There Is No Better Media

Rich and powerful people read and watch the exact same slop everyone else does.

UBI Proposal

The Universal Dividend Act establishes a monthly per capita payment to every citizen and national of the United States, funded as a fixed and escalating percentage of federal outlays. The payment begins at 10% of the five-year moving average of federal spending, rises by 4 percentage points annually, and caps at 50%. At current spending levels, this produces roughly $190/month per person in year one, growing to approximately $1,700/month at maturity as federal outlays grow over the ten-year ramp. Payments are non-taxable, immune from garnishment, and do not affect eligibility for existing benefit programs.

Most Observers Are Alone: The Fermi Paradox as Default

Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord (2018) showed that the Fermi paradox dissolves once we take our uncertainty about the Drake equation's parameters seriously: the silence of the cosmos is unsurprising given what we actually know. This essay argues that their result is not a contingent fact about our particular universe but a generic prediction. Under a simple multiverse model, most sentient observers in most possible worlds should expect to find themselves alone.

Jeffrey Epstein Had Dyslexia

seriously, please don't be weird about this

On Respect

'Respect' means many things, not one or two or three. It is an infinitely flexible word.

Is Rationalism a Religion

Certain rationalists are prone to telling people, in great detail, that rationalism is not a religion. Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about how Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult and then wrote three separate essays either denying or mocking the idea that what he was in or leading a cult, which sends sort of a mixed message.

When To Vague

The Scott Alexander Email: An Explainer

So, Scott Alexander sent an email to someone in 2014. In 2021 the person who got that email thought that Scott was not being honest about his relationship to the neoreactionary movement, so they published it.

Robot Slur Discourse

Hopefully a permanent home for this one