Robin Hanson has a sneerworthy level of hubris that has lead to him falling for all sorts of BS over the years (he’s long argued that being an economist makes him more rational and better at working out the truth than domain experts at all fields of science, apparently because only economists have heard of incentives) but I was still surprised to learn he’s now a UFO conspiracy nut.

Presumably he caught some History channel rerun of Ancient Aliens and was struck by how much more plausible it was than his “Age of Em” theory.

This is not a sneer so much as a sneer request; anyone know of any good articles written about the total hypocrisy of the Free Speech brigade since the inauguration? By far the most anti-speech environment in decades and most of them are still just whining about pronouns on campus or whatever.

(Yes; FIRE has passed this very basic test and has occasionally switched topics from whining about “leftist professors” to saying stuff like “it’s not great that we’re deporting people for writing articles for their school paper about how genocide is bad”. Literally everyone else is a hypocrite)

The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.

I’m pretty sure I’ve dunked on this quote before, but I can’t even imagine the hubris on display here. Obviously if you read a bunch of convincing lies you’re going to end up believing some of them! He knows he’s reading propaganda (I’ve fucking read articles written by him talking about how Moldbug deliberately tries to trick the reader into believing bullshit by appealing to innate biases), but he’s 100% sure he can divine the “hidden truths” just by thinking about it with his big Rationalist brain!

It’s like seeing someone using heroin because they’ve convinced themselves they’re too smart to get addicted, except dumber because at least that guy didn’t write a fucking anti-heroin FAQ!

Getting pretty far afield here, but goddamn Matt Yglesias’s new magazine sucks:

The case for affirmative action for conservatives

“If we cave in and give the right exactly what they want on this issue, they’ll finally be nice to us! Sure, you might think based on the last 50,000 times we’ve tried this strategy that they’ll just move the goalposts and demand further concessions, but then they’ll totally look like hypocrites and we’ll win the moral victory, which is what actually matters!”