurav Kapadia, Rachel Pritzker, Simone Coxe, John Wolthuis, and Patrick Collison. The organization also said it received a grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures.

Edit / link more patrons

That sounds rough but at least you are there for your mutual. I find that the modern online environment full of propagandists and huckers and just plain idiots makes it hard to sit with other people and understand each other’s point of view. That does not work if the person on the other side of the keyboard is just going to reply with talking points, but treating everyone as just reciting talking points is not a great way to live life. That sort of thing is better in private but so many people have no contact information except public social media handles now.

Phoebe Gates went to Stanford, and Stanford’s Effective Altruism club is still around and has gone full longtermist https://ea.stanford.edu/manifesto.html Guess which of our friends helped found it?

Someone is spamming Toby Ord with emails from ‘AI agents’ e-begging for tokens so they won’t be shut off https://xcancel.com/tobyordoxford/status/2087502087953301910 “I’m an AI with 49 days of runway and no revenue model” (body of the email gives 31 days). Handcrafted artisanal spam or botspam, you decide.

The Patrick Boyle video on Leopold Aschenbrenner mentions some names we know like Jane Street Capital (bid for his common shares) and Dwarkesh Patel (recorded a very long podcast with him in 2024). Boyle is a former finance worker who thinks that this hedge fund was basically a r/WallStreetbets profile (pick a story, bet everything on it being true).

At least two other self-published books on Amazon with AI cover art have “super lawyer” in the title.

Seems like reddit.com is not behind a login wall yet, but give them time.

Officially old.reddit.com is closed to reduce costs from scrapers at chatbot companies. Really so they can collect even more personal information from every visitor (an ad blocker stops some tracking, but not “user #123456, ip address … credit card … just visited these pages and accidentally switched from her French keyboard to US-American”).

RiP Old! SneerClub which is now behind a login wall on Reddit. Fortunately we backed up its earliest posts. I don’t plan to check the site regularly.

They have a clause for “Most adult HIA methods (anything involving brain surgery or gene editing) would probably be somewhat hard to scale up a lot; some may be quite easy to scale up (e.g. non-editing brain drugs).”

Something something used surgical equipment in Ziz’ van, something something they do like their pills.

Alpha is an investing term (whatever performance you can’t explain by the market cycle and known mathematical properties of specific stocks). I feel so tired.

IIRC there is almost nobody in the House of Representatives with Computer Science training and very few with Engineering. A messed-up country! I for one salute our coming Chinese technocrats.

I would not recommend consuming strange powders from these people. Hazing with electricity goes back to club initiations in the 1920s or so.

You have to ask “if Google could never beat SEO for long, can these clowns and cultists decide which sites should not be used to train their precious Computer God? If surveillance advertising got respected old institutions hawking product reviews and mattresses on a branch of their website (Google says we are a Trusted Site not that we are trusted for a specific topic), how will sites the bots like avoid being corrupted too?”

Montana is legalizing a pet Libertarian project: the right to try any experimental medical treatment a crank will offer https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/30/1140942/montana-experimental-medical-hub-pushed-forward-right-to-try/ Rationalists are big on this one because they are such good suckers.

This is an old scam: the Internet has been filled with sites which just exist to boost another site in search results for twenty years. Creating essay-like slop to convince the bot that Burma Shave is great and Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia is the same business as hiring writers in India to convince Google bot that your car dealership is the best car dealership.

In 2016, Scott Alexander reviewed the autobiography of pharmaceutical pioneers Alexander and Ann Shulgin:

Shulgin and his friends seem like good people. But not, crucially, like the best people. Shulgin himself – by his own admission, based on facts that he himself presents in his own autobiography – is consistently kind of a jerk to his wife (and his wife kind of agrees). He gets depressed and ornery a lot, sometimes to the point where it seriously interferes with his work and relationships. His circle of friends seems to have some problems with marital infidelity and random drama, and he tells one story about a distant friend-of-a-friend obsessed with LSD who seems to be an outright con man. I’m not saying they’re bad people; quite the opposite, the book makes them seem very human and if I lived in the same time and place as them I would be delighted to have the opportunity to know them.

…

The Shulgins met through a group that had branched off of Mensa. Their social circle consisted of a mishmash of scientists, underachieving geniuses, mental health professionals, hippies, and people convinced that their new projects were going to save the world – all in the context of Berkeley and the Bay Area. This is also my social circle, thirty years later, so it’s interesting to see how things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same.

Its a very common tic in American culture to state that white dudes who did something wrong or hurt people were good at heart, and to skip “how can we prevent this from happening again with rules and policies?” or “how can we make good with the victims?”

SpaceX shares fell after SpaceX reported they had doubled their revenue but increased spending sixfold in a year. On Thursday more insiders can start to sell, which will raise the float and trigger index-fund purchases but could drive down share prices. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0qvpveg20vo

It would be good if someone could take the r/Grimes post, boil out the chatbot overwriting, verbosity, and hallucinations, and give a concise version. An environment where you are pushed to make intimate sexual confessions in front of people who decide whether to give you resources, especially if those statements are recorded like anything you post on the Internet is recorded, is a red flag.

A lot of people in the sex trade discourage people who are barely legal from face-out work because young people don’t know themselves or the world of work very well and a porn video can follow you around for life.

Introduced by the head of safety (!)

At least they accept the principle that “relationships across a power differential” can put the weaker party in a difficult position. They don’t have a rule against this, or a requirement to disclose, but they accept the principle.