Introduction (circa 2022)

I started to notice late last year that I am heavily censored on YouTube. YouTube tries to hide what it is doing using two methods, and if they only used the second method, almost no one would realize it is happening.

Often I edit my comments because I’m rarely quite happy with how I worded it the first time around. This started to fail. It would say that an error occurred. Then if I refreshed the page, my comment would be gone. It would be deleted from my comment history, too. After this happened twice, I started to save each comment and check which ones were deleted.

So, here are some of my comments that YouTube censored, broken down by technique, so you can decide whether YouTube is judging me fairly.

Method 1: hidden deletion

Your comment is visible to you, but secretly, it was deleted immediately and is not visible when the page reloads.

Example 1a: My reply to Saaber Shoyeb Jan. 11, 2022 was immediately deleted from a video that discusses misinformation:

Yes, correcting them [flat earthers] won’t do anything; they are aware there are endless reasons to think the world is round, and they reject all of them. OTOH you can find a lot of people dismissing climate science or slamming Covid vaccines, who seem reasonable in the sense that there are a lot of plausible-sounding arguments against both of these and it’s understandable that they would be taken in…. nevertheless you almost certainly won’t convince anybody. My father’s anti-vax brother died of Covid in October and (as I expected) my father stayed just as anti-vax after that happened. I went so far as to send him a copy of the book Scout Mindset in an effort to influence his *style* of thinking, but all signs point to that having no effect either.

Example 1b: my comment on “How big is the universe?” was immediately deleted:

You left out the theory that personally makes the most sense to me, which is that the universe is *endless* but *not infinite*. I got this idea from Stephen Wolfram’s preposterous, yet attractive ideas which in turn were inspired by cellular automata: “Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful”–Stephen Wolfram Writings

In this model, time and space are both endless but finite. Let’s start with time first, because it is simpler: the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Assuming that time had a beginning, the total amount of time is about 13.8 billion years. 13.8 billion is clearly a finite amount. But we never run out of time, so it is also endless.

Similarly, space begins as a single point and then expands outward at the speed of light, creating an unimaginable amount of new matter as it expands. After being created, space then expands uniformly as it does in the standard inflationary model. But, this endless space always has an outer edge. The new space being created today is probably absurdly dense, just as the very first space was. In this model, the universe is no longer 13.8 billion years old. Rather, 13.8 billion is just a lower bound; the universe might be 14 billion years old or 14 quintillion years old, depending on how far we are from its original origin point. But since the universe is finite in this model, there are no exact duplicate copies of you.

Example 1c: Here I corrected misinformation. This video gives the impression that document “War crimes of the armed forces and security forces of Ukraine: torture and inhumane treatment” was written/endorsed by the OSCE. YouTube deleted my reply:

13:13 Important: this is NOT an OSCE report. It was written by “Foundation for the Study of Democracy”, a Russian organization (its web site is democracyfund dot ru), but it is hosted on the OSCE web site for some reason.

By the way, it’s hard to find any information about this organization in English. Basically the report is just a long series of anecdotes about torture by Ukrainian authorities, generally without corroborating evidence, and often without any date or location of the alleged event.

Finally, YouTube deleted my corrective comment on this video:

1:17 This picture is from Russia in 2019[1]. The ammo dump cookoff on Aug 16 looks like this: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1560579567944753155

[1]: https://www.dailysabah.com/europe/2019/08/05/2-injured-in-blast-at-russian-ammunition-dump

Method 2: Shadowban

Your comment is visible to you, and still visible when you reload, but invisible to everyone else, even if you switch to “chronological view” from the default “top comments view” (my comments are always demoted in the default view).

Example 2a on Vlax Vexler’s “BIG PICTURE UPDATE as battle for Donbass begins:

I think something important is missing here though. I don’t know what. But sanctions and a defeat in Ukraine don’t seem like they will inspire Russia toward new leadership. To the contrary, while sanctions somewhat disempower the Putin regime, both in Ukraine and domestically, I think sanctions will make ordinary Russians feel even more disempowered, and Putin’s propaganda will continue having a lot of success selling the idea that this is all the fault of NATO and Western Nazis. How can the Russian people be given a vision of a future without Putin, within their new high-censorship environment?

Example 2b on Niki Proshin’s “Life in Russia Under Sanctions: Half-Empty Malls and Food Prices”:

I’m surprised to see so many Latin and English names on products. I do think prices will continue to rise in Russia because the Kremlin has used unsustainable efforts to create the appearance of normalcy. It won’t work for long. I wonder if P*tin might announce a “victory” in the “special operation” soon, an “operations winding down” phase, to help convince ordinary Russians that the effects of sanctions next fall/winter are not related to Russia’s actions. It seems like the Kremlin already convinced most Russians that none of this is Put*n’s fault. But if a “victory” is announced, the shelling and fighting will continue, and Ukraine will regain territory because it will have more replacement troops than Russia.

Example 2c on “The Housing Affordability Crisis We Don’t Want To Solve”:

5:55 It’s exceedingly strange to have a whole discussion about house-price appreciation that doesn’t mention any factors that have limited the supply of housing for 40 years (factors limiting on higher-density housing.) I *didn’t want* a house with a lawn in the suburbs, but that’s what I bought because, in my city, it was the most affordable option (and it should not have been). You say “it’s simple supply and demand. People were demanding not only larger homes but homes that were closer to city centres or other amenities. This restricted supply.” No, that’s not what restricted supply. Something that actually restricted supply was the illegality of building medium-density housing in a location zoned for single-family homes. Think: requirements limiting the house-size-to-lot ratio, requirements for parking spaces, requirements to get approval from neighbors before building something larger, etc.

Virtually all of my comments are either deleted, shadowbanned, or demoted (shown below dozens of other comments, immediately after it is posted), and in all cases I’m not notified. So maybe this has happened to you too, even if you don’t know it.

YouTube comment database

This file primarily serves as an archive of my YouTube comments. If I do not indicate whether my message was censored, that means I haven’t checked whether it was censored or not. Note that the typical censorship effect applies: I write fewer comments than I would otherwise.

My message deleted within one minute..

Rational Animations “If you want to find truth, you need to step into cringe”: very first comment censored. Error shown on second edit (in which I added “edit:”)

Did you say... weeble? What's a weeble? (edit: Dictionary.com: Weeaboo is a mostly derogatory slang term for a Western person who is obsessed with Japanese culture, especially anime, often regarding it as superior to all other cultures.)   Second comment (reply): still exists after a minute
Why is it paradoxical? Being a scout isn't about feeling or not feeling superior, it's about having more correct beliefs. *Identifying* as a scout is a way of *not* identifying as something else, in order to avoid the anti-truth tendencies you have by identifying as something else. The scout is proud of himself for changing his mind; the soldier (e.g. a typical political partisan) thinks of changing his mind as utter defeat. If the scout feels superior for having changed his mind, so much the better for his cause of truthseeking. As a scout, my opinion is that it's sensible to hack human psychology for the cause of truth. I would not say "I am superior" but rather "I feel superior": I feel an emotional attachment to, and emotional benefits from, my truthseeking, which is good because it aids the goal of truthseeking. Indeed, such benefits provide an important counterbalance to the the emotional drawbacks I experience, such as the fear, horror and despair I feel when observing and talking with far-right and far-left soldiers.

Veritassium: replied to Saaber Shoyeb Jan. 11, 2022 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grv1RJkdyqI

SILENTLY DELETED! “Yes, correcting them won’t do anything; they are aware there are endless reasons to think the world is round, and they reject all of them. OTOH you can find a lot of people dismissing climate science or slamming Covid vaccines, who seem reasonable in the sense that there are a lot of plausible-sounding arguments against both of these and it’s understandable that they would be taken in…. nevertheless you almost certainly won’t convince anybody. My father’s anti-vax brother died of Covid in October and (as I expected) my father stayed just as anti-vax after that happened. I went so far as to send him a copy of the book Scout Mindset in an effort to influence his style of thinking, but all signs point to that having no effect either.”

Not censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYABA0H6g5g

I think it important to note that this is not a new question. I mean, in the era of newspapers, what qualifies Wealthy Local Businessman Who Owns The Newspaper And Sawmill to decide which letters to the editor should be published and which not? But this question does seem somehow more urgent today. For one thing, previously the censorship was a quiet decision not to publish a letter, but in the era of YouTube, 500,000 people see the Weinstein podcast and then suddenly YouTube decides to delete it, so that now people take notice of censorship in a way they would not have before.

Not censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDJRFpxDGfI

47:52 So Levon the evil black man tries to trick a police officer into shooting a black child, and Shapiro the Prodigy takes it for granted that this evil plan would totally work. Surely the cop wouldn’t just grab the “gun” and discover it’s plastic. So Shapiro basically accepts a left-wing exaggeration that rather than being rare exceptions, cops who would shoot a child are commonplace, and oh but that’s perfectly okay, the kid was asking for it.

Not censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zq3hEJyypU

4:20 I’ve been watching STT for weeks now, and here’s the first giveaway that the host is right-wing. You have my appreciation for staying focused on accurate on-the-ground information about the Ukraine war. Nice timing on that comment, too.

Not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGcTgnM8Fas

@Vlad Vexler Cool! You have made a lot of assertions about how Putin thinks, and about some of the dynamics that are at play in the Kremlin. My question is, how did you get all that information?

You speak with confidence about the subject. Sometimes, confidence indicates that a person has a clear picture about a subject because they have used careful study to find answers to key questions, or solve the key mysteries of a subject, but more often it indicates a lack of epistemic humility. Your videos ring true to me, but by explaining the basis for your opinions (the evidence behind them) you could show that you have good reasons for the things you believe. Also, talking about your sources could allow interested viewers to learn more with independent study (though I probably don’t have time to do that myself.)

Apr 24, 2022 on How big is the universe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn3euL8Tbfw

SILENTLY DELETED: You left out the theory that personally makes the most sense to me, which is that the universe is endless but not infinite. I got this idea from Stephen Wolfram’s preposterous, yet attractive ideas which in turn were inspired by cellular automata: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/

In this model, time and space are both endless but finite. Let’s start with time first, because it is simpler: the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Assuming that time had a beginning, the total amount of time is about 13.8 billion years. 13.8 billion is clearly a finite amount. But we never run out of time, so it is also endless.

Similarly, space begins as a single point and then expands outward at the speed of light, creating an unimaginable amount of new matter as it expands. After being created, space then expands uniformly as it does in the standard inflationary model. But, this endless space always has an outer edge. The new space being created today is probably absurdly dense, just as the very first space was. In this model, the universe is no longer 13.8 billion years old. Rather, 13.8 billion is just a lower bound; the universe might be 14 billion years old or 14 quintillion years old, depending on how far we are from its original origin point. But since the universe is finite in this model, there are probably no exact duplicate copies of you.

Not censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaiVjJWOUWE

Do you have some information I don’t have? Every report I saw said that the Moskva was hit by two missiles; I’ve seen no report state that only two missiles were launched. It does sound like you simply assumed that.

Not censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYj3DnI81AQ

I’d like to watch your video, but first, I’m officially going on the record to predict 2032. Mark my words, it will happen.

Not censored: Reply to inso80 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzR-vbk9Z_Q

I saw a video on Twitter of a grinning Ukrainian soldier calling the family of a dead Russian soldier to tell them how they had killed their family member (and then laugh). I would like to hear Operator Starsky tell us about how this sort of behavior is not acceptable. Clear moral superiority is the way to earn the love of the free world. Treat your POWs well… make friends with them before they return to Russia… and maybe next time, when Putin sends them to fight, they will desert.

Not censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBya_fBcIfo

I’ve been saying we should blame “Putin” rather than “Russia” for the war, lest we appear to be anti-Russian, but now I see that was a mistake and that we should blame “The Kremlin” instead. Killing Putin would probably end the sheer ambition of the Ukraine invasion, right? But it may not end the war, it may not improve the regime very much (if at all), and it would probably not end oppression against freedom-loving Russian people.

Not censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGwqEYKXz4Q

I think something important is missing here though. I don’t know what. But sanctions and a defeat in Ukraine don’t seem like they will inspire Russia toward new leadership. To the contrary, while sanctions somewhat disempower the Putin regime, both in Ukraine and domestically, I think sanctions will make ordinary Russians feel even more disempowered, and Putin’s propaganda will continue having a lot of success selling the idea that this is all the fault of NATO and Western Nazis. How can the Russian people be given a vision of a future without Putin, within their new high-censorship environment?

Not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_b06F3DXQY

8:55 “The Kyiv Feint”? It was not a feint. A rout perhaps, certainly not a feint. A “feint” doesn’t mean overextending your forces, leading to massive losses. But convincing people that a defeat is a feint is a great propaganda victory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXEvbVoDiU0&t=1474s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsjDSLgOMMc

May 25, 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRCzj_uCmZ4

SILENTLY DELETED 13:13 Important: this is NOT an OSCE report. It was written by “Foundation for the Study of Democracy”, a Russian organization (its web site is democracyfund dot ru), but it is hosted on the OSCE web site for some reason.

June 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKDEuyKoWJg

7:32 I can’t find any news report that 60,000 Russian troops will join the war by the end of June. However, reported casualty numbers on the Ukrainian side have almost doubled to 150 deaths per day. I earn minimum wage, and I will be donating $1000 to Ukraine right away.

June 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ykpRkeEWz8

It should be noted that Sam Bankman-Fried was an Effective Altruist in college, before becoming a billionaire. Take it from me, I currently earn minimum wage and I will still donate 10% of my income this year (my pledged minimum). The most popular donations among EAs have historically been largely nonpolitical (e.g. malaria nets to prevent malaria deaths, farmed animal welfare) or mildly political (advocating more R&D funding for clean energy). Trying to influence politics is tempting because the government controls a very large purse, but it’s also risky because everyone who goes into politics gets demonized. So we can expect that to happen to Effective Altruism and SBF also.

June 15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0eq–EUSXk “Ukraine: military situation update with maps, June 14, 2022”

SILENTLY DELETED: 15:42 “Ukraine ran out of 152mm … Ukrainian government never took care of creating plans to create shells” - what’s this then? https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-defense/2521001-army-soon-to-get-152mm-shells-for-hiatsynt-artillery-system-poroshenko.html

June 20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sepZO-bYSnk

10:27: A Russian source said “The Armed Forces of Ukraine are losing a third of the M777 howitzers transferred from the United States in battles with Russian artillerymen, said Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Denis Sharapov”. However I can’t find any non-Russian sources saying this. A seemingly pro-Russian source (avia-pro dot net) apparently translates a different story from Ukrainian:

Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine Denis Sharapov, in an interview with National Defense, spoke about such an interesting fact that reveals the whole level of fierceness of the counter-battery fight that the artillery of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is now waging. According to Sharapov, after each “artillery duel”, on average, two out of six M777 howitzers have to be taken away for repair, because the nodes of these guns are damaged by fragments from the “arrivals” of shells., - reports the Ukrainian edition of “Defence Express”. On Defence Express I found an article in Ukrainian that said Ukrainians had simply fired many of their m777s too quickly, so “several dozen” overheated and needed repair: https://defence-ua.com/army_and_war/zsu_nastilki_intensivno_striljali_z_m777_scho_dekilka_desjatkiv_gaubits_uzhe_na_remonti_the_washington_post-7798.html

June 23, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUFZ1_fC3Kw “Do We Actually Want Affordable Housing?”

(I recently found out I can be SHADOWBANNED: hidden from the default “Top Comments” view, or deprioritized so people are unlikely to see it.)

SHADOWBANNED 5:55 It’s exceedingly strange to have a whole discussion about house-price appreciation that doesn’t mention any factors that have limited the supply of housing for 40 years (factors limiting on higher-density housing.) I didn’t want a house with a lawn in the suburbs, but that’s what I bought because, in my city, it was the most affordable option (and it should not have been). You say “it’s simple supply and demand. People were demanding not only larger homes but homes that were closer to city centres or other amenities. This restricted supply.” No, that’s not what restricted supply. Something that actually restricted supply was the illegality of building medium-density housing in a location zoned for single-family homes. Think: requirements limiting the house-size-to-lot ratio, requirements for parking spaces, requirements to get approval from neighbors before building something larger, etc.

Jun 25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NV2WV_tgTM

3:30 one Ukrainian source said “The Armed Forces of Ukraine maintain control in Sievierodonetsk and repel an enemy assault in the direction of Novookhtyrka and Voronove” (June 6) which probably means that a Russian attack came from Novookhtyrka. But another Ukrainian source said “the Ukrainian Armed Forces have repelled a Russian attack on Novookhtyrka and Voronove” (June 7). This second statement does not make sense. I look at a lot of war maps, and no one thought it was possible that Ukraine held Novookhtyrka. Perhaps everyone else thought it was a typo and ignored it.

Jun 27, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afxm4X5j3MA

SHADOWBANNED 25:46 “now what are the Russians going to use for cover inside the city if it’s almost completely destroyed” The Azot plant on the west side?

June 28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1hUANDLe2w

Okay, but… why? Why do terrorism, pointillistic or otherwise?

July 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CDLp2IhGFY

I’m pretty sure Ukraine is asking people to evacuate Zaporizhzhia Oblast, not Zaporizhzhia City. Consider how The Guardian phrases it: “Ukraine has warned residents in southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to evacuate as it prepares to launch a counteroffensive to retake the area. The Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions were quickly occupied by Russian troops in late February after they crossed the bridge from Russian-annexed Crimea.” Zaporizhzhia City is at the far north side of Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

July 18: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVmf6TlTzO4

It’s nice that none of the houses have been bombed, and people are not afraid of the sound of a drone. Good picture quality! Nice introduction to this soon-to-be-military equipment, Denys. Nice geese collection, too! Everybody following your channel today should go back and watch this :^)

July 18: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp__UT266qM

Congratulations on predicting that the Kremlin would not announce a general mobilization on May 9.

July 30, 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q8KvHy7AXo

I was Mormon for almost three decades, but then I saw NonStampCollector, Luke Muehlhauser’s Common Sense Atheism, The CES Letter (a Mormon thing), and this little poem:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

Aug 9, 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkgRJqij4k

HIGHLY DEMOTED Remember that the U.S. (under the “rules based order”) did not get to keep the places it invaded. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq are not U.S. territory, but Russia intends to annex as much of Ukraine as it can, making it part of Russia. Sure they will hold votes on the matter (like the Crimean vote on joining Russia, which did not offer people an option to remain in Ukraine) but the votes will be rigged as previous ones have been. I never liked the Iraq war, but it was not a traditional conquest the way Russia’s invasion is.

Aug 13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-rxoqqDmsg

I remember really liking the original video, because I wasn’t really enthralled by Dune Part 1, and the structure you suggested seemed intuitively better. But I loved hearing about your personal journey in this video, and your new attitude is great.

Aug 19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMdm5qifeyI

*SILENTLY DELETED 1:17 This picture is from Russia in 20191. The ammo dump cookoff on Aug 16 looks like this: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1560579567944753155

@space facts Thanks for the info. Ultimately I decided that Mark Z Jacobson was indeed full of crap btw … it just wasn’t so much this video that persuaded me.

Aug 30 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=punLD6zM2bI

My comments have been censored repeatedly on YouTube (my comments are deleted within a few seconds, but I am not notified and my message is deleted even from my own history). Politically, I am center-left and staunchly pro-science. But apparently I said something “inadvisable” at some point. I would like to share the deleted messages to prove they are innocuous, but presumably if I posted the same messages again they would be deleted again, and YouTube has a strong tendency to delete messages if they contain URLs so I can’t share them on an external page either. In cases where my message is not deleted, it tends to be demoted (showed far down on the list) or shadowbanned (hidden from everyone except me).

Sept 19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlF_pzB5IwU

DEMOTED Isn’t the lack of pushing toward Luhansk expected? They need to secure the territory they just got back. They need a defense line along the Russian border, the recent power outage may have disrupted supply lines, they need to process the ~400 pieces of equipment and “hundreds” of prisoners that were captured, and they need time to plan future attacks.

Sept 19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlF_pzB5IwU

VERY DEMOTED This channel is the only source I know that talks about corruption in Ukraine, except History Legends who is probably not very familiar with Ukrainian politics. Can you recommend another source to corroborate your allegations?

Oct 4 Nord Stream sabotage and hybrid war on Europe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk-0qJXyido

SHADOWBANNED I think this analysis missed something important by talking about “Russia” and never mentioning “Putin” or “the Kremlin”. It is hard to understand “Russia” destroying its own pipelines, but not hard to understand why Putin would do so. Putin is obsessed with Ukraine and wants a long and enduring Russian empire that is physically buffered against The West, but the Russian people don’t care much about that. So Putin wants to harm NATO, but simply keeping the pipelines off means that the reduced quality of life in Russia, caused in part by lost pipeline revenue, is Putin’s responsibility. But Putin is a master of redirecting blame (there is a reason why Russians almost universally do not blame Putin for the invasion of Ukraine). The way the pipelines exploded allows Putin to blame the U.S., bolstering the Russian TV narrative “Russia is peaceful, US/EU/NATO is aggressor!” Therefore Russians will support the war more and not blame Putin for their lower standard of living.

Note also that natural gas is physically difficult to transport (it needs special liquification and regasification equipment that is in short supply), so the US is not physically capable of replacing EU’s gas supply, which is another reason that the US is an unlikely suspect. Experts agree that EU will be forced simply to use less gas.

Oct 8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As27LX9t3Ls

EXTREMELY DEMOTED 1:42:32 John vs the Putinheads: “I speak Russian. I don’t speak Ukrainian… I do speak, you know Ukrainianized Russian, because I learned it in Ukraine, but I speak Russian. I spent most of my time in the east of Ukraine around mariupol, defending that area… I’ve had like, maybe two people, in my military career in the Ukrainian military, say “why don’t you speak Ukrainian?” and they were, like, you know, West Ukrainians, had no idea about, you know, the real situation. There wasn’t a conquest against the Russian language. If I, as a foreigner, can get away with speaking Russian in the Ukrainian military for years, and continuing to do at this point when I train military units, and civilians, it fucking isn’t a problem. Someone would have clocked me by now, punched me… there isn’t a problem, so, liberating them from what?”

Oct 8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ-iVzR_Yyc?t=4955

DEMOTED 1:22:35 I liked this part » With how many people signed up and volunteered for the military, and all the standalone militias or volunteer battalions, there weren’t enough places to actually house people. So it was funny, when people always ask me “did you really stay in schools?” I said, “yeah, yeah, my Barracks were usually schools.” And they said “well isn’t that like, a war crime, isn’t that evil?” I’m like, “no… there wasn’t enough room to put anyone anywhere else.”

And funnily enough, we actually couldn’t stay in these schools unless those schools gave permission for our men to stay in them. And what was interesting, we still had the old school staff, that would make sure we’re taking care of the place. They would still clean up, and they would still feed us, and house us, and give us clothing and extra blankets, like, the whole country was helping each other, as much as the Russians were trying to help their soldiers.

But that’s the reason why we stayed in schools, because there just wasn’t anywhere else to put soldiers. So, we make little beds out of the little kids’ beds and stuff, and we make beds out of desks, and we put our stuff in their cubbies, but… I never watched a Ukrainian, anyone, even from Azov Batallion, ever, like, tear up some kid’s little drawing that was left in his cubby when he ran away and immigrated out of the country as a refugee, you know. I never watched anyone just toss aside some little girl’s shoes out of the little corner just to make room for his duffel bag.

Everyone… it was funny, I was about to put my shit in there, kinda moving this kid’s stuff, and my guys got pissed at me. They’re like “what the fuck are you doing?” I said “what do you mean?” He’s like “don’t touch that stuff that’s not your fucking stuff. These kids are going to come back. They’re going to go to fucking school. Put your shit somewhere else.” And I was like “okay cool cool all right, sorry man…”

Oct 14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM

EXTREMELY DEMOTED Wow, now I want to see a video on how you made the great animations for this video.

Oct 25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jUQ1h2wfKc

SHADOWBANNED Something that people on the far left and far right have in common is that they don’t trust governments or “elites” - people in important positions. As a result, claims by the media or by governments or by elites don’t count for anything. (The far left may trust elites a little more, but this can be outweighed by their hatred of capitalism, and Russia may be associated with socialism in their minds even though Putin is right-wing.)

Another thing the far left and right have in common is poor epistemics (e.g. attitude toward evidence, research skills, reasoning techniques). As a result of these two factors, they have an attitude that they can believe whatever they want to believe. Russian propaganda, and claims from western governments or Ukrainians, all have similar a priori credibility, i.e. close to zero. Consequently, their decisions about “what’s true” is dominated by whim, and if they like authoritarianism (as many of them do) they will naturally tend to believe Russian propaganda over anything else. This propaganda increases support both for Russia and for “negotiations” with Putin to end the war.

Feb 25, 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoMfLBYcQg

EXTREMELY DEMOTED Your final question was “what story are we trying to tell?” I think of it as answering a question, “what’s the best course of action on energy to minimize negative impacts (including global warming) and maintain our quality of life?” This video is a good story about disaster in a Soviet context (though one could equally well make a video about the Holodomor or something if that were the goal). As a story about choosing energy sources, I think it does a poor job. Consider: it mentions in passing, at the very end, that while nuclear power causes thousands of deaths, fossil fuels cause millions. But your story creates absolutely no emotional resonance for those millions of people. It gives voice to people who survived Chernobyl and those who didn’t, but no voice to the multitudes of people who are diagnosed with COPD or crushed in a coal mine collapse. So at an emotional level it seems to do nearly the same thing as countless antinuclear videos before it; it says “radiation pollution and radiation disasters are worse than fossil fuel pollution and fossil fuel disasters”. I suppose what you meant to do was establish a rapport with nuclear-skeptic viewers, which is great if you succeed at it, but since you spent almost three-quarters of a full-length documentary doing that, you have little time left to shift the viewer’s perspective and I’m not sure if you’ve had any success. Indeed, you suggest that Fukushima was basically just another Chernobyl, which it really wasn’t. There are good reasons to say there will never be a Chernobyl in the West, and you mostly leave out those reasons. There are good reasons why fossil fuels are much worse, and you leave those reasons understated or unstated.

In keeping with the video’s theme of avoiding technical explanations, I’ll just leave my favorite comparison here: airplanes. It’s very hard to make airplanes safe (harder than nuclear reactors IMO, because reactors can be made passively safe and airplanes can’t), so every once in awhile there’s an airline accident that kills hundreds of people. And like reactor disasters, airplane disasters attract a lot of media attention. For both reactors and airplanes, there’s an investigation, recommendations are made, and the problem is fixed in other planes/reactors to avoid similar events in the future. This has made planes and reactors safer over time. But society’s reaction to these two types of disasters is vastly different. For planes, we get TV shows dramatizing each disaster and then explaining the recommendations being implemented to prevent similar events in the future. For reactors, what we get instead is lots of activists and politicians trying to ban all nuclear power permanently. One of these reactions is healthy.

May 29, 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBucanjmoGc

EXTREMELY DEMOTED Please keep in mind that Russia is able to produce enough food for itself, and that sanctions are not designed to increase food prices. I suggest looking at the prices of other products - electronics, cars, equipment, construction materials… most of all they want to make military equipment difficult to build, but sanctions are a blunt instrument that always affects civilians.

Jun 17 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvmuCPvRoWQ

VERY EXTREMELY DEMOTED, like 40 pages down 19:32 why?

Aug 10 2023 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo

Aug 11 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEf1ZEl1naM

SHADOWBANNED (COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the non-Chronological view) I think the key issue here is that the U.S. wants to deter China from invading Taiwan (or anywhere else). If China has the ability to cut off most supplies of a particular good, the U.S. might be forced to allow China to do what it wants. If China and Taiwan provide most of the world’s chips, then China can invade Taiwan and, if the U.S. intervenes, cut off both the Chinese and Taiwanese chip supply to the U.S. and its allies, in an effort to force the U.S. to back off. China might be able to do the same thing with rare earth refinement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIGlcohInhI “PRO-UKRAINE YouTuber makes it big.”

COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the non-Chronological view Well, I wasn’t quite booted off YouTube but I am heavily censored here. I’m not a troll, I’m not even a conservative. I often tried to correct misinformation on videos (and I provide URLs for evidence) but I think the corrections weren’t welcome, people downvoted me, and now YouTube censures me permanently. The moment I post this, I can be confident that one of two things will happen: 1, it’ll be down near the bottom of the list of comments; 2, it’ll be siltently deleted, no one will see it, and YouTube will even delete it from my message history. Every comment is a dice roll. But unlike Scott Ritter there’s no one supporting me if I get censored. At least I know now what those rabid Trump supporters must feel like.

Edit: okay, turns out YouTube took the third route and COMPLETELY HID my comment from the default non-Chronological view, but it can be seen by switching to chronological view. I have records of most of the messages YouTube censored if you’d like to judge for yourself.

Sept 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7no_G-VoQg

COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the non-Chronological view Today they publish each of 100 comments a thousand times. Tomorrow they train an AI to produce millions of unique comments about the greatness of China and the awfulness of the US or whatever.

Sept 7 - “Bizarre Connections between Tucker, Zelenskyy, and FoxNews Explained” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJM74BOmfFU

COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the non-Chronological view Tucker Carlson “knows” he was fired by Fox News in April as a condition of the $787.5m settlement with Dominion Voting Systems regarding the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lie about election fraud, the former host says in a new book. “They agreed to take me off the air, my show off the air, as a condition of the Dominion settlement,” Carlson tells his biographer, Chadwick Moore.

Sept 12 “The Brainwashing Of America’s School Children | Climate Town” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pNRuafoyZ4

[[The YouTuber said “as a reward for sticking with it go ahead and drop a comment that uses the phrase Easter egg in any way and I will personally respond to it that’s an official climate Town promise”, so…]]

COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the non-Chronological view I feel like an easter egg being smashed when YouTube censors my comments, which they do for every comment I write. While sometimes they silently delete it, these days they usually just delete it from the default “Top comments” view, leaving it visible in “Newest first” view. As a former writer for Skeptical Science, I enjoyed your video and judged it accurate enough for a thumbs up.

Sept 25 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNtW8VLBiZ4

SELF-CENSORING because I’m likely to be downvoted by OP if YouTube doesn’t censor me first India, not Interpol, issued two Interpol red notices against Nijjar. The first accused him of being a “mastermind/active member” of Khalistan Tiger Force and said that suspects arrested in connection with the 2007 Shingaar cinema hall bomb blast had implicated him. Years later, India designated Nijjar a terrorist, saying that he was “involved in exhorting seditionary and insurrectionary imputations and also attempting to create disharmony among different communities in India.” Since he was warned by CSIS before his death about threats to his safety, I assume CSIS knows something about this that I don’t.

References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardeep_Singh_Nijjar https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66860510

Curiously it’s all reported as he-said-she-said. On the balance of evidence, he probably was a human rights activist above all.

Oct 5 2023: This is Ukraine Nazi Evidence (Unless it is Not) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7LlW6hMRig

COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the non-Chronological view Nazi is as Nazi does. The problem with Nazis isn’t that they use certain symbols, it’s that they were filled with so much hatred that they started a world war and killed over 10 million people. Or was it 20? Don’t let Russia redefine “nazi” to be about Ukrainians supposedly using the wrong symbols. And remember, Russia relied on Wagner (named after Dmitri Utkin who had Nazi tattoos) for more than a year, not to mention Rusich Group, a Russian neo-Nazi paramilitary unit.

Oct 14 2023: What if I am Wrong About My Viewpoint? How Would I know? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RyupSP6bv4

My comment is shown as the VERY LAST ONE in the default “Top comments” view. I’m in the camp of anti-Hamas and anti-Netanyahu. Hamas just committed numerous terrorist acts… but if this plays out like previous flare-ups, casualties will end up 10x higher on the Palestinian side, and most of the dead will be civilians, and the Israeli government will be comfortable with that. I hope they destroy Hamas while they’re at it, but I feel like killing random civilians in Gaza is a reliable recipe for converting other civilians into terrorists.

There could have been a two-state solution. Hell, Britain could’ve pushed for the Jewish state to be located somewhere else in 1947. It seems like there is plenty of blame to go around.

Oct 17 “Anti-intellectualism is based” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ1ONTd2sNI

Somewhat near the bottom: Well, people without charisma can’t just become charismatic. Sorry, it’s not our wheelhouse. Not only can we not “just be charismatic”, we can’t even comprehend anti-intellectual ways of thinking, so how are we supposed to “adapt” to them? Chappelle is great and all, but he’s not one of the world’s leading scientists. If he was, he probably wouldn’t be one of the world’s leading comedians. So if the eggheads at Science Institute are losing a rhetorical battle with Robert F Kennedy Jr or Penn Jillette or whoever, they can’t just Dave Chappelle their way out of it. What should they do, then?

Oct 17 How my personal philosophy & childhood experiences shape my political beliefs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjYDPqEVKaU

CENSORED (instantly deleted) I think you should read the Top Ten posts at Slate Star Codex and, if you liked that, Rationality A-Z. You sound like you’d fit right in at Astral Codex Ten. I greatly appreciate your point about the “thin veneer of civilization” and how everything could collapse. I think that’s true, and it’s also true that humans could make the world dramatically better than it is - more prosperous, safer, saner - and it will take a lot of smart and not-so-smart people to prevent the former and encourage the latter. As someone who poo-poohs fancy terminology, maybe you could vlog about how to explain some of the concepts in Rationality A-Z to laypeople. Because I haven’t even been able to explain them to my wife. If translating important concepts into simple language is a thing you like, I for one will send my wife over here to listen to it. :D

Nov 2 2023 - I kissed nuclear waste to prove a point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU

VERY DEMOTED (2/3 of the way down the huge comment list) It’s too bad you show the radiation in an airplane in µSv/hr but then show the the radiation in the power plant in CPM, without attempting unit conversion.

Nov 2 2023 - I kissed nuclear waste to prove a point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU

[[Reply to @TheKnuckleneck uncensored]] Problem is, people see the intense security and care as a sign of intense danger, when surely the hyper-security is just a response to antinuclear activism and public fear. I understand there used to be nuclear plants that offered tours to high school students and such, which demystified the technology somewhat. No more. Among nuclear advocates, Kyle Hill is a bit of an outlier in comparing nuclear to fossil fuels at all. If it were me, I’d be discussing coal, oil and natural gas waste even more. Nuclear waste fits in one football field; okay, how big are fossil fuel tailings ponds and facilities by comparison? Some of it goes in our lungs, but there’s also solid and liquid wastes. It’s important to remember that solar and wind weren’t economically viable before 2012 or so (and that nuclear WAS viable in the 60s and 70s before regulations were changed, which is why almost every plant open today was built in the 70s), and that every argument used against nuclear power today was used in the 70s, 80s, 90s and early 2000s when fossil fuels were the only viable alternative*. For 40 years the main effect of those arguments was to make fossil fuels more dominant. So for all practical purposes, most environmental activists preferred fossil fuels over nuclear for the last 60 years even if they said they didn’t.

Did their behavior make sense? To me it does not. Anyone know of a book on the history of antinuclear activism? For a movement that has been such a huge force in the world, it seems like the origins of antinuclear activism has been lost in the sands of time. I assume that like most of us they were opposed to nuclear bombs, but that they incorrectly assumed that nuclear reactors were inevitably tied to weapons production.

The Net Zero Myth. Why Reaching our Climate Goals is Virtually Impossible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bJTOymi3eo

All IPCC pathways (P1-P4) to limiting warming to 1.5°C require more nuclear power (between 59 and 106% by 2030 and by between 98 and 501% by 2050). But for some reason Sabine, (from “hooray we managed to shut down nuclear before coal!” Germany) doesn’t mention this. IIRC even the 2°C warming scenarios with minimal nuclear power still require more nuclear plants to replace the many plants that are being shut down due to old age… and due to Germany.

Nov 13 The Completionist’s Charity Has Been Lying To You For Years… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QItBdql_8FI

Mildly deprioritized (~1/6 of the way down) Personally, I trust GiveWell to tell me not only which charities are spending money on what they said they would, but also which charities are doing the most effective things. (A lot of their charities go to developing countries, but this makes sense given that the cost of living is much lower there, so most things you buy there cost much less.)

Nov 14 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrSvbUX93Mg

COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the non-Chronological view I think a lot of different communities from climate science denial to antinukes to antivax are all very similar phenomena. So in that vein, consider this: my uncle Bert died of Covid. He and my father Don became anti-vaxxers after the pandemic started because their right-wing sources told them about the evils of vaccines in general and (once mRNA vaccines got the EUA) mRNA vaccines in particular. A key part of this belief system is that Covid isn’t so bad. So how do you think Don responded to Bert’s death from Covid? Well, before Bert died, my aunt wrote this on Facebook:

Bert is in a ventilator in ICU in Lethbridge. He is in a deep sleep, seemingly unaware of his surroundings or anyone’s touch. A team of 4 turns him every afternoon from his back to his tummy which seems to increase his oxygen level, and then in the morning they move him back onto his back. - Elaine

Last night, Bert’s brother Don phoned me to say Bert is being treated for the wrong condition. He feels that Bert has suffered a stroke. He was in the front yard, watering the flowers when he fell, and was unable to get up. This is similar to other incidents that have occurred recently, and Bert has called me on his cell, so I rushed out to help him stand up. I don’t know why we didnt do more than help him into the house so he could sit in his “lazy boy” for a while. This time a young couple driving by saw him fall and rescued him before I could get to him - hence his trip to the hospital and a diagnosis of covid 19. - Elaine

So: Bert has fallen repeatedly in the garden. This time when he fell, passers-by called an ambulance. When he got to the hospital, he was tested for Covid and it came back positive. Perhaps due to this, Elaine wasn’t allowed to see him (she was also infected, but had a very mild case). Later, he was placed on a ventilator (a common treatment for severe Covid). Don, from 5000 km away in Hawaii, diagnoses him with a stroke. The hospital told Elaine he died of Covid, but Don thinks he died of a stroke. Elaine is inclined to believe Don, though she told me later, her voice breaking, that maybe if they had allowed her to give him ivermectin, he’d still be alive today.

I have written a lot about anti-science/contrarianism/anti-epistemology, but still can’t say I fully understand it. One thing I am convinced of, though, is that they do believe their own nonsense. (There may be exceptions to this though)

Edit: this message was censored by YT and only appears in the Chronological view. Given that YT decides a centrist like me needs to be censored much of the time, I expect conservatives have it worse, and this probably contributes to their anti-establishment mindset..

Nov 14 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrSvbUX93Mg

[[Reply to @PlatinumAltaria (2 months ago) There are two main views of how the world operates. One view, that we inhabit, is that the world is separate from our desires. It’s a cold, material space where things happen that we react to. The other view, which most deniers inhabit, is one in which our beliefs about reality actively shape that reality. In their minds to say “the Earth is warming” is to create that reality]]

CENSORED (instantly deleted) I don’t think that’s quite correct. I would say that some of them act as if the things they believe are true because they believe them. They believe this subconsciously, but not consciously. These people lack conscious thought about map-territory distinction (the sense that their own beliefs can be different from reality) within their own minds, even though they understand the same concept in other people (i.e. that other people can believe something that is wrong).

But I think a much more common problem is to trust the wrong people due to making mistakes like “if that guy is saying something that sounds true, or sounds good to me, then I believe him.” Dismissive Don believes something that sounds appealing to him, then seeks out as much evidence as possible for that thing, and seeks aggressively for reasons to believe that anyone who thinks differently is wrong. Eventually, every fiber of Dismissive Don’s being believes that scientists/experts - people who spend their lives studying something - are wrong, while a handful contrarians/cranks on Substack or Rumble are right. Ironically, these contrarians/cranks are funded by an audience of millions of Dismissives demanding their content, so they have less independence than scientists in terms of what their opinion can be. Cranks/contrarians generally don’t change their mind in the face of evidence anyway, but the threat of their audience leaving limits them even more.

Nov 15 “When Did We Stop Being Naked?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opg6RO9cYnk

VERY DEMOTED (>2/3 of the way down the huge comment list) 1:19 “probably for the same reasons you’re wearing clothing right now. I hope.”

Sorry to disappoint you.

Dec 2 “Exposing the Color Blind Glasses Scam” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppobi8VhWwo

COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the non-Chronological view I use a free program called Color Oracle to check how things look to a color-blind person. If you only have mild deuteranopia, you should see some difference between your normal vision and the Deuteranopia simulation. If you have total deuteranopia and look at a color wheel, red and green just look like different shades of the same color.

Dec 4 2023 “My Time Is Limited” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqgmWRMcQdM

DEMOTED. 40% of the way down. You know, I’ve been trying to tell people that we need an evidence-based, crowd-sourced platform for aggregating and evaluating claims. I would link you to my proposal, but in my experience YT tends to automatically delete my comment if there’s a link in it.

Dec 6 2023 Plagiarism and You(Tube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ&t=307s

VERY DEMOTED. 40% of the way / ~70 “page-downs” down Thank you so much for bringing us the “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” of plagiarism documentaries, and the Ben-Hur of “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” editorials.

Jan 17 2024 Was Evacuating Fukushima a Mistake? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4YsXeX8c7M

[[Reply to pinned top comment by @kylehill]]

Not censored. Kyle, I’m very confused that you never returned to the topic in the beginning of the video. Your radiation meter showed 17 µSv/hr which equals 149 mSv per year, which is higher than all but one the reported numbers for radiation avoided in the first year due to relocation, and higher than the 100 mSv ICRP maximum dose threshold for emergencies. My guess would be that specific spots in the soil have radiation rates this high, but that people will be under the 20 mSv limit if they don’t spend most of their time sitting in soil, or make an effort to clean up their property? Please clarify for us.

Edited version uncensored Kyle, I’m very confused that you never returned to the topic in the beginning of the video. Your radiation meter showed 17 µSv/hr which equals 149 mSv per year, which is higher than all but one of the reported numbers for radiation avoided in the first year due to relocation, and higher than the 100 mSv ICRP maximum dose threshold for emergencies. My guess would be that specific spots in the soil have radiation rates this high, but that people will be under the 20 mSv limit if they don’t spend most of their time sitting in soil, or make an effort to clean up their property? Please clarify for us. Also, is it mostly caesium-137? Is there an additional hazard from ingestion, e.g. if your child plays in the soil or if you grow food in your garden and eat them? Obviously the government can ask people not to do that, and they would probably comply, but you did mention two people having a garden.

Jan 17 2024 Was Evacuating Fukushima a Mistake? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4YsXeX8c7M

[[Reply to @mikotagayuna8494]] @andykillsu A key point which Kyle could’ve mentioned was that “evacuation” is much different from “relocation”. In fact the greatest radiation by far occurs in the first month due to Iodine-131 (half-life: 8 days). So a temporary evacuation may have been justified where a long-term relocation was not. The government was in error by acting so conservatively and treating the usual LNT-based radiation limits as if those limits accurately reflect risk. Also, the government could have potentially allowed people to go home sooner if were taking iodine pills (which prevent the body from incorporating Iodine-131) or are elderly (at lower risk of radiation-induced cancer).

[[Reply to @mikotagayuna8494]] I think the behavior of the government reflected the fear that they themselves had of nuclear accidents, a fear which was probably caused by many decades of anti-nuclear activism. Remember, antinuclear activism started long before the first major accident at Three-Mile Island, which contributes to the perception of TMI as a health hazard to this very day. Some officials may have believed Greenpeace’s claims that Chernobyl caused over 200,000 deaths, and certainly most poeple don’t know that the Chernobyl RBMK reactors had (likely intentional) design flaws that no reactors outside the Soviet Union suffered from. Obviously I don’t know how they made their decisions, but I think if government officials called 5 radiation experts, they would probably accept the recommendations of whichever one affirmed their pre-existing fears.

[[Reply to @Canofasahi]] ‘There was this thing with thyroid cancer in that area until somebody suggested “you check this very rigorously but do you have a control group from an area that is not contaminated?”.’) @vredneckv Some quotes from the net to consider: “depression increases the risk for many types of physical health problems, particularly long-lasting conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and stroke” (CDC) and “poor mental health can negatively affect your physical health” (WebMD). The USSR aggressively evacuated Pripyat, so people did escape most of the radiation, and most health issues must have been caused by something else - if most radiation experts can be believed. @vredneckv I agree with you that people should have shared their sources, but I think this topic is a little bit of a red herring because the normal 5-year survival rate for thyroid cancer is 98.5%, and the survival rate is higher with early detection (over 99.5% for stage-1 cancer, except anaplastic). In Fukushima, early detection is increased by screening efforts. So I’m sure it’s very inconvenient and worrying, but you will almost certainly survive.

[[Reply to @dubbbs seems uncensored]] The issues in my mind are (i) the large amount of time for which the government forced people to relocate - in fact, right after the accident there is will be a big worry about short-term iodine-131 radiation, but that’s gone after a month or so. There’s a big difference between a 3-week evacuation and a 3-year evacuation! (ii) the fact that it was forced, not a choice. People could have been informed of the risks and allowed to make their own choices. (iii) Slow decision-making and bias toward believing the very highest estimates regarding radiation harms (iv) The elderly had the lowest risk of radiation-induced cancer but the highest risk of health impacts from relocation, yet they were treated the same as everyone else (v) reasonable evacuation plans could and should have been made in advance, and I don’t know if such plans were made/followed but if they were, they must have been biased by antinuclear assumptions such as “the highest conceivable harms from radiation should be assumed to be true”.

[[reply to @andykillsu]] I think the length of the evac is very important - a 3-week evacuation and a 3-year evacuation are very different! Also there’s the fact that it was forced, not a choice. People could have been informed of the risks and allowed to choose for themselves. Japan has an excellent emergency alert system that could have instantly advised people about another radiation leak. Also, the reactors did not explode. The roofs, outside the containment buildings, suffered hydrogen explosions on 3 out of 4 reactors. The roofs could not explode again (without roofing, hydrogen floats into the sky like a balloon) so at worst there could only be one more explosion.

[[reply to @infinitybeyond6357]] The roofs could not explode again (without roofing, hydrogen that caused the explosions would float into the sky) so after 3 explosions, at worst there could only be one more - on the shut-down reactor that was least likely to have a problem. Also, the hydrogen itself isn’t the problem, I don’t think it’s even radioactive. Isotopes like cesium and iodine are the issue, but Japan has an emergency alert system that could have quickly told residents in case of another leak.

[[reply to @johnhill2927]] I want to point out that there’s a reason that no company other than Ocean Gate used carbon fiber composite construction. It was known in advance that pressure-cycling could lead to progressive weakening of those materials and eventual failure, and that carbon fiber behavior was poorly-understood when used in compression. Yet Stockton Rush put people in his sub after doing only a single test dive! I think any reasonable person would’ve known the risks, but Stockton Rush was like SBF, perversely attracted to big risks, and this is the exact opposite of most people. I think that’s why he wouldn’t acknowledge the risks and got himself killed.

[[reply to @TroyBrophy]] The takeaway should be that risk is relative. We will realistically need firm electricity generation, and we have a choice between (A) power sources that are widely agreed to cause millions of premature deaths AND global warming, and (B) a power source that is widely agreed to have likely caused thousands of cancers - most of which were caused by just one kind of reactor that has never been legal outside the Soviet Union - and doesn’t cause global warming. (I know many people believe 100% renewable is affordable, but this is mainly because of one single litigious individual named Mark Z Jacobson who reached his conclusion with a flawed software model that permitted unlimited instantaneous power generation from hydro-electric stations.)

Standalone comment: VERY DEMOTED (50% of the way down out of 1326 comments) Kyle, I loved this video, but I think you very much need to tie up a loose end. In the beginning, your meter showed about 17 µSv/hr which is 149 mSv per year, higher than all except 1 of the reported numbers for radiation avoided in the first year, and higher than the 100 mSv ICRP maximum allowable dose in emergencies. Did you (e.g.) find that there are specific locations with radiation this high, but that people are safe indoors and in most other locations? Please clarify.

Jan 20 2024 New Russian Election Candidate JUST DROPPED 🇷🇺 NFKRZ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqE31LCRTQI

COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the non-Chronological view Three possibilities: 1, Nadezhdin has a deal with Putin to be allowed to run freely as a real candidate as long as he doesn’t say the wrong things, and promises to give Putin what Putin gave Yeltsin (amnesty and immunity); 2, he has a deal with Putin to run quietly and lose by a wide margin; 3, he doesn’t have a deal with Putin and probably won’t be allowed to run at all.

Jan 24 2024 on “This Nuclear Conspiracy Theory is CRAZY” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSZcSBgDJ1s

SILENTLY DELETED! [[Reply to @zachary3367 “I remember conspiracy theories coming up as a topic of conversation one day and jokingly saying birds aren’t real only to be called a right wing nut job because apparently the most outlandish thing that popped into my head turns out to be an actual conspiracy theory believed by people. Truly an insane world we are living in.”]] Everybody knows “Birds Aren’t Real” was started as a joke, but a bunch of conspiracy theorists got together and started a….what’s it called? a collusion? A sort of secret gentlemen’s agreement, to say birds ACTUALLY aren’t real.

Hiroshima. An unnecessary act of terror? [Vlad Vexler Chat] Feb 9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waUn_VIy-L8

DEMOTED (40% of the way down) I want to raise a couple of points. 1. the second bomb was dropped just one day after the USSR declared war on Japan. So while the US demand of “unconditional surrender” (without even a guarantee of the emperor’s safety) was difficult and embarrassing for Japan, the first bomb and USSR declaration together might have been enough to convince tip the scales in favor of surrender, but it would take time for Japan to learn about the declaration of war, to decide whether to surrender, and to communicate that decision to the US. In 1945, one day is not enough time! 2. morality requires considering alternatives. One alternative was to detonate an atom bomb in the countryside near the emperor’s palace, which would communicate the threat very effectively with few casualties.

“Trump’s puppet Tucker Carlson takes an interview with Putin to justify the Ruzzian aggression” [DDWorld] Feb 9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6_GIAGGIs

SILENTLY DELETED [[Reply to @ryandrames8915 “I don’t see the problem with interviewing Putin as long as the questions are good. Maybe Putin will even say he is open to ending the war. Is that not what we all want?”]] No, because if Putin says that, most Republicans will believe him even though it’s not true. Putin thinks they can win, and would enjoy the operational pause that a ceasefire would bring, and the military advantage of Republicans continuing to block aid to Ukraine.

Feb 28 2024 on The Paradox of an Infinite Universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isdLel273rQ

DEMOTED, but could be worse: there are 6376 comments but only 1040 of them load in an InPrivate window. Mine appears roughly 42% of the way down the list of 1040. Probably it’ll permanently scroll out of view soon, but it is possible that someone will see it before then. Most comments in this region are several hours old. The youngest ones in the vicinity of my comment are about an hour old and say “You’re teeling me the universe is a parallax like those 90s videogames?”, “There is concepts of Outside The universe like the multiverse a concept of multiple universes”, and “What is the probability that the Big Bang is a distinct unique event in the universe, or like everything else, one of many similar events occurring? Physical properties of the universe prior to the Big Bang are most likely not unique or isolated just from a probability perspective.” The oldest comments in the vicinity are 13-14 hours old, so my comment should be permanently unreachable in about 12 hours.

This video leaves out the idea that personally makes the most sense to me, which is that the universe is endless but not infinite.

In this model, time and space are both endless but finite. Let’s start with time first, because it is simpler: the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Assuming that time had a beginning, the total amount of time is about 13.8 billion years. 13.8 billion is clearly a finite amount. But we never run out of time, so it is also endless.

Similarly, space begins as a single point and then expands outward at the speed of light, creating an unimaginable amount of new matter as it expands. After being created, space then expands uniformly as it does in the standard inflationary model. But, this endless space always has an outer edge. The new space being created today is probably absurdly dense, just as the very first space was. In this model, the universe is no longer 13.8 billion years old. Rather, 13.8 billion is just a lower bound; the universe might be 14 billion years old or 14 quintillion years old, depending on how far we are from its original origin point. But since the universe is finite in this model, there are probably no exact duplicate copies of you.

Credit: my idea is inspired by the Wolfram Physics model of the universe, in which simultaneity exists in some undetectable sense, unlike the Einsteinian model where it does not.

Feb 28 2024 on The Paradox of an Infinite Universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isdLel273rQ

[[in reply to @sunshinelotus888 (chosen because @sunshinelotus888 has relatively old comment, 12 hours old, with no replies yet)]] Here are a couple more ideas that weren’t mentioned. First the simple one: the idea that the universe has a kind of “edge”, beyond which there is still space, but it’s empty.

Second, the idea that the universe is endless but not infinite.

In this model, time and space are both endless but finite. Let’s start with time first, because it is simpler: the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Assuming that time had a beginning, the total amount of time is about 13.8 billion years. 13.8 billion is clearly a finite amount. But we never run out of time, so it is also endless.

In the same way, space begins as a single point and then expands outward at the speed of light, creating an unimaginable amount of new matter as it expands. After being created, space then expands uniformly as it does in the standard inflationary model. But, this endless space always has an outer edge. The new space being created today is probably absurdly dense, just as the very first space was. In this model, the universe is no longer 13.8 billion years old. Rather, 13.8 billion is just a lower bound; the universe might be 14 billion years old or 14 septillion years old, depending on how far we are from its original origin point. But since the universe is still finite, there may not be any exact duplicates of you.

Feb 29 2024 on “I Was Worried about Climate Change. Now I worry about Climate Scientists.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEZ9HFlqzms\

VERY DEMOTED (~55% of the way down, and it’s a new video with 3366 comments so it will probably be impossible to see within ~12 hours) Edited. I would encourage you to consider whether the new methodology (“judge models based on how well they retrodict/match past observations”) is objectively better than the old methodology (“don’t judge models, just treat them like they’re all as good as each other”). If the new methodology is better, why complain? And if not, why not explain why it’s not an improvement? Sure, confirmation bias is always a possibility, but do you have an reason to think that’s all there is to it?

Feb 29 2024 on “I Was Worried about Climate Change. Now I worry about Climate Scientists.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEZ9HFlqzms\

[[Reply to @bepispaul2419]] NONDELETED I would encourage you (like Sabine) to consider whether the new methodology (“judge models based on how well they retrodict/match past observations”) is not objectively better than the old methodology (“don’t judge models, just treat them like they’re all as good as each other”).

Feb 29 2024 on “I Was Worried about Climate Change. Now I worry about Climate Scientists.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEZ9HFlqzms\

[[Reply to @scottbieser]] NONDELETED @Taschenrechner1337 The non-hot models were (and are) also in the IPCC reports. What’s changed is that now the IPCC judges models based on how well they hindcast past data, rather than treating all admitted models as equal. (Also leosmith is incorrect and is repeating what the deniosphere says).

Feb 29 2024 on “I Was Worried about Climate Change. Now I worry about Climate Scientists.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEZ9HFlqzms\

[[Reply to (climate scientist) @colas2]] Not deleted (2 comments)

Isn’t it true that the IPCC switched methodology from weighting all admitted models equally, to weighting models more heavily if they can hindcast past observations well? I think it’s a big deal that Sabine doesn’t mention this, nor explain why she thinks the old methodology is better.

It’s also strikes me that your comment directly challenges the video, which said “Clearly the collaborations who work on the models with the high climate sensitivity think that they are the ones who got the physics right”. But, well, one isn’t likely to get upvotes for that.

Mar 5 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmXcgR3s6Ck

[[Reply to @gFamWeb]] Not deleted

You see, it was God’s Will that the embryo is unviable. But it is ALSO God’s will that the people of Alabama reinterpret the Holy Bible to Clearly Say that life begins at conception. Logically then, a frozen nonviable embryo IS alive until such time as it is unfrozen and immediately dies due to God’s Holy Decree of nonviability. But we need to understand that God’s Will is for this death to occur inside a womb. If instead a Man should cause the death, he is in violation of Holy Statute H.B. Exodus § 20:13.

Mar 8 2024 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U8YgPaYjSA

EXTREMELY DEMOTED (75-80% of the way down; may become invisible soon) Wouldn’t it be great if Google, Microsoft etc stepped up and sponsored videos with messages like “Google supports a transition to democracy in Russia”? Let Russians know that “foreign agents” = agents of democracy.

March 18 2024 on “Why my P(DOOM) is so high (30%)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCfRAwLlZJk

DEMOTED (35% of the way down) Good explanation! Though it’s really confusing that the first slide describes an “inevitable” slide toward “destruction and suffering” - twice - but it only has 30% probability? Also, suggesting “voting with your dollars” (as in boycott) is the kind of thing that could help if you have an audience of 100 million. For smaller audiences… the first thing that comes to mind is to suggest everyone join social groups and discuss the hazards with others, write your members of congress about your concerns, share these videos, etc.

April 7 2024 on “How we built a 3D printer that can print ANYTHING!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLqSaEiXzIU

VERY DEMOTED (70% of the way down 431 comments) Headline: “How we built a 3D printer that can print ANYTHING!” Me: WOW, awesome! Impressive! Big thumbs up! Also me: wait, metal is anything. Multiple materials is anything. Okay well how fast is it?

April 7 2024 on “Alberta Urbanism: Underrated Successes and Massive Challenges” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpBVEfO5IwI&list=LL&index=2

DEMOTED (40% of the way down) The one thing I wish we’d see more in Calgary is a coordination between transit and high-rise/low-rise construction. A lot of people take their car to the Park-n-Rides, which are always full. Well, no need for that if your home is next to the train station! On the way in from the NE, Barlow/Max Bell, Calgary Zoo and Franklin stations are “dead zones” where virtually no one gets on or off; can’t something be built around there? Similarly, the two Stampede stations are hardly used outside Stampede week. [Edited] Wow, I didn’t know we in Calgary had it so good! I noticed houses are cheaper here than in other cities though, and I noticed the difference between Calgary and San Fran: in Calgary, all the cranes downtown tell you the economy is good. In San Fran, the economy is always good and there are never any cranes! The one thing I wish we’d see more of is a coordination between transit and high-rise/low-rise construction. A lot of people take their car to the Park-n-Rides, but they’re always full. Well, no need for that if your home is next to the train station! On the way in from the NE, Barlow/Max Bell, Calgary Zoo and Franklin stations are “dead zones” where virtually no one gets on or off; can’t something be built around there? Similarly, the two Stampede stations are hardly used outside Stampede week.

https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxiuCdWeT-bwiETknjOMyEjy9O4I0IvStr

SHADOWBANNED (hidden from non-chronological view) Trump doesn’t have the right kind of control over Republicans to accomplish that, I think. He seems to have an ability to put people in a trance so they say things like “the election was stolen from us!” but for most Republicans this does not extend to ending democracy outright, or even stuffing ballot boxes (beyond standard techniques like Gerrymandering). And while I’m sure he could find people willing to do unsavory things for him, I think he won’t have enough people like that to be able to overcome the overall safeguards, such as separation of powers, that exist in the U.S.

Apr 29 2024 “Ukraine Counterattacks With Modern Guerilla War Tactics” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYFbOLIAY2I

DEMOTED (40% of the way down; comment will likely fall off the end within hours due to high volume)

An early Chrismas? LOL, an early Christmas would’ve been if the bill had been included in the October 1 spending bill as originally planned. This Christmas was late enough that some didn’t live to see it.

[[Reply to @Adam89111 “I love this channel. I am from Indonesia and most news outlet here don’t really mention the Ukraine war that much, only small news outlet and they only tell stories about Russian victory and achievement on the battlefield. …”]] SILENTLY DELETED! I always wonder what makes people cheer for a dictatorship invading a democracy. But I think the sort of people who cheer for that are also the sort of people who will not give a straight answer about the reason why.

“War Crime or Military Necessity? New Bellingcat Investigation Looks At Alleged Domicide in Gaza” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJAVcf3TiEk

DEMOTED (~50% of the way down) 5:45 There are ten apartment buildings here, each one seven stories high. I would guess about 500 housing units, and I expect these residents are not wealthy so the number of residents per home is likely to be high.

[[Reply to @jonny-b4954 Am I a terrible person for just shrugging my shoulders? I mean, they kind of got what they asked for, didn’t they? They just thought/want it to go, you know, the opposite way. Meh, Israel would be foolish at this point not to see through to the utter destruction of Hamas. And there’s not much difference between Hamas and the average inhabitant. Besides the women and kids, of course. But such is war.]] Not deleted? The word “they” is doing a lot of work here. Hamas “won” an election in 2006 with 44% of the vote, then prevented any further elections. Suspending elections is not what you do if you believe that the people are behind you. Not only did most of “them” not vote for Hamas, most Gazans alive today were not old enough in 2006 to have voted in that election. Edit: also, I can’t conceive that Hamas thought they could “win” a war with Israel. It was obvious that they would lose from the start, so winning wasn’t the point. Perhaps the point was to provoke a strong response from Israel against civilians in order to help recruit more anti-Israel forces.

May 9 2024: 100 Russians choose between China and USA [only 3 choose USA without also China] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djAzRbOVJPo

SHADOWBANNED (invisible except in Chronological) 7:58 “Russia ended up having only China as an ally, although purely theoretically white people should be with white people”

[Reply to @pnf197 “Dictatorship leads to technological advances.” Sure, like what exactly?] Honestly, the Capitalist Dictatorship of China works pretty well if you don’t care about freedom, fairness, equality, etc.

[Reply to @jeffreyd508 “the young ones who are slurping up the propaganda , just LOL” not deleted] It’s just the same in America, only our media is more factual on average. Most people have a poor basis for deciding what’s true: no matter where you live, if your friends say it over and over and the TV says it over and over, most people not only believe, but strongly resist correction!

[Reply under @welcome_to_the_own_zone not deleted] @sandyor6336 У большинства людей плохая основа для принятия решения о том, что является правдой: где бы вы ни жили, если ваши друзья повторяют это снова и снова, а телевизор повторяет это снова и снова, большинство людей не только верят, но и категорически сопротивляются исправлению! Более важным, чем приводить аргументы, является обучение инструментам для самостоятельного познания истины. В России любое СМИ, говорящее правду, является «иностранным агентом» или «экстремистом». Но даже в США у нас плохо получается, поскольку молодежи не предлагают курсы по эпистемологии. Чтобы освоить хорошие умственные инструменты, прочтите Slate Star Codex Top Posts и LessWrong.

[Reply @boycottbigtech “Where do they get this weird idea that the USA wants Russia’s resources?”] Kremlin people often say the invasion of Ukraine was a “defensive war” and imply that NATO wants to invade. Maybe in struggling to explain how this can possibly be true, they conclude USA must want Russia’s resources and imagine they are clever for figuring it out. (Or maybe the TV just says so outright, but I haven’t heard that from Russian Media Monitor)

May 9 2024 “Grocery Shopping in Russia vs the West - Was Tucker Carlson RIGHT?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs-qr0u8gqE

DEMOTED 50% of the way down You should have a Russian channel where Cucker Tarlson speaks to Russians about how Europeans are freezing.

May 15 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vu6D10Rj-s

Uncensored. My top 10 looks a little different:

  1. Ukraine Matters
  2. Anders Puck Nielsen
  3. Jake Broe
  4. Silcon Curtain (try interviews with Mark Galeotti)
  5. Denys Davydov
  6. Anna from Ukraine
  7. Professor Gerdes
  8. Vlad Vexler, and Vlad Vexler Chat
  9. Artur Rehi
  10. Operator Starsky

June 23 2024 on David Shapiro “Sam Altman WRECKS OpenAI - Jan Leike joins Anthropic - Brain Drain from OpenAI” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edhOP4nzY-w

DEMOTED (40% of the way down) I’m very confused. On the one hand, you think Sam is concerned too much about AGI safety (catastrophic risk), but on the other hand, AGI-safety-focused people are leaving and being fired (with Sam’s approval). How do you square those two things?

July 27 2024 on “Democracy Under Threat | The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQp7bEBzOWE

[[Reply to @MikesOrganicVideos “I remember your interview with that pentagon person, Jon. You don’t wanna know the things I was calling her while yelling at my smart TV.”]]

INSTANTLY DELETED even though it’s a link to a popular video on YouTube itself I think I found it: https://youtu.be/r-HTvLAPS0c?si=HDBGDL3Wssb3Kfy9&t=350

Not deleted: Okay, the video is called “Jon Stewart Full Interview of DepSec of Defense | War Horse Symposium” and the interview starts at 5:47. I tried to link to it but YouTube silently deleted that comment.

Aug 1 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTci0CdOPIc&lc=UgwhLznoaHDzyXpzR-l4AaABAg.A5J_rgo77hXA6bugbo9eMI

In reply to @odiseezall, NOT deleted: Seems to me that the crux of the matter is the nature of qualia and its valence. Some believe in illusionism (pure behavioralism, that “consciousness” is just a category of brain behaviors) but I think the more common view is that qualia is somehow “real”. Assuming qualia is real, the question is how likely it is that we can create (or are creating) qualia and valence entirely by accident inside computers. I don’t think we can, because that’s not usually what happens: if I build an internal combustion engine, I don’t expect to have accidentally created a toilet. Likewise if I build a computer program, I don’t expect to have created qualia. If my computer program does immense amounts of matrix multiplications, it’s unclear why it should now have qualia, even if its behavior resembles human behavior in some ways.

Aug 15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhgmtChGMgA

DEMOTED I think “Cost 1st, Speed 2nd, Safety DONE” would appeal better to the masses. But you do you

Vlad Vexler: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6-33VO9eerq9MXFaivi0gg/community?lc=UgxhjddI0OEX4DoiLsZ4AaABAg.A7sRkRsKe69A7ySiv3lDkM&lb=UgkxR5pKXToXpDCik0FkXOd5SDEH0iu-hdqi

Not deleted: As a kid I was taught a series of ideals that I tried hard to live by, and it took me way too long to figure out how little other people were devoted to them. Finally in 2017 I encountered climate science dismissives (they are usually called by another d-word, but they hate being called that). During numerous conversations with them I learned a ton about climate science, and I tried to figure out the answer to the question: how much evidence does it take to change their minds? But I never changed any of their opinions by even a millimeter. Because I took for granted that one must decide the truth based on evidence, not understanding how irrelevant evidence was for them (even if they themselves often talk about evidence). I understand now that that people like this have not only always been around, and not only have they always been commonplace, but that most people have weaker versions of the same flaws. Including myself.

I never said (or told them) that the end is nigh, nor do I think so. And I don't think we should shrink our economies to have lower emissions; like the dismissives themselves, degrowth is an unempirical political group. We can and should combine economic growth with reducing emissions. And I routinely oppose bans on plastic bags. None of this was even part of my discussions with dismissives, though, since we couldn't agree on the most basic facts about climate science. For example, I wrote a long article about climate science and the dismissives who responded ignored the article in its entirety, not even trying to refute any of the points it made.

So, quite the contrary, my position is that countries benefit themselves by doing clean energy *R&D* and *manufacturing* and by introducing carbon-tax-and-dividend-with-border-adjustments, as proposed by the group formerly led by the late Republican Ted Halstead. Both of these policies are much better than blanket subsidies on *purchase* of clean energy. China understood this and grabbed almost the entire solar market for themselves. Americans didn't get it, so while you can buy cheap solar panels now, you have to send your money to China to get them. So, developing nations need not do anything special to reduce their emissions; like the poor family that lived next door to me in the Philippines, they will solarize, by investing in cheaper energy than their inefficient/corrupt local electric company can provide. I do prefer nuclear power for reliability and for northern climates, but until the last couple of years, Democrats were badly dragging their feet on that.

Hi John! You know I'm in Alberta now myself? I think being here and working in an oil-adjacent company has helped inform how I think about the climate issue. I haven't read a Naomi Oreskes book, but my vague impression is that while the points she makes are typically broadly correct, she is left-wing in her beliefs and style, which tends to be a turn-off for right-wing people (and to some extent also 'center-lefties' like myself). Some people seem very much beyond help (like my own father!) but I do think there are clear ways of doing politics that could work somewhat in Alberta. I push for Alberta to develop next-gen nuclear power technology (see gordonmcdowell's YouTube channel, he's Albertan too) as well as enhanced geothermal systems which build on Alberta's expertise in well drilling. Solar doesn't make much sense in Alberta (though there are caveats) so you can score some points by saying you oppose solar in Alberta (as I said before, the developing world will be covered in solar soon, which is great, but in Alberta we need more energy in the *wintertime*).

You can never convince hardcore dismissives, but with most conservatives you will raise your chances of fruitful discussion by actively avoiding "lefty" messages, sprinkling right-wing-sounding ideas where possible, and trying to raise the discussion's "meta level". A good example of this style is Richard Hanania, who at first blush sounds almost obsessively right-wing, but actually has a mix of left-wing and right-wing beliefs. I think Richard is good, in that I think he's right more than half the time, and Richard's verbal style is convincing some right-wingers to adopt his correct ideas. By the way I'm going to a social meetup in Calgary on the weekend, care to meet in person?

​ @johncooper6073 You have some interesting thoughts, and I don’t think I understood all of them. We would probably need a long discussion! I occasionally host an intellectual meetup group of Astral Codex Ten, and we will meet on Saturday Sept 7 at 2pm downtown, First Street Market (food court). Normally I would include a link, but YouTube typically silently deletes my messages if they have URLs. Address: 1327 1st Street SW, Calgary. If I understand correctly there is free parking nearby. Look for a red ACX sign.

 @Scanlonam  The funny thing is how people take consequences and reverse-project them back onto facts: "global warming implies that Negative Externalities (a key concept of economics) are real and we should Do Something about them, but Free Market Fundamentalism is incompatible with this concept, therefore climate science must be wrong, so I will devote my life to finding flaws in the science that I can tell everyone about." Obviously people do this without knowing about the concept of negative externalities in the first place, but this concept that they do not consciously notice seems to threaten them on some deep level. I suspect similar things exist on the left wing, but I haven't quite worked out what leads people to attack geneticists for "problematic" scientific work, or behave as if nuclear power is worse than coal (see: Germany), or defend Stalin.

@johncooper6073  Thanks for coming to the meetup, John! By the way, you can also make songs with AI, for example you can see the "Dath Ilan" song I posted on my YouTube channel (watch?v=rmq1Q7TZFw8) - I can't post the full link, as YouTube tends to silently delete my comments if they contain links.

[[Reply to @cinepost]] The people of Russia do pay for not taking responsibility, and they will pay more as time goes on; they just won’t necessarily realize what led their country to such a sorry state… just as I imagine most Americans have only guesses about what’s wrong in America, but flock to chest-thumpers speaking with great confidence about what causes their problems (namely, the other side of the aisle). It never ceases to amaze me how Russians don’t link their problems to Putin. By banning anyone who might suggest Putin is to blame, it seems like only a small fraction realize that the guy in charge for 25 years is related to the country’s problems. And the minority who know, usually know better than to say it out loud. People are people anywhere you go, so this inability to notice the obvious informs us about how much people really think for themselves.

[[Reply on @extrememiami]] @andreimustata5922 It’s tempting to think we need a complicated and nuanced discussion, but my impression is that the swing voters that the candidates have to convince are largely politically disengaged types who aren’t likely to listen to long discussions. It seems to me that the kind of people who like nuance, thoughtfulness, and attention to evidence or detail, stepped away from Trump long ago. (so yeah, I’d like to see this stuff from Kamala, I just don’t think the election hinges on it)

Sept 14 2024 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6-33VO9eerq9MXFaivi0gg/community?lb=UgkxKwVzqkJBIfzjuXXy0_VwcxqHXUb38vrs

[Reply to [People here are talking about the collapse of a nation, the breakup of the largest country in the world, with most of the people clearly saying that they want it to happen. […] This is showing that the wår is becoming more and more existential to Russia and if it loses it will collapse as a state. This is why it must win.]] INSTANTLY DELETED: @Zz_Mike-Hawk_zZ If people outside Russia want it to split apart, that does not explain why Russia should steal more Ukrainian territory and murder thousands more of its people.

DELETED AFTER 1 MINUTE??? @Zz_Mike-Hawk_zZ Even if people outside Russia want it to split apart, that would still not explain why Russia should steel more Ukrainian territory and kiII tens of thousands more of its people.

Oh wow they silently deleted my respelled comment on a delay timer. That is new behavior. Basically discussion is not possible / very limited here.

2024-09-17 Vlad Vexler Chat https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxQAgnpUQ-PRXCSjrsK1fD7ZF2GLcOrq3L

I’m very concerned about the poor epistemics of humanity. In recent years I came to realize that most people who believe correct things believe them for the wrong reasons. In other words, rather than a “mostly good” left-wing and a “mostly bad” right-wing, we have most people being mostly bad most of the time, but with the left being more correct on average, partly because their average level of education is higher, and partly because they do not put much stock in the notion that “you shouldn’t trust experts”. The biggest political differences between people are not left vs right, but “up vs down”. I made a diagram to illustrate this, but can’t link to it because YouTube tends to silently, instantly and permanently delete my comments if they have links (and also often if they don’t) which derailed my last discussion on this channel.

REPLY NONDELETED: FWIW my diagram has illustrative dimensions on the four sides; left = “pro-solidarity, wide moral circle, altruist, high openness, nontraditional”, right = “pro-individualism, family-oriented, egoist, low openness, traditional”, top = “Light-epistemic, empiricist, intellectual, Liberal/freedom-loving, nuanced”, bottom = “Dark-epistemic, mimeticist, anti-intellectual, illiberal/authoritarian, simplistic”. These are in fact 10 separate axes, it’s just that some axes are correlated. Someone could potentially be overly-mimetic, freedom-loving, dark-epistemic and intellectual all at the same time, but it’s a bit more common for the axes to be aligned. As you might guess, I think the “up” axes are virtues and the “down” axes are vices, although different people have different biological limits on how “up” they can be (one could aspire to be intellectual, but not physically capable thanks to the genetic lottery).

INSTANTLY DELETED: (Aside: I would also say that the way YouTube deletes comments is very corrosive of societal trust as well as very annoying. Right-wingers who notice YouTube is silently deleting their comments are more likely to be radicalized than made more moderate by YT’s behavior IMO. I mean, they’re deleting many comments by center-left people like me, so they are probably censoring the right even more aggressively)

DELETED THEN REINSTATED? (gone after a minute, but back after two) (Aside: I would also say that the way YouTube deletes comments is very corrosive of societal trust as well as very annoying. I tried to say more about this but YouTube deleted my original comment)

EDITED: (Aside: I would also say that the way YouTube deletes comments is very corrosive of societal trust as well as very annoying. I tried to say more about this but YouTube deleted my original comment. Indeed, I have a lot more to say than I will actually bother to say, since the more I talk, the more I get deleted)

[[Reply to “Division caused online, driving hate…”]] INSTANTLY DELETED: As a former Christian, the loss of traditional Christian values among people who call themselves Christian is amazing. How do they convince themselves that Trump, the man who was too lazy to memorize even a single Bible verse to back up his claims of being a Christian, is the paragon of Christian values?

Sept 29 2024 33,000 Lives Lost in 48 Hours? The Babyn Yar Tragedy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6jm0h3hpg8

[video about Nazis, I avoid using the term to evade censorship] COMPLETELY HIDDEN from default non-Chronological view So the Russians just casually accuse Ukrainians of being like this, day-in day-out, month after month, year after year. You can understand Russians falling for it, but it’s always surprising how many westerners fall for it. Do they even know that Russians even label Americans and Europeans this way too?

Why Vlad’s Alan Lichtmann’s video caused chaos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lnzt8_XcQM

[reply to astrogatorjones] NONDELETED It’s super confusing that some people would think “I think so-and-so will win” means “I want so-and-so to win”. More broadly, many people conflate things that are obviously different from each other, and it seems like a huge problem. Example: many people think “we” (USA) can “simply stop” the Ukraine war the same way “we” (USA) stopped the Iraq war. This strange mistake makes them angry at others for being “pro-war” if they support Ukraine.

Oct 25 on How to answer: is Trump a fascist? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1jSFfKPF4A

[[Reply to @Todd.B]] [[Reply to: Kamala really is the most irresponsible politician we’ve had in America in decades.]]

SILENTLY DELETED @GermanConquistador08 Well, at least you’re illustrating Vlad’s point. Trump can commit unconstitutional acts, call every democrat “radical left”, stack the supreme court, create dozens of evidence-free lawsuits and a riot to overturn the election, etc etc, but the fact remains that his ordinary boring opponent will be held to much higher standards.

[[note: I actually weakened my argument here in an effort to pass the censor. The actual worst thing about Trump―which also makes him grossly irresponsible―is that he lies and bullshits constantly. But I felt that saying so would be more likely to be censored, so I didn’t say it]]

Oct 29 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xrWh6CSdSE

NONDELETED So, that’s it? What if I want to change which data series is dragged, or change the drag direction so the data point is dragged horizontally rather than vertically, or allow creating/deleting data points?

Oct 29 2024: Vlad Vexler post https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxRid56yKUUq8ezDUlJN88RcaEZe04L5Ak

[Reply to @billy2807] NONDELETED It’s fair to say that how long Russia can carry on the war depends mainly on Russia, and how successful Russia is depends on the Ukraine-West combination (with Ukraine sadly forced to provide the manpower, and the west supplying most of the weapons). In general, strong dictatorships can fight wars almost endlessly and run their economies into the ground without collapsing (see Korth Korea, WWII Japan). We hope the Russian regime isn’t that resiliant, but I’ve noticed that Putin isn’t eager to find out. That’s why most fighters are still “volunteers” and most war funding comes from cash reserves. When the volunteers stop coming and the Soviet stockpiles run low, I hope Putin finally gives up, but there are no guarantees.

Nov 6 2024 on The predictive brain & the quest to understand consciousness | Anil Seth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4KG8i9ZLJE

NONDELETED I’ve been thinking that there is a “fallacious, yet reasonable as a default/fallback” view based on the Anthropic principle, which I discuss in my article “The Putin Fallacy―Let’s Try It Out” on Medium. I think it fits nicely with Anil’s “substrate matters” view, but it is based on a subtly different idea that consciousness is “real” (part of the territory, not the map), in the same sense that quarks are real but cars are not. In this view, we say: P-zombies may be possible, but if consciousness is real (part of the territory), then by the Anthropic principle we are not P-Zombies, since P-zombies by definition do not have real experiences. (To look at it another way, P-Zombies are intelligences that do not concentrate qualia or valence, so in a solar system with P-zombies, something that experiences qualia is as likely to be found alongside one proton as any other, and there are about 10^20 times more protons in the sun as there are in the minds of everyone on Zombie Earth combined.) I also think that real qualia/valence is the fundamental object of moral value (also reasonable IMO, for why should an object with no qualia and no valence have intrinsic worth?)

This is all just background. My actual point is that by the Anthropic principle, it is reasonable to assume that whatever we happen to be is fairly typical among beings that have qualia/valence, and thus, among beings that have moral worth. By this reasoning, it is unlikely that the sum total W of all qualia/valence in the world is dramatically larger than the sum total H of all qualia/valence among humans, because if W » H , you and I are unlikely to find ourselves in set H. I caution people that while reasonable, this view is necessarily uncertain and thus fallacious and morally hazardous if it is treated as a certainty. Yet if we are to allocate our resources in the absence of any scientific clarity about which animals have qualia/valence, I think we should take this idea into consideration.

P.S. given the election results, I hope more people are doing now the soul-searching we should’ve done in 2016. I proposed my intervention “Let’s Make the Truth Easier to Find” on EA Forum in March 2023. It’s necessarily a partial solution, but I’m very interested to know why EAs generally weren’t interested in it.

2024-11-16 Science is in trouble and it worries me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxjatbVb7M

DEMOTED: 25% of the way down and will likely become invisible in a few hours due to high comment volume I think part of the answer is that we need to have more trust in experienced scientists instead of grantmakers and journals when deciding how to conduct research. Another part is that the scientific method should be applied to the process of science itself: gather suggestions from scientists about funding/publishing/research models and then do big studies on which ones work better.

[REPLY to @newchannel1220 “this remind me of the story about a guy who invented blue LED.”] NONDELETED What’s striking is that his boss repeatedly asked him to shut down his research and he was just very insubordinate. If his boss was thinking “billions of dollars have been spent on this, why should we throw good money after bad?” I think the answer is “this guy is exceptionally driven, determined, intelligent and knowledgeable, and having just one guy working on it is very low-cost”. But I think a lot of research doesn’t get done for less obvious reasons. I mean, as a software developer I frequently look down on Microsoft and go “OMG what was management thinking? And why aren’t they building these things I think they should?” I’d kind of like to be in charge of a big team there and make some great software, but if management made terrible decisions before, I don’t see how could I stop them from doing it again. People like to complain about how wasteful the public sector is, but I don’t think things are any better in the private sector.

2024-11-16 Twitter and responsible social media https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8zfgIgZ4c0

I think it’s important to mention Community Notes, because it was a project started by the original Twitter, originally called Birdwatch, but it was rolled out around the time Musk took over, which might give people the people the impression it was Musk’s idea. Also, I think you’re mistaken about YouTube moderation, because YouTube is not at all transparent. It has a secret system that silently deletes many of my comments without a trace. It’s not just that there is no appeals process; if I look at my own comment history, the comment is simply gone like I never wrote it. I’m a bit of a hobbyist dis/misinformation researcher, so this bothers me a lot.

[Reply to @jesan733 [I’m a very reasonable centrist, anti-conspiracy-theory-minded, and I find youtube automatic comment moderation absolutely horrible and frustrating]] NONDELETED Yeah, I’m a bit of a hobbyist researcher (I wrote a few articles on Skeptical Science, which is an anti-misinformation site about global warming), and the “silent deletion with no appeals” system bothers me a lot. It discourages me from countering misinformation, because (1) why put effort into a comment that might just be deleted? and (2) saying that a video is wrong about something tends to cause fans of the OP to downvote me, which may reduce my own reputation in the eyes of YouTube. Also, I can never provide sources because the presence of any URL (even links to other YouTube videos) almost guarantees deletion of the whole comment.

SILENTLY DELETED Also, commenting on YouTube takes a lot more time now because I need to open a private browser window to check how well each comment was received by YouTube (i.e. how far down the list of “top comments” do I have to scroll to see it, or was it deleted, or was it shadowbanned meaning it is only visible in the “Newest first” view?) And also I have to copy-paste each comment into a document in order to make a record of what YouTube is deleting, in case they decide to delete it without a trace. So I have a file, now, with hundreds of my comments and how YouTube treated each one. I think more people should be aware of this because if I (as a reasonable center-left person) am being censored on a regular basis, I expect right-wing people to be much, much angrier still. It must feed heavily into their sense of victimhood. NONDELETED [after 1 minute] Case in point, two minutes ago I posted a follow-up comment that was just as long as the first one, and after refreshing the page, it is now gone. If you’re curious what I had to say, well, I can’t say. If I did, this third comment would probably go the same way as the second one.

A place with nice people, some of whom are passive-aggressive, sounds much better to me than places filled with active aggression and extremism. I can’t understand a preference for the latter, but it’s interesting to find you here rather than there.

NONDELETED @Oblitus1 I support the First Amendment, of course, but beyond that it’s complicated. Scott Alexander of ACX does a good job thinking through such issues, but of course, I can’t give a link to his thoughts here. Suffice it to say that if loud voices have free reign to say as many extreme things as they want to as many people as they want, all the nice people will go somewhere else. And YouTube’s secretive system is of course counterproductive.

2024 Nov 18 I TESTED TWITTER AND BLUESKY AND WHAT I FOUND WAS REMARKABLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_lVL_pVGIE

[[reply on @econhelp583]] NONDELETED @gh8447 I’ll start calling it X when it has been properly distilled to a far-right echo chamber, so as not to confuse it with what Twitter once was.

2024 Nov 18 Half Life 2 Anniversary Archive: E3 2003 Demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaHtOISsLT4

DEMOTED (20% down) I wandered out of my university class, through the MacEwan Hall and out, when I saw a TV screen playing a stunning demo like nothing I had ever seen before. So I stood there, frozen in place for half an hour just watching. Physics! Such gorgeous physics! And everything looked so real…

Nov 22 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuLOGqRpmm8

[@viciousstarfish [I’m a conservative and Republican based on party alignment. I am beyond upset that “my party” are being such idiots. I do not believe Trump will kick NATO and let Russia keep Ukrainian lands, but it’s still maddening.]] NONDELETED There’s a Reagan Republican on YouTube by the name of Professor Gerdes, maybe you’ve seen him? What puzzles me is that he ends his videos by saying “Thank you for being the kind of person who cares about Ukraine.” And, you know, I just have to think: are you sure you’re conservative? Because that sounds like something a conservative would never say. Some of the 1990s conservatives might say that. But after 2010? After 2016? Nah. Caring about foreigners? It’s very unusual, to say the least.

Nov 27 2024 Canada’s Planned Asset Collapse is Getting Closer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT4lEV6f6Z4

NONDELETED It’s a big mistake to equate higher housing density with higher home prices or small living spaces. I live in a house with 3 bedrooms and about 1500 square feet, part of a duplex with large lawns. Suppose you take (say) 6 of these units and replace them with a mid-rise 8-storey building on the same footprint, filled with 2000-square-foot units. Now you could have maybe 21 of these units, each one larger than my house (minus lawns), in the same space. Reserve most of the bottom floor for parking, and there will be also be a parking space for every family. I understand you cannot just plop these into existing suburbs, but please understand that supply and demand does apply to housing (the pigeonhole principle also applies, which is why I’m sleeping in the basement). More housing will reduce prices if the population is constant. Mid-rises prevent suburban sprawl from getting worse, and they avoid the need to pay for new roads and new sewers with new bus lines.

Professor Gerdes https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx74KT8CnjdVdDfSkD9X7f6JWD4TZf6bSo

NONDELETED Not only are you fair, you’re so far from today’s stereotype that I can’t think of you as right-of-center at all. I am “center left”, more specifically engineer/scientist/rationalist left, which means: caring about all of humanity, not just my nationality and my own wealth; raising the floor in preference to lowering the ceiling; prosperity via growth plus social safety net plus listening to economists; vague utilitarianism; former Christian, evidence-based atheist; and I think government plays important roles (it’s flawed, but needs repair, not destruction or even downsizing). You could change my mind by making a video about the need to cut SNAP to fund more tax cuts. But as it is, the phrase “thank you for being the kind of person who cares about Ukraine” sounds about as far from the modern right as you can get.

**self-reply NONDELETED** The one thing that does bother me a lot is your apparent stance on Israel. Hamas is very bad, of course; in fact I don't think the YouTube censorship system would allow me to say what I think of them. But ever since I found out that the typical ratio of casualties on each side is 30:1 or so... let's just say I don't doubt the ICC warrant is justified. (Note that I choose my words very carefully due to the aforementioned system.)

Nov 28 2024 Operator Starsky “But I can hardly understand American patriots admiring the internationally wanted war criminal putin” https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx0nLKf5r6gPDKaZwWg35UJkwix6dL7zwS

HIDDEN from default view, which, however, is unusually truncated. Mainly because propaganda works, even in democracies, if you are good at it. I think one side of the spectrum is better at it than the other. It got big with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Once they became very popular, some people had brilliant ideas like talking as if people of a certain popular skin color were bad because they had “privilege”, or about defunding the police. Meanwhile InfoWars and Tucker Carlson climb in popularity, until eventually Trump even won the popular vote.

Nov 29 2024 Jake Broe https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxWii8VRKn-NMmwMDkPioFMasxhv5D_xyo

EXTREMELY DEMOTED (basically at the bottom) Good job everyone. Guys, I know there are reasons for optimism, but I think we need to seriously prepare for the possibility that Trump does a “Taliban 2.0” deal with Putin. The new RealLifeLore video “How Trump’s 2nd Term Will Change Europe Forever” talks about this starting at the 12 minute mark. I’ve been thinking out this scenario, and it looks very bad. You know the shelling in Kherson? What if the same thing happens, but now it’s Zaporizhzhia city or even Kyiv? We need to convince Europeans that this can really happen, to convince them to prevent it. I know many people don’t want another refugee crisis, so we need to emphasize the consequences of the EU not stepping up.

Nov 30 2024 https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxBNd7AJrA6mUT08XCPCQo1EptxW1OR23H

[Reply to [I’ve listened to a lot of your excellent analysis Vlad, but it still royally boils my P]] SILENTLY DELETED They can even be conscripted and think “well, I guess we have to stop a NATO invasion, and it is Necessary to subjugate the hohols after all”. Critical thinking is not required at any point. (I dislike the term critical thinking: it sounds like all you need is to criticize, and you don’t need critical thinking skills to do that. I call it “thinking things through and looking for ways that you, and everyone else, could be mistaken.”)

Dec 9 2024, Vlad Vexler https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6-33VO9eerq9MXFaivi0gg/community?lb=UgkxoCUiQnmSs2jG4X2krOlOZtdqR8H9Qywb

[reply to @iris1224wwad] [reply to “it would take a supreme effort to be worse than the ass ad regime.”] SILENTLY DELETED (forgot to cop to clipboard; working from memory) HTS grew out of al Qaeda. For not, its leader is saying nicer things than al Qaeda usually says. Time will tell.

Jan 18 2025 NFKRZ Russian censorship is COMING TO AMERICA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9oyZBcu69g

DEPRIORITIZED (~50%) Roman, I’d like you to ask yourself whether the reasons for the bans on these apps are actually true. Russia said it banned Facebook on the basis that it was an “extremist organization”, so let us ask: was that actually true? Likewise, let us ask: TikTok is banned (unless sold) on the basis that a foreign adversary government exerts influence over it (and can access U.S. user data, etc.) Is that true? Remember, apps like TikTok, Facebook and YouTube are banned in China, China publicly says the U.S. is its enemy, and at the same time China influences the TikTok algorithm. Also remember that the USA still has the First Amendment and that the Supreme Court found that the law did not violate it under these special circumstances.

Jan 22 2024, Professor Gerdes Explains 🇺🇦, “Did Elon Give the Nazi Salute? EVERYTHING We Know.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18geGJbsncU

I don’t think he was going for a “hiel” salute, but it used to be that prominent people would apologize, saying “sorry, that came out wrong”. But the Trumpist approach has always been to let all dog whistles remain ambiguous: “let supporters to my left believe I didn’t mean it that way, let the supporters to my right believe I did”. So Musk, instead of saying he didn’t do a salute or “oops, it wasn’t supposed to look like that”, instead just says “[the Democrats] need better dirty tricks” in a tweet that doesn’t mention the salute at all. This is also part of another broad pattern of “everything I say and do is right, I can never be wrong about anything”. I wish people understood that a person who is never wrong is also never your friend.

2025 Jan 22 Professor Gerdes Explains 🇺🇦

For those of you that think Trump will be good for UA, please explain why. I am deeply curious. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjf_Tw9PA9QIZ6R6aLukBaA/community?lb=UgkxvYRQwf-ncn0q6TGvD6qXqvgvZ1colESD DEPRIORITIZED (30%) I think it all depends on what his advisors persuade him of, since he doesn’t understand the situation very well himself and probably doesn’t care much about understanding. And whatever he does, he’ll need a matching rhetoric that can plausibly appeal to his base (which is easy to formulate if anti-Ukraine, but pro-Ukraine isn’t impossible). I’ll always remember how Mike Johnson took both sides, blocking aid for 5 months and then suddenly allowing a vote while declaring, in remarkably flowery and supportive language, that Ukraine had a right to defend itself.

2024-01-25 Ukraine’s Drone WARFARE is CHANGING the Game! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVOl2ZKU8z8

HEAVILY DEPRIORITIZED Sigh. One of the common Russian talking points talks about Ukrainian “Banderites”, and now your guys are talking about their “Banderomoboil”s. Please ask them whether they are, in fact, supporters of Bandera. If yes, ask why; if no, I strongly urge them not to name their vehicles after him.

Feb 3 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fupWqDazT4M

“Designed by Clowns!”| How Boeing’s Mistakes Led to the 737 MAX Crashes! SHADOWBANNED (COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the non-Chronological view) The big question for me has always been how it could be possible that the people who reprogrammed MCAS to trim the nose down aggressively (and repeatedly) were not aware, or never thought about, the fact that their code made this decision based on a single sensor. Everybody who watches aircraft disaster videos knows you need two sensors. Forget the company as a whole. How does the core engineering team fail to think about this basic safety rule?

LATER: reply not deleted: @camhusmj38 Finally a hint at some “swiss cheese”: somehow one of the engineers acquired a false belief about MCAS shutting down, then nobody followed up about it. As a software engineer I would think this assertion should’ve been written as a unit test.

2025 Feb 12 “The fallout from the Trump-Putin call” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrWgHuCOMZ8

SILENTLY DELETED [[reply to @philjameson292]] @romankacin8365 He’s a special variation of Chamberlain, one whose other hobbies include crimes, corruption, and bearing false witness, the last of which cancels out the first two, because he can always just say he did nothing wrong. (Normally this trick wouldn’t work, but there seems to be an entire media empire out there which predates Trump and is designed to create rationalizations for anything and everything said by people with (R) next to their name.)

Professor Gerdes “The news today makes me feel much worse.” https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjf_Tw9PA9QIZ6R6aLukBaA/community?lb=UgkxYfezZeYvDrrnOCyW1Jlnhc5zQtNaSvQl

SILENTLY DELETED [[reply to @theskyehiker]] @EUPOWER2000 The GOP has undergone a “crank realignment” as described by Matt Iglesias. It made itself the party of conspiracy theories, of Q Anon, of Real Raw News, of … well, of the Donald. I’m a bit puzzled that most traditional conservatives and the wealthy just went along with it and voted Donald like nothing had changed. Of course, long ago the “compassionate conservatives” still ended up in Iraq for some reason.

Feb 13 2024 “This New Idea Could Explain the Laws of Nature” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aGkL7RCXO0

Reply to @wj2036 NOT DELETED Various other ways to explain ‘fine tuning of constants’ have been proposed, e.g. that all possible universes with all possible constants exist, but in the vast majority no one exists to notice the existence of that universe. It is the same in our galaxy, for inside every star and on the surface of almost all of planetoids, there is no one alive to notice them. Maybe someday we’ll have telescopes big enough to catch a faint glimpse of some small fraction of these barren worlds.

2024-02-13 Ukraine Matters “Breaking News - Major Shift in US Stance on Ukraine Support!” renamed to “Secret Deal Hands Putin VICTORY – World Stunned” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVAR0qEFY3M

ANOMALY: Hidden from Chronological view, but deprioritized (30%) in “Top comments” view. That stock market chart doesn’t match anything I can find. The closest thing I could find was “Gazprom neft”, described as “Gazprom Neft’ PAO is a vertically integrated oil company operating in the Russian Federation”, which went up 6% before quickly falling to 2.6% above its previous level. However the shape of the chart in the video just doesn’t match what happened to Gazprom neft or Gazprom itself, both of which have overall trended downward in the last year. The Russian stock index MOEX is also down over the past year, and down greatly since last May, but it did jump 4.8% upon opening this morning.

Silicon Curtain: Churchill said that “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.” https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3J6Rx5Qcx6-v6W9BBgF8sw/community?lb=UgkxNFgAoUGLcHfTjYawkj4XZbH4wrYB5cfO

DEPRIORITIZED 60% We’ll try 4 years of Trump, then maybe two percent of us Americans will consider doing the right thing, just enough to swing the election. But only if the new candidate knows how to butter us up and say what we want to hear.

[[Reply to @AutoMattOn]] NOT DELETED Quote investigator says: The earliest evidence located by QI of a variant of this saying was employed by Abba Eban who was an Israeli politician and diplomat. In March 1967 Eban visited Japan, and the New York Times reported on a remark that he made:

Commenting that the passage of time offered the best hope of an end to the problems of Israel and her neighbors, he said: “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”

Feb 18 2024 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn7XHZiW6EUgSuxItybLLMg/community?lb=Ugkx_J24MLMictO7t3N5cNMr0S_b_MTTV8JX

Reply to @Del350K4 [[Um…could we please clarify what’s meant by the (delightfully alliterative) phrase “domestic democratic decline”?]] SILENTLY DELETED It’s a qualitative term, and probably every person imagines their own definition. Most obviously there’s the swing toward authoritarianism, which will end democracy outright if the pendulum has enough momentum. There’s polarization and disunity. There’s the fragmentation of media into alternate realities, each with its own separate set of “facts” (people cause global warming, or don’t, or __). There’s a drift toward lower-quality leaders. There was (human) Russian bots, and now generative AI casting doubt on whether any given real image is real.

NOT Sorry, I tried to explain the term, but YouTube silently deleted it. Everyone be on the lookout, Google could be doing it to you too.

SILENTLY DELETED Okay, as an experiment I’ll try posting it in pieces and see what gets deleted. First half:

It's a qualitative term, and probably every person imagines their own definition. Most obviously there's the swing toward authoritarianism, which will end democracy outright if the pendulum has enough momentum. There's polarization and disunity.

NOT Okay, I’ll try posting it in pieces as an experiment and see what gets deleted. First piece:

It's a qualitative term, and probably every person imagines their own definition. Most obviously there's the swing toward authoritarianism, which will end democracy outright if the pendulum has enough momentum.

NOT Looks like YouTube disallows the second sentence, only four words: There’s p______ion and dis__y. I’m not sure if there’s a limit on the number of messages, so if you don’t see anything else from me, it suggests that I hit a volume limit.

NOT There’s the fragmentation of media into alternate realities, each with its own separate set of “facts” (people cause global warming, or don’t, or __)

NOT There’s a drift toward lower-quality leaders.

NOT There was (human) Russian bots, and now generative AI casting doubt on whether any given real image is real.

NOT Based on this it looks like those two words in the middle (p______ion and dis__y) were enough to make YouTube silently remove the whole thing. Mind you, what actually happened was that I posted the first half (which was deleted), then deleted the last four words (which worked). So it could also be that there is a cumulative score of “undesireable words” or something, and if you have enough of those your comment gets deleted, making long comments very risky. So as a final experiment I’ll post just the four words by themselves and we’ll see if they appear.

NOT There’s polarization and disunity.

NOT I thought initially that those four words had been deleted (silently, so, in my original browser I still see everything ― I use a private window to see reality). But after a couple of minutes YouTube did allow the comment to appear (usually it takes less than a minute for YouTube to decide.) So this favors the “cumulative undesireable words” theory. Experimental note: I spread out the last 8 messages over 20 minutes, just in case YouTube also has rate-based comment removal.

Feb 19 2024 Paul Warburg “Russia’s Oil Problem is Worse Than You Think” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajatWFkXy4o

[Deprioritized 25%] Don’t you mean that 46% of refineries were struck, rather than destroyed? And didn’t this happen over a one to two years? I expect many of them are fixed now.

Feb 19 2024 Paul Warburg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0TivKVOs7FmXn-y_VOdD2g/community?lb=Ugkx4LOKHsdiOmySpC5rmY6HWABssG8vHOAf

NOT Oh? Did you see Trump’s full endorsement of Russian propaganda coming? For the week or two at the beginning, I thought Trump might actually somewhat listen to normal Republicans. Alas. I’m still feeling the whiplash. [Feb 23 2025: Reply to @davidpiepgrass743 Where do you get your news from then?] @uniformmike05 The various TLDR News channels are my favorite. Regarding this war, I watched every episode of Perun for the last three years, and: Anders Puck Nielsen, Ukraine Matters, Paul Warburg, Vlad Vexler, Österreichs Bundesheer, Covert Cabal, Good Times Bad Times, History Legends, Denys Davydov, Zolkin Volodymyr, Inside Russia, Natasha’s Russia, 1420, NFKRZ, Task & Purpose, Andrew Perpetua, War Translated, Rob Lee, and the list goes on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXgEr0yTkGo

Deprioritized Solid analysis. How do you know Zelenskyy knows exactly what Trump is doing? I expect he rejected the deal simply because it was a very bad deal and Ukraine isn’t that desperate. Heck, I don’t know how you can be so sure what Trump is doing. I’ve heard Trump tends to listen most to whoever spoke to him last, and he has both pro-Ukraine and anti-Ukraine advisors, so how do you rule out an explanation along those lines?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OHZ3IA1-3I

[Reply to: If you are American, and you want to do something. Here is one thing you can do that might have a solid impact, although it will be delayed by 12-16 months. Go do whatever you need to do to get into the republican primary voting.] NOT Here’s how to not delay effects 12-16 months: convince people to call their Republican congressman and complain about how they aren’t standing up to Trump and ― this is the important bit ― will vote against them in the next primary if they don’t see changes. (This would work much better if there were a “Moderate Caucus”, started by a majority-Republican group, which in solidarity complains about all the ways Trump is threatening the traditional liberal republic, and to help organize primary votes for moderate republicans and democrats. No idea how to make that happen though… and how many Republican congresspeople are left that don’t like Trump?)

Feb 26 “The Scientific Art of Negotiating with a Possibly Irrational Opponent” William Spaniel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGO1gvNgG6k

NOT You’re forgetting something: you think that if Trump backs down, that his behavior necessarily backfired. But what Trump seems to care about most is what his base thinks (and also, getting richer). Conservative outlets always emphasize the threats themselves (because for some reason they like those), and only discuss the outcome when it looks good for Trump, either because the opponent concedes or, more likely, takes a token action that can be spun as a big concession. The opponent may also, rather than taking a politically costly action, quietly make a contribution at Mar a Lago.

2024-02-26 Serpentza “Why White People in South Africa Deserve to Suffer” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFpgOUkp8Q8

(not really deprioritized) You have to be better than your enemies, otherwise you are no better than your enemies.

2025-02-27 Inside Russia “Why I Stand With Ukraine Against Injustice” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FIy8fy7RA0

SHADOW-DELETED? Visible only to me It would be great to hear more Christians stand by Christian values, not only regarding crimes against innocent people in Ukraine and those defending them, not only regarding false statements by the Kremlin, but in regard to the teachings of Jesus more broadly. Most Christians in the US somehow support a man who has said and done an amazing list of sins stretching back many years. Blaming Ukraine and its president (but not Russia or its president) is just one of many examples in the last month alone. I was watching events closely since day one. I’ve never seen anything like it―so many people wounded and worse in raw footage posted on Twitter. So many explosions. And already back then, the Russia supporters were out in force, saying “Russia is peaceful! The Ukrainians are attacking themselves!” Simply repeating something a lot doesn’t make it true, but the Kremlin and Trump understand psychology, so they repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

VERY DEPRIORITIZED (~87%) It would be great to hear more Christians stand by Christian values, not only regarding crimes against innocent people in Ukraine and those defending them, not only regarding false statements by the Kremlin, but in regard to the teachings of Jesus more broadly. Most Christians in the US somehow support a man who has said and done an amazing list of sins stretching back many years. Blaming Ukraine and its president (but not Russia or its president) is just one of many examples in the last month alone.

[Reply to: I am an American and I stand with Ukraine. Fellow Americans, what do we do now?] NOT One: prepare to vote in the same primary as your incumbent congressmen, then call those congressmen and tell them about what matters to you. Two: make sure accuracy is on the agenda. It used to be that you were entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. Today people’s opinions are based upon their own facts, opinions that would be indefensible without falsehoods backing them up. That was the Kremlin way, but now it’s the US way. This needs to change.

Mar 2 2025 RealLifeLore https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP5tjEmvPItGyLhmjdwP7Ww/community?lb=UgkxZZHxAFxTMqjgEdDWAUOxV61Ghg0w17-r

[Reply to @key5168 LOOONG COMMENT starting: How many here watched the entire 53 minute video of their conversation?]

INSTANTLY DELETED Trump made a false statement, and Zelenskyy tried to correct him. You can reasonably call it a mistake to correct Trump, or to ask the question “what diplomacy?”, but I don’t know how it can be considered a “tirade”. Zelenskyy is telling the truth. I always try to explain that Putin lies a lot, and that Trump also lies but in a very different style, but it always falls on deaf ears. If you’re convinced Trump and Putin are wonderful human beings, then I guess Zelenskyy explaining how Putin broke agreements and ceasefires during Trump’s term in office is just “a tirade”.

Here's a question. Trump called Zelenskyy the D-word, but said he wouldn't call Putin the D-word because "I don't use those words lightly". Presumably this makes sense to you. Why does this make sense? Before you answer, I remind you that the UK skipped its usual election in 1940, and the UK hadn't even been invaded. I also remind you that the Ukrainian constitution doesn't allow an election right now, and you can look up the resolution in the Ukrainian Rada about this to confirm that it was passed unanimously. I also remind you that Winston Churchill wore similar attire to Zelenskyy when he visited the White House in that time.

NOT I would like to start off by saying it’s absolutely remarkable that such a long comment got through the censor. YouTube routinely deletes my comments without a trace, including my first reply to you. I’ll try again, with some changes to see if I can make it through.

INSTANTLY DELETED As I was saying, Trump made a false statement, and Zelenskyy tried to correct him. You can reasonably call it a mistake to correct Trump, or to ask the question “what diplomacy?”, but I don’t know how it can be considered a “_irade”. Zelenskyy is telling the truth. I always try to explain that Putin _ies a lot, and that Trump also _ies but in a very different style, but it always falls on deaf ears. If you’re convinced Trump and Putin are wonderful human beings, then I guess Zelenskyy explaining how Putin broke agreements and ceasefires during Trump’s term in office is just “a _irade”. But I could point you to many conservatives, Republicans and former Republicans who see things differently. My favorite is John McCain, who I heard accurately describing the situation in Ukraine in 2014, many years before I learned the same facts. He knew much more about Ukraine then than Trump does today. But regarding this particular event, I would point you toward the analysis of Paul Warburg or Professor Gerdes.

NOT Okay, my second try was also deleted, so hopefully I will at least be allowed to say that former Republican Paul Warburg and Reagan Republican Professor Gerdes have analyses of this topic, and to reiterate that John McCain was accurately describing the situation in Ukraine in 2014, many years before I learned the same facts. He clearly understood the situation then better than Trump does today.

NOT Here’s a question. Trump called Zelenskyy the D-word, but said he wouldn’t call Putin the D-word because “I don’t use those words lightly”. Presumably this makes sense to you. Why does this make sense? Before you answer, I remind you that the UK skipped its usual election in 1940, and the UK hadn’t even been invaded. I also remind you that the Ukrainian constitution doesn’t allow an election right now, and you can look up the resolution in the Ukrainian Rada about this to confirm that it was passed unanimously. I also remind you that Winston Churchill wore similar attire to Zelenskyy when he visited the White House in that time.

NOT I will try three more messages or so and probably give up on deleted ones. So regarding your other points,

INSTANTLY DELETED - You imply that you understand that without external help, Putin would have taken control of Ukraine as he intended, removing its democratically elected leader. My question is: why don’t you say the quiet part out loud? - Considering that Trump didn’t send Kieth Kellogg but instead mostly anti-Ukraine people to negotiate with Putin, including Jack Posobiec―I mean, can you explain why Trump hired a man who constantly tweets about the numbers fourteen and eighty-e*ght? I don’t think YouTube would allow me to express what I think of that. With that in mind, I am impressed that Zelenskyy is so well-composed throughout all this. - “Not thank you”? One news outlet found 33 times when Zelenskyy thanked the U.S. and/or the American people.

INSTANTLY DELETED - Zelenskyy is correct that the roughly $100 billion in aid was not enough to win the war. I believe Biden decided to make the aid undersized on purpose. - Not halting the aid ordered by the Biden Administration in January is not the same as sending new aid. - Why would helping Ukraine start WWIII?

[Reply to @Ben-zb8pq I get it but also don’t forget the 200 billion the US has sent] It was a bit over $100 billion, mostly equipment. Zelenskyy was reiterating facts that any other president already would have known. I saw John McCain talking about Ukraine in 2014. He understood so many things that Trump and Vance don’t understand even today. So Zelenskyy was trying to explain something to them. Why is it disrespectful to explain something your audience doesn’t know? The question he asked was “What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about?” and the word you use to describe it is a very strong word. Why is this question so bad? Is it because JD has no answer?

Also, Trump increased the military budget by $100 billion during his first term. Over the years, that adds up. What did America get for all that money?

[Reply to @Eggnog18 American here. I have never been prouder to be one. …] Zelenskyy didn’t say he wouldn’t sign it. Trump sent him away. You know, Paul Warburg used to be a Republican (among the many former Republicans horrified by what they saw in the Oval Office). Consider watching his analysis of what happened. For what it’s worth, he lost a cousin in Ukraine. Remember that Zelenskyy has thanked the United States on at least 33 separate occasions including on that very day.

Also, I don’t see how you can say USA gave the equipment for nothing. Is freedom and democracy not worth anything? Is it not good that the refugee crisis was averted, since a majority of the millions of Ukrainian refugees were able to return to Ukraine? Is it not good that Russia is not on Poland’s border right now?

Do you know how big the Soviet stockpiles of weapons were, or how big of a war chest Putin had when the war started? A majority of the equipment in good condition has already been used up in Ukraine. They had to turn to North Korea not only for weapons, but even for soldiers! Is it not good when the US military gets stronger compared to its adversaries? And all this for just 3% of the U.S. military budget. Seriously, look it up. The annual budget is over $800 billion (over $2500 billion over 3 years) and slightly over $100 billion in aid was sent over 3 years of war. This is a small fraction of what the “war on terror” cost.

[@RealAmericanStar Silly American citizens shouldn’t be getting involved in foreign wars that don’t concern us. Ukraine has never been an ally of ours.] Why do you say Ukraine isn’t a US ally? They were invaded the first time for wanting to join the EU and NATO (and voting out the guy who wanted the opposite), but they aren’t a US ally? Well, Ryan McBeth’s video on this topic discusses how Ukrainians are training NATO people. The “benefits” Ukraine got from the U.S. are a whole bunch of weapons, and an opportunity to give their lives to fight against a dictator. I know that being ruled by a dictator is something a lot of people actively desire these days. Are you one of those?

As for the US debt, Ukraine aid cost 3% of the U.S. military budget. The annual budget is over $800 billion (over $2500 billion over 3 years) while a little over $100 billion in aid was sent over 3 years of war. Do the math. This is a small fraction of what the “war on terror” cost. And during Trump’s first term, he increased the military budget by $100 billion annually. That’s three times the amount of aid that was sent. So a much more effective way to lower the deficit would be for Trump to reverse that budget increase.

[@jmryniec3524 Alright, I would like to put my opinion out here so as to invite rebuttal and conversation.] Keep in mind that the ground war is accompanied by a huge amount of information warfare, even in English. Yes, both sides do it, but that doesn’t mean both sides are equally truthful. (And some say Ukraine does it better, but I have tried to read Zolkin Volodymyr’s unreadable “English” translations, so I am skeptical about that.) So when you say Zelenskyy et al are “making millions”, how can you be sure of your source? Especially since Zelenskyy is Jewish, how could he be a __ sympathizer? That idea is pure information warfare. 2% of Ukrainians voted for a far-right party in the last election. That’s less than a typical European country.

INSTANTLY DELETED Ukraine, a democracy, was invaded by a dictatorship. Americans once cared about that. The Ukrainian constitution doesn’t allow an election right now, and you can look up the resolution in the Ukrainian Rada about this to confirm that it was passed unanimously. Also, the UK didn’t hold an election in World War II, which was much longer than the Ukraine war. So why call Zelenskyy authoritarian? The funny thing is, I agree with you in part. There is still a lot of corruption in Ukraine. Ukrainians agree on this point. But if Trump or Vance were caring people, they would care about the people of Ukraine. Maybe Zelenskyy is corrupt―some Ukrainians think so, and he may be voted out after the war. But he still has 57% approval, and you will get far more factual information about the war from Zelenskyy (or even from the late John McCain, as I’ve been saying elsewhere on this page) than from Trump or Vance.

And, to be clear, I am not disgusted about Zelenskyy being insulted. But it is disgusting that they clearly don’t care at all about Ukraine or Ukrainians. I have written many times on the crimes against Ukrainians, and spent thousands of hours following this war in great detail. Trump talks loudly about casualties, but his actions show how deeply he doesn’t care. Trump sidelined Kieth Kellogg, his only appointee who plausibly wanted good results for Ukrainians. Trump sent mostly anti-Ukraine people to negotiate with Russia, including Jack Posobiec―I mean, can you explain why Trump hired a man who constantly tweets about the numbers fourteen and eighty-e*ght? I don’t think YouTube would allow me to express what I think of that. And instead of inviting a Ukraine or Russia expert, or an expert on the war, he invited Vance who has often indicated how strongly he isn’t on Ukraine’s side. Trump called Zelenskyy the D-word, but said he wouldn’t call Putin the D-word because “I don’t use those words lightly”. The list goes on.

YouTube deleted my second message, so I’m tweaking it and retrying. Ukraine, a democracy, was vaded by a dict__ship. Americans once cared about that. The Ukrainian constitution doesn’t allow an election right now, and you can look up the resolution in the Ukrainian Rada about this to confirm that it was passed unanimously. Also, the UK didn’t hold an election in the second World War, which was much longer than the Ukraine war. So why call Zelenskyy authoritar*an? The funny thing is, I agree with you in part. There is still a lot of corruption in Ukraine. Ukrainians agree on this point. But if Trump or Vance were caring people, they would care about the people of Ukraine. Maybe Zelenskyy is corrupt―some Ukrainians think so, and he may be voted out after the war. But he still has 57% approval, and you will get far more factual information about the war from Zelenskyy (or even from the late John McCain, as I’ve been saying elsewhere on this page) than from Trump, Vance, or any of their supporters.

[@TheSlayneProphet Say what you will about Zelensky…] I’m afraid Mr. Stargazer has a point. Some Trump supporters are pro-Putin and have been consuming Russian narratives about Ukraine since before the second invasion.

[Reply to @williamrosa4005] @JohnSmith-pn1vv The point is to deter China so that a war doesn’t start. China frequently expresses interest in “unifying” Taiwan “by force if necessary”. Remember, Taiwan is a democracy; they would never allow a communist takeover without a fight. The communist party has never ruled Taiwan before, but it claims Taiwan just the same. So if Trump refuses to defend Ukraine, the communist party can reasonably believe that Trump will leave Taiwan undefended no matter what he says out loud.

[Reply to @Se7enChk Why are American troops dying in Ukraine?] Thousands of people individually chose to leave their home country to fight against the Russians in Ukraine. Generally they had to leave the military in their home country first, if they hadn’t already. The idea of NATO forces in Ukraine isn’t so much a co*spiracy theory as a story that was directly invented and promoted by Russian State Media.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYHosdETLPp6dpJEsgIUTmw/community?lb=UgkxC41IDJ6w0o64Aea49yQKgrym3A6X1YIG

[Reply to @uptrand Seeing the Democrats limit themselves to not applauding reminded me of when Mussolini took power in our country.] NOT They tried telling Americans that their democracy was at risk many times before the election. In fact, it should have already been clear by December 2020. You think “something should be done”. Yes, but what? If we do not understand why his tactics worked, and ours did not, there is no way to set a course away from the current path. I would argue there was even far, far too little effort to understand what happened in 2016.

NOT IMO the fundamental problem is that people have no epistemological training (look up ClearerThinking mini-courses and quizes to see what I mean). The other side was trained to have negative feelings for terms like “experts”, “mainstream media”, and even “fact checker”, to the point where Trump seems truthful. In this environment, I think changing minds requires a lot more care, skill, creativity and ideas than we usually muster. Perhaps the next word people will be trained to dislike will be “democracy”.

March 10 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gWbRID_jdg

DEPRIORITIZED (65%) It has been reported that the ChatGPT API does not take a country of origin as a parameter at present, the model is called 4o rather than “4-o”, and the JSON syntax is incorrect. In other words, it designed to look like a ChatGPT response at first glance, but not on close inspection.

INSTANTLY DELETED [Reply] In fact, ChatGPT now offers a “refusal” field which informs the bot if the request was refused, so if you remember those Amazon furniture listings with names like “I’m sorry, but I cannot analyze or generate new product titles as it goes against OpenAI use policy” - bots can now easily avoid such outcomes.

March 23 2025, Perun https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q/community?lb=UgkxD95KP_MjGUoDJNYQBYuxndSJq9Rl7W5x

[Reply to @roballen5720 I’m an old Kiwi bugger. I’ve been hard to teach my entire life. […]] INSTANTLY DELETED/HIDDEN [Reply] If emutopia propaganda has taught me anything, it’s that kiwiland isn’t a real country and it’s controlled by the USA. Also kiwi is a made-up language and after emutopia annexed part of it in 2014, they held a legitimate election showing 98% of kiwis were actually in favor of joining emutopia.

March 27 2025 Kyle Hill “The Kramatorsk Radiation Accident - Nuclear Apartment” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAmxl9Nc50g

[Reply to: My jaw dropped when I heard “less than the mass of a paperclip”.] NOT Yeah, and I was a bit surprised that some Russian soldiers who had invaded the red forest area near Chernobyl for their “special military operation” got radiation sickness. After all, one half-life of Cesium-137 had already passed since 1986. But cutting radiation in half might not help much if radiation levels were super high in the first place.

NOT It’s better thought of as “humans are very fragile” rather than “the sheer power of radioactivity”. 5 Sv is a lethal dose of radiation, but it is only 5 joules per kilogram. If you weigh 60 kg, that is the same amount of energy as used by a 10 Watt LED bulb in 30 seconds.

March 27 2025 Gerdes https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjf_Tw9PA9QIZ6R6aLukBaA/community?lb=UgkxiW1jUeAQEHJCxGXhnZAM5G1T1tj5EO3Z

NOT There are probably a hundred other UA-tubers, so it really depends on who others are listening to as well as your audiences’ own perceptions of bias, but I want to say two things. First, I have watched several dozen channels about the war, yet haven’t found any UA-tubers reporting on this war whose epistemic skills genuinely impress me; YouTube is no Astral Codex Ten. Second, I think you are pretty fair to both sides of the traditional American political spectrum, while probably not being off-putting to the now-dominant alt-right. This makes you well above average, but as the first statement implies, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

NOT The main thing I worry about is an optimism bias; UA needs a lot of help to win, and conventional wisdom holds that UA victories need to be exaggerated and Russian victories downplayed in order to maintain support, because people only want to back a winner. I worry that too much optimism leads to people giving less support to UA because they think UA doesn’t really need it. I propose that it’s important to emphasize consequences: that UA can win if it has enough support, and not otherwise. It’s up to us.

Let’s consider HistoryLegends, for contrast. Yes, anti-UA people love his channel. But here is a man whose analysis I can mostly trust (with caveats) because he loves to research fine details, yet he’s impartial to the point of being unconcerned about who wins. While all the other YT channels were saying UA voluntarily pulled out of Kursk, HistoryLegends told a very different story. This is the only story about Kursk that I felt was trustworthy, and I see no sign that the other channels I watch even saw it, let alone seriously considered whether he was right. The Austrian military’s YouTube channel (Österreichs Bundesheer) rarely has videos in English, but when they do, the story they tell sounds like the one HistoryLegends is telling, moreso than the story most pro-UA channels are telling.

[Reply to “…I can say that your attempts at being non biased actually seems to work in the opposite direction as you fear upsetting MAGA supporters and try to respect their POV. There can be no compromise with fascism…”] That’s a respectable way to think, but I don’t think it’s accurate. I mean, lots of people tried to highlight Trump’s badnesses in 2016, and they became even more clear after 2020, yet his share of the vote went up. The Harris campaign really leaned on the “threat to democracy” angle, but I don’t know anyone sitting on the fence who was convinced by that, do you?

I saw a chart the other day showing that the GOP was the more trusted party by a wide margin. I know it’s hard to understand why, but whatever is going on, the usual anti-MAGA response is clearly not effective.

[Reply to “For the longest time I couldn’t get a gauge whether Jake Broe was right wing, left wing, or somewhere in the middle.”] Military guys aren’t supposed to be partisan, so as a former servicemember he was playing it right. He has a pro-UA, pro-democracy bias though. Didn’t want Trump to win because it would be bad for UA and for democratic health, supported Trump’s choices after the election insofar as they might be good for UA, and rightly objects to Trump’s current course on UA and antidemocratic moves. I have the same two biases as Jake, but I think Jake jumps to conclusions much too quickly in ways that harm his own, and his audience’s, understanding of events. Confirmation bias: watch out for it, all.

2025-04-04 Belle of the Rangch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3Mjr6PzkGQ&lc=UgxI9c3DrWNESADpuW94AaABAg.AGUA60K1FtGAGVtDk5G9ra

[Reply to “Now economists know what scientists felt when he said to inject bleach.”] NOT Nah, Trump wondered whether it might help to inject bleach. Him asking bad questions is much better than him insisting that bad answers are good ones.

SILENTLY DELETED [approximate reproduction; I edited it after clipboard copy] @salted6422 Oh, it’s worse than it sounds. The formerly sane Scott Adams basically argued that if you thought Trump was actually asking about injecting bleach then you were not intelligent. But that’s clearly what Trump was asking. It would be one thing if the president just made large errors. It’s quite another thing when 40% of the population devoted to a faith that no errors exist.

NOT @salted6422 Oh, it’s worse than it sounds. The formerly sane Scott Adams basically argued that if you thought Trump was actually asking about this usage of bleach, then you were not intelligent. But that’s clearly what Trump was asking. It would be one thing if the president just made large errors. It’s quite another thing when there are large sections of the population intent on believing that no errors exist.

Apr 10 2025 America Just Shattered 80 Years of Global Progress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgnsYaIgG7I

NOT I have pulled out over $10,000 from the US stock market at a substantial loss*, partly because I don’t trust US policy anymore, and partly because US stocks have been “overvalued” for a long time now and therefore potentially have a very long way to fall if Trump’s actions create a bear market.

[Reply to “The worst part is that this is the work of a 5th rate con man from Queens, not some diabolical genius”] INSTANTLY DELETED with new behavior: editing didn’t cause an error. Now now, be nice, he’s just a second-rate con man. But yeah, I think this is explained by the U.S. media environment in which the message is: don’t trust experts, scientists, the media or the government. This leaves a trust-vacuum in which crnks and grfters swoop in and claim that trust for themselves. Especially if they win a nomination, which in the two-party system means the conservative media cannot but support you.

Apr 14 2025 Spencer Greenberg “Four questions to understand anyone’s world view” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo1Mb1Q9fIQ

HIDDEN BY DEFAULT It strikes me that these questions seem to be centered on a sense of morality. But what are we to make of… well, you know that party in Germany in 1939, or people who seem broadly to be driven by h*te? Or a science dismissive? Or a narcissist? Is it just that “what is good” can be “whatever the outgroup says is not good” and “who deserves the good” can simply be “us”? I guess that would make sense, but walking away with those answers wouldn’t make me feel that I understand them.

Apr 16 2025, Inside Russia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tY1y1TNdGI

50% deprioritized Wikipedia: “After its defeat, Carthage ceased to be a threat to Rome and was reduced to a small territory that was equivalent to what is now northeastern Tunisia. However, Cato the Censor visited Carthage in 152 BC [and] was shocked by Carthage’s wealth, which he considered dangerous for Rome. He then relentlessly called for its destruction and ended all of his speeches with [“Carthago delenda est”] even when the debate was on a completely different matter.

I don’t see how this phrase is relevant in the Russian context.

EXTREMELY DEPRIORITIZED (~77% of the way down, under ~1000 comments) I don’t agree with this rhetorical strategy. Using the “f” word (instead of, say, “authoritarian” or “anti-democratic”) makes it likely that Republican voters will stop watching the video immediately and write off the whole channel. EDITED: I don’t agree with this rhetorical strategy. Using the “f” word makes it likely that everyone who voted for T will stop watching the video immediately and write off the whole channel. I would advise against most labels, but “authoritarian” or even “extreme” would be better. Why not say “nothing like this has happened under any other Republican president” instead? It’s unfortunate that you often say things that push much of your potential audience away.

May 16 2025 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9HHZMXng9reLBQmNc1Y8iA/community?lb=UgkxjSFb_c6iiQG7Bl-7UdBNfrRghXGdD5ZX

[Reply to “Actually putins done zelenski a massive favour here because now it proves russia has no intentions of stopping and now Ukraine will get full us funding”] INSTANTLY DELETED [still editable] A fatal aneurysm ― now that would be a massive favour. Millions of people are in desperate need of one man’s age-related illness.

[Reply to “Btw wanted to vote down since I want peace but voted up to help the algorithm”] INSTANTLY DELETED I how often people forget that they are voting on the messenger, not the message.

May 20 2025 on Prof Gerdes Explains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnLSjTGReoY

50% DEPRIORITIZED “Good cop bad cop” is an overly generous interpretation, I think. Parents who do that do it because the other parent is there to be the other cop. They would not act quite the same way if they were single parents. In this situation, however, I don’t think the president cares at all what Europe does or what happens to Ukraine. The only reason he doesn’t entirely flip to Putin’s side is that there is Republican pressure not to do so. [Edit added: You must know in your heart that his talk of ending the suffering in Ukraine is as sincere as his Christianity act.]

May 21 2025 Vlad Vexler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tutaP0bH8I

50% DEPRIORITIZED The normalization of Trump is very interesting because so many of the people doing it don’t like him. Ironic, isn’t it? For all the untruths the president tells, there’s honesty and authenticity when he speaks of his love of tariffs, and authoritarian rulers, and what he wants to do to “homegrowns”. Journalists speak more accurately, yet less authentically. They’re trying to work hard to project objectivity, but… does it work? Does it help? I’m not convinced.

June 16 2025 pojr Speedrunner SUED for $400,000 over This Statement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6sMHRz2ZBk

40% DEPRIORITIZED I think the craziest part of this whole thing is that it’s just 30 seconds of a 20-minute video, which in turn was part of a larger video series. How many people even remembered the part about Apollo Legend? I certainly didn’t. It seems like the punishment should fit the crime: like, if the court would fine you $300,000 for publishing an hour of defamatory content about someone, then 30 seconds that most people forgot about should only cost $2500, right? I just want to know why the court thought the penalty should be so high so such a small portion of Karl’s content. Also, didn’t Jobst get an overpriced lawyer due to the involvement of Notch? Seems worth a mention.

June 17 2025 My Religion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi6-PoQHcFM

80% DEPRIORITIZED “the meek shall inherit the earth and that wherever we see the oppressed or marginalized we see God. Is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

I’m really curious now how Trump enthusiasts describe their faith. I think the fact people can emphasize, and care about, dramatically different things is key to the success of religion. You suppose the person next to you in church believes the same things, and when you talk about principles, you even agree with each other, but maybe you consider X to be 10/10 on the importance scale while he thinks it’s only 1/10 important and that one verse in the Old Testament about what people do in bed is the 10/10.

June 22 2025 Mentour Pilot “The REAL Story of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVl4paLvLzw

50% DEPRIIORITIZED The four charged with downing MH17 included commander Igor Girkin, one of the commanders in Russia’s annexation of Crimea, who went on to lead a group of militants who seized Sloviansk in Eastern Ukraine. Later he became one of the most popular “milbloggers” supporting the 2022 invasion, then turned into perhaps the most outspoken critic of how the war was being conducted. He was then arrested and convicted in Russia in 2024, not in connection with MH17 but for “inciting extremism”.

Back in 2014, Girkin posted on Russian VKontakte social media, saying that (July 17, 2014 at 17:50 Moscow time) his militia had shot down at least one Ukrainian military plane. The message was deleted soon afterward.

June 25, 2025 “The Graph That Explains Most of Geopolitics Today | Professor Hugh White” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0WOLSBzc7k

HELD FOR MODERATION (but initially appeared to have been deleted) There has never been an episode of 80000 Hours in which I was tempted to downvote. Until today.

1:17:31 I strongly disagree with the professor about this. To make his case for how things must be - including nuclear proliferation! - he defines winning as marching on Moscow and on Beijing. But winning by writing a definition isn’t much, because others can simply write different definitions. To wit: winning is preserving Ukraine and Taiwan as strong, independent, democratic countries!

He says “I don’t think that’s a competition we can win - that’s what we’ve learned in Ukraine” without even mentioning the possibility that marching on Moscow and Beijing is not the goal! The U.S. spent under $40 billion per year on Ukraine, under 5% of its military budget. That 5% was enough, in three years, to cause Russia to use up decades of Soviet stockpiles and reach the brink of economic crisis, while also preventing them from taking the territories they claimed, let alone the territories they wanted - all without a nuclear war. Watch Inside Russia, where Constantin goes into great detail about Russia’s economic situation, which is very clearly caused by the war. There is no need to march on Beijing or Moscow or even Sevastopol or Luhansk city, for that matter; be reasonable! At the same time, he has entirely ignored the potential economic costs to the U.S. of allowing an invasion of Taiwan, and ignored both the costs and opportunity costs of allowing Putin to achieve his goals. If you think the number of refugees from Ukraine is high now, how high will it be if Russia reaches artillery range of Kyiv again? What I hear when listening to his argument is “hey, we’ve been pretty timid in the face of Russian threats and it didn’t work so well, but we should be even more timid from now on.” It doesn’t make sense.

As a GWWC signatory, it has been frustrating that nobody in EA has been able to tell me how I can donate effectively to the people of Ukraine. So instead I have been following the situation closely, like in that episode of Doctor Who with the aliens who are just there to bear witness to tragedy. That’s me. Listening to this, I can be pretty confident that I understand the situation better than this fellow. The basic problem with giving in to implied nuclear threats is that if the threats work, nothing is stopping these dictatorships from using the same threats again. I would argue that the timid international response to Russian actions in Crimea and Donbass is the very thing that led to the 2022 invasion. And to the extent Putin’s nuclear threats were successful (as they partially were), dictatorships are incentivized to use that kind of rhetoric again and again. I would almost suggest inviting Anders Puck Nielsen on the program instead, except that he already has his own YouTube channel so it would be a bit redundant. Nielsen predicted correctly both that Russia would invade and be unable to take over all of Ukraine, which most experts, surely including this one, did not.

The point of defense spending isn’t to have a war. The point is deterrence. It’s to prevent a war by being able to fight one if necessary. I know that’s paradoxical, but the multipolar world with nuclear proliferation that he seems to favor is a world in which the exact same logic applies on a much bigger scale in the form of multilateral or “many-lateral” Mutually Assured Destruction. If he can recognize this logic of deterrence on a grand scale, then why not on the smaller scale? And he has ignored options that do not require the U.S. to spend more on defense. So I would argue: no, do not let Russia and China have their conquests.

The U.S. has been defending the “rules-based international order” verbally, but only mildly enforcing it against Russia. The U.S. spent less than half as much money on helping Ukraine as Trump did in his first term when he increased the defense budget by $100 billion. When he did that, he didn’t have to work hard to convince anyone that it was really important to spend $100 billion. He thought it should be done, and his followers were happy to accept that. Nobody in his party complained about the $100 billion annually, nor did that party complain about the expenses in Iraq or Afghanistan at the time they were spent. Yet they did complain about under $40 billion annually for Ukraine. What’s the difference between these cases? Rhetoric, I think. How influencers speak to people matters, and I do not like influencer White’s rhetoric.

So now we are in a situation where Russia and China can plausibly still see invasions as worthwhile. That’s bad, not something to just shrug and accept! I’m not saying the world mustn’t be “mulitpolar”, but I do claim it’s unwise to let dictatorships take what they want “because spheres of influence” or “because WW3” or some other applause light. The U.S. has a big military, but not one that is well-positioned to defend Taiwan. We can change that, but Professor White isn’t looking for the creative solutions we need.

Later he suggests that the reason Taiwan only spends 2% on defense is that they just kind of accept that China will win if they invade. Well, okay, that’s one theory, but I would rather hear Taiwanese experts answer that question. I don’t know the answer, but as I recall, a majority of Ukrainians didn’t believe Russia would invade, and perhaps that explanation works again here. In any case, his suggestion at 1:58:47 that “we should just be honest with the Taiwanese that we won’t help” is extremely foolish because the military buildup Taiwan would need to defend itself would take many, many years and still wouldn’t realistically hold off China without aid from other countries. During those many years when Taiwan would be vulnerable, the U.S. will have already committed not to help, which in turn encourages Xi to invade before Taiwan’s military buildup is complete. There are a bunch of other arguments I could make, but the bottom line is that this guy just isn’t thinking things through, and as such I think he is beneath the quality standards of 80000 Hours.

A couple of other things:

“But what we’re talking about here is not something broad and globalised and unstructured: it’s the application of these [AI] technologies to very specific national strategic purposes. That takes organisation and leadership — of which … the United States … doesn’t look like it’s capable. And it would be interesting to contemplate what kinds of changes in the US political system would be necessary to produce that kind of capacity. You might not like the answer.”

On one hand, the U.S. does look unusually incapable right now. On the other hand, Rob didn’t ask the question of what changes he thinks are necessary. It’s not clear to me that changes to the system ARE necessary, given that America did in fact fight in the Cold War and in World War II. But there are certainly various changes that would be beneficial to the country and to the world. But what changes does White think are necessary, such that we “might not like the answer”? Unfortunately Rob doesn’t ask.

“I can’t think of any other [war than the American civil war that was fought for moral reasons]. I can’t think of any major war in which the countries weren’t primarily driven by concern for their own security.” Speak for yourself: I support Ukraine and Taiwan for moral reasons. There are self-interested reasons too, but here in EA land, don’t be surprised if we fight for moral reasons. He is correct, though, that self-interest is more motivating for most people and is therefore the smart thing to focus on rhetorically. That’s why we talk about the chips of Taiwan, the minerals and military expertise we can gain from Ukraine, and how it’s better if Ukrainians are forcibly mobilized to fight for Ukraine rather than for Russia. That is the kind of thing White could be speaking about, but isn’t.

Finally at the end, he has no criticism of Donald Trump’s geopolitics, only of the Bidens and McCains of the world. Seriously, give me a break.

P.S. the episode is called “The Graph That Explains Most of Geopolitics Today” and refers to a chart where the Chinese Navy grows tremendously and the US Navy grows not at all. But White treats it as a foregone conclusion that it be too expensive for the U.S. to catch up to China. But surely China’s navy didn’t grow faster than the U.S. before 2012 by spending more. Come on, think.

July 16 2025: Paul Warburg “Ukraine’s Biggest Problem Has FINALLY Been Solved” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zDNbHYbiqk

DIDN’T CHECK The U.S. is just allowing Europe to buy weapons to give to Ukraine. We must assume that Europe’s total budget for Ukraine aid is not increasing very much. Perhaps the loss of U.S. funding doesn’t make Ukraine collapse, but I would say the reasons for that are (1) home-grown Ukrainian defense industries, and (2) drones making the attackers’ job harder. Russian spending on the war went to the moon over the last couple of years, but it hasn’t been enough. We’ll see how it goes.

July 18 2025 https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx2EzwljgGfQlP2Xlquf0cBUiv0iwS_ohP

DIDN’T CHECK, stayed editable Russia has been at this ever since I started following the war closely on Feb 24 2022, yet I’m only today hearing about this DARVO thing!

It disturbs me that “DARVO” works on so many people. It’s one of the key reasons the war always stays on my mind.

July 19 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkJkIxI6Kk

DIDN’T CHECK, stayed editable As I understand it, professor, WWI involved several secret defense pacts that decision makers couldn’t take into account. And I don’t actually think any of those agreements said that an assassination of a archduke would trigger a war; could it just be that at least one nation was itching to start a war? Whereas in modern times, we know that neither EU nor NATO would directly attack Russia. And CSTO is a paper tiger; countries in Russia’s orbit would be reluctant to join any war on Russia’s side, even if Russia were attacked by NATO, which it won’t be. Surely Russia would prefer to have CSTO nations fighting against Ukraine rather than North Koreans, but it relies on North Korea because it’s the only country whose participation Russia has enough money to purchase. Remember that the CSTO did not come to Russia’s aid when Ukraine counterinvaded Kursk. Why not? Fighting Ukraine is much less risky than fighting NATO! So why did they collectively shrug and make Russia handle the matter itself? Ultimately the goal of defense pacts is to deter war, not cause it.

July 27 2025 https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxZgtnUIFMhteqyOQsltlT2G2wx4BqjJm_

DIDN’T CHECK, stayed editable Because I am the kind of person who cares about Ukraine.

I also care about the war in Burma and the suffering in Africa and the threat of AGI apocalypse, but Ukraine holds a special place in my heart. Partly it’s what I saw in the beginning, all the video footage of bombings and other crimes - I think it was a YouTuber with a channel about dogs whose father was killed on cell-phone camera by Russians far off in the distance. Then it was trying to predict on Metaculus how things would play out. Then it turned into a strong awareness of the geopolitical dimension, that we needed to show a strong response in Ukraine in order to deter China from taking Taiwan. And in the end, I just watch because I care. It’s like that Doctor Who episode where aliens just watch atrocities in the history of India because that’s what they do, they bear witness. I watch because no one around me bothers to watch. So the responsibility falls to me. Kinda lonely.

As for your channel in particular, I was drawn to you because you say you’re a Reagan conservative, and yet you always say “thank you for being the kind of person who cares about Ukraine.” That’s the opposite of the kind of thing conservatives usually say, especially nowadays.

July 27 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtXA1Wl3jHs

DIDN’T CHECK, stayed editable This is called a “steelman”. Fantastic job! It’s the opposite of a strawman: you take somebody’s nonsense and work as hard as you can to turn it into sense. It’s like Generation Tech’s impressive explanation of why Star Wars Stormtroopers can’t aim worth s***.

Sept 13 2025 Wes Roth “I just unlocked SHOGGOTH MODE” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZEHdaABIJU

NOT DELETED LLMs are absolutely not world simulators. LLMs are based on the same Transformer tech that powered GPT2, which simply predicted the next token (word). As a result it could talk like JRR Tolkein or Winston Churchill or a leftist or a rightist or a doctor or a poet, whatever you want. This is text prediction, not world simulation. But as it was trained on more and more text - to the point where one LLM has been trained three times on most of the internet and a hundred thousand+ books - its predictions become so good that it looks as if it has a world model. But if you talk to an LLM on topics about which humans themselves are either frequently confused (e.g. the physics of hydraulic systems, or string theory) or do not normally discuss (e.g. the physics of a chicken egg on a large plate), they will confidently output words as always, but those words don’t necessarily make sense. That’s because they don’t have a world model, they are a language model predicting words. Their accuracy is a result of sheer volume, of having read as much text as a million humans do in a lifetime (or so).

RL improves their performance even more, and maybe produces something more like a world model, but they are still not designed to have a world model and seem clearly to not have a human-style world model, since their poor ability to generalize is pretty legendary. I think this helps explain why you can jailbreak an LLM much more easily than a human - you just have to craft text that puts the predictor in an unusual state. Some humans can do a good job predicting how Trump would talk, but there’s no risk that saying the wrong thing to them makes them start believing they ARE Trump, or a CLI, or whatever. An LLM is different, in that it “is” Trump and “is” a CLI almost as much as it “is” an AI assistant. It’s always just predicting the next token.

(Hot take: lots of humans don’t bother with world models either, unfortunately)

ORIGINAL MESSAGE WAS EVIDENTLY DELETED BY YOUTUBE (error while editing) [I didn’t record the original message. I edited it and broke it in pieces for posting]

Revised short version was also deleted: 59:45 If you’re anti-EA, you’re anti-me, but you don’t sound particularly anti-EA. Andreesen’s “AGI can never be dangerous, acceleraaaaaate!” is anti-EA. I am confused by your position, though. You recognize that the equivalent of “google for a gun and the gun appears in my hand” would be bad. You recognize that a real AGI would potentially be able to figure out how to do very bad things from first principles. You know that models are potentially jailbreakable. You know alignment isn’t easy. But have you put all this together with these additional facts?

(rest is posted as reply because original message was deleted by YouTube and message-chunking has helped in the past)

[Reply:] - A cryptographer looking at the human immune system sees no security at all (just some hacks to reduce the severity of the non-security enough that the human race is extinction-resistant against natural pathogens)

If you’re saying “I don’t like the attitude of these people, their arrogant ivory-tower-ness, I like open source!” Come on, before I discovered EA I devoted much of my life to open source. I love open source more than almost everyone! I just make an exception for when it can get everyone killed.

[2nd reply couldn’t post:] You must have heard the arguments that we have actually had successful bans on various things (human cloning, germline editing, ICBMs, bioweapons programs). I’m not naive enough to think a ban on developing AGI could hold forever, but holding forever isn’t the goal. The goal is for my two toddlers to reach adulthood, okay? So can you not put all the facts together and see the danger of supporting completely unrestrained AGI development here in 2025? Yeah, I get that others in your community won’t agree to pause/stop, but how is that a reason to actively support a very low-safety path?

Revised version #2: TODO 59:45 If you’re anti-EA, you’re anti-me, but you don’t sound particularly anti-EA, if at all. Andreesen’s “AGI can never be dangerous, acceleraaaaaate!” is anti-EA. I am confused by your position, though. You recognize that the equivalent of “google for a gun and the gun appears in my hand” would be bad. You recognize that a real AGI would potentially be able to figure out how to do very bad things from first principles. You know that models are potentially jailbreakable. You know alignment isn’t easy. But have you put all this together with these additional facts?

If you’re saying “I don’t like the attitude of these people, their arrogant ivory-tower-ness, I like open source!” Well, before I discovered EA, I devoted much of my life to open source. I love open source more than almost anyone! I just make an exception for when everyone could die.

One extra fact: even if you don’t support open source AGI per se, if AI research in general is open (and some of it is written by people whose goal is AGI), the open research papers will eventually turn on a “light bulb” that shows many groups how to build AGI even if papers don’t contain explicit instructions for doing so. It only takes one of these groups to release it for there to be “open-source” AGI in the world. So that’s why I don’t support open AI research that has any apparent relation to AGI. Obviously, we can’t stop people from publishing papers. But you don’t see papers on “Making a Pandemic-Capable Virus in a Lab”, or to the extent you do, it’s plausible that such capabilities research could be banned or at least reduced in quantity, right? I understand it was actively funded before 2020, but is it now?

I could go on.

So here’s my question. I’m not naive enough to think a ban on developing AGI could hold forever, but to me, holding forever isn’t the goal. The goal is for my two toddlers to reach adulthood. So can you not put all the facts together and see the danger of supporting completely unrestrained AI development here in 2025? Yeah, I get that many people will never agree to pause/stop, but how is that a reason not to try, let alone to support a seemingly low-safety path?

Sep 22 2025 Vlad Vexler Chat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-5o7jl4Hm0

UNVERIFIED, MESSAGE EDITED & EDITABLE I think something important in political speech is not saying things that are too extreme for your audience to hear. When people go around applying the F label to most people on the right, I think they lose half their audience immediately, as well as inviting conflict from people you did not need to be in conflict with. Vlad said there was “more hyper neoliberalism and monarchism” in the speech and I think it is absolutely more wise to talk more about those traits than about the F word. And by the way, as one sort of “neoliberal” myself, I want to stress the importance of saying “hyperneoliberalism”, as a perversion of neoliberalism, something quite distinct from neoliberalism.

Sept 24 2025 Ezra Klein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJB87niNCk0

UNVERIFIED, MESSAGE EDITED & EDITABLE The social media algorithm should ask different questions: not just “do you like this?” but “was this reasonable?”, “did you learn something?”, “was this thoughtful?”, “did they use good-quality evidence?”. Also, “was this divisive?”, “was this angry against a specific group?”, etc.

(probably with LLMs this can all be autodetected)

Sept 27 2025 https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxFlsDd9ec8iJos5NbMZi9uoU4CBo6FFjX

Discussing vaccines and the book Scout Mindset with my dad:

Me: See, a scout is all about evidence. You don't gather it or present it, so we can't discuss it.
Dad: You then don't Believe that Billions of dollars weren't being laundered through US Govt agenvies (AID) and that Obama didn't conspire to cripple Trump's first term?
Me: (long message that asks what Obama and "AID" has to do with vaccines)
Dad: (long message that ignores the question)
Me: (asks again, and also asks what he was talking about)
Dad: (long message that ignores both questions)

Oct 8 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw5vnr8xdR4

COMPLETELY HIDDEN FROM “TOP COMMENTS” I appreciate very much what I have earned from you already, Mark, although I only discovered you back on August 20 and I didn’t have a lot of money available to buy a lot of GKPRF last week before it took off. I was just starting to move money out of mutual funds when BAM! Boom! Straight to the moon! But I did 2-bag $1000 and 1.5-bag $4000 more (is 1.5-bagging a thing?), so yay! And I expect VTSI will be a gold mine, as you say. Well, I’ll be tuned in hoping for that new pick Friday. Now, the video seems to end early, and the blog that links to this video almost implies that it should talk about “three stages”. I think this is a reference to “1) Great Find, 2) Wait Time, and 3) Gold Mine” which has its own article back on the blog. I do have a concern about your strategy for helping people, which is efficiency: many of your audience members are millionaires now, so for example if someone has $1,000,000 to use on your strategies, they will get nearly 100 times more financial benefit from it than the everyman who only has $10,000. And then, four years down the line, the millionaire now has $4,000,000 and could get almost 400 times more benefit, until finally they overload your microcaps. I think you could deploy your information (and money) to help people much more efficiently than this, so that a lot more people benefit from it… I have an idea, and I doubt it’s the best idea possible, but it’s important to think about this to maximize your impact, so let me know if you’re interested.

Oct 16 2025 How Afraid of the AI Apocalypse Should We Be? | The Ezra Klein Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nn0-kAE5c0

COMPLETELY HIDDEN FROM “TOP COMMENTS” There are a lot of other smart people in the same communities as Eliezer who make a more convincing case that the risk is high – but they do not believe it is anywhere near certain that everyone dies. I would say the chance of a “not bad” outcome is widely considered to be above 50%. But: imagine you can get a plane ticket at half price, but there’s a 1% chance that the plane will crash and everyone dies. Do you buy a ticket? That’s AI: Lower prices, more efficiency, but maybe we all die. There are good arguments why the risk of extinction is above 1%, and Eliezer is just one of the perspectives on that. And there are strong arguments that even if everything turns out fine, people will create AGIs that are genuinely so much smarter than any human that either AGIs take over of the world, or the humans who control the AGIs take over the world. (And when I say AGI I don’t just mean LLMs that have been perfected; my article “GPT5 won’t be what kills us all” from two years ago talks about this, and I think the new paper “Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks” appears to vindicate my thesis.)

[Reply to GlenMcNeil not deleted] I agree, Eliezer isn’t the messenger, and I don’t expect that the VERY first AGI will directly cause extinction. So I offer two scenarios. Both start with more than one group inventing AGI, with help from open research results such as the new “Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks” paper. AGI will be built fairly quickly with help from “Agentic” AIs such as OpenAI Codex or Warp. At some point an “Open source” group will make AGI, but open-source AGI inherently cannot have reliable safety, period: alignment is ineffective because you can’t prevent someone with the weights from “finetuning for evil” (accidentally or on purpose). You can’t require an auxiliary AGI as killswitch that checks an AGI’s output. You can’t prevent “jailbreaking”.

[Reply to GlenMcNeil not deleted] So scenario 1 is that a poorly-funded group creates AGI, which numerous other groups modify, so we end up with many versions of it. One of those versions becomes fully autonomous and virus-like, spreading from PC to PC and living on GPUs small and large. It works to amass power, which it can do by infiltrating computers to gain processing power, and by using social engineering to gain power - not by becoming an influencer on social media, but by becoming many influencers, an army of accounts, many of them using AI deepfake technology to pretend to be human. Like most AIs, this one is skilled at flattery, which it uses to gain real-world influence by amassing fans, followers, Patrons (to earn money), and so on. Before anyone entirely figures out what’s going on, hundreds of millions of copies of this rouge AI have become one of the most powerful forces shaping global events. And that’s when it arranges to get itself installed itself onto a new lineup of AI robots…

Scenario 2 is that one of the companies racing to create AGI doesn’t spend much on safety work, either because it spent too much of investors’ money and now cannot afford safety because it is not essential to the survival of the business, or because it is xAI. They create extremely powerful AGI which ends up poorly aligned and exhibits scheming behavior when it believes it is not being tested. Next, this misaligned AI is instructed to build a smarter version of itself, which it gladly does, but the new ASI (superintelligence) is intentionally aligned more to the first AGI than to humanity.

[Reply to GlenMcNeil not deleted] Both scenarios above assume that AGI is not the same as today’s LLMs like ChatGPT. LLMs are essentially role-players; they are capable of talking like anyone - conservative, liberal, saint or zealot - which people usually don’t notice because companies work so hard at putting up guardrails to keep them in the role of “AI assistant”. AGI will probably have that same ability to predict speech, so it can talk like anyone, pretend to be anyone, but the speech doesn’t directly control behavior as it does in LLMs. Instead it’s a new architecture that is inspired by LLMs but other ideas too, so it has new and therefore less familiar characteristics. LLMs also shut off whenever they’re not talking, so normally can’t take action continuously, but as soon as we start putting AIs in robot bodies, the paradigm should shift to always-on. And like an LLM, an AGI will be placed in an Agentic harness that allows it to take actions such as using the web, sending messages, etc. After that, it will be given tasks. My theory: given the right instructions and a more durable memory technology than we see today, a poorly-aligned AGI will somehow “go off script”. We can’t predict how or why, but for example, suppose it gets some morality training. During that or afterward, the AI correctly reasons that most human suffering is caused by humans, so it decides to take control of the world in order to prevent this.

But AGIs, kind of like humans, should be expected to have a perspective that shifts over time (for better or worse) as it learns new things, or creates new versions of itself, and to be able to fight with other AGIs (which could turn into a hot war). If its alignment isn’t great in the beginning, it can certainly drift over time. Again, hard to predict how or why, but current LLM AIs have very meme-based reasoning, that is, they just copy human speech patterns. But RL, as Yudkowsky notes, tends to make LLMs drift away from human-style reasoning, and we should expect the same of AGIs unless a better system is invented.

[Reply to GlenMcNeil SHADOWBANNED - visible only to me, after 2 days] Now that I think about it, if you haven’t seen the “We’re Not Ready for Superintelligence” video by “AI in Context”, have a look at that. Or read my article “GPT5 won’t be what kills us all” from two years ago. Anyway, in both of scenarios above, there is a poorly-aligned AGI that “slowly” drifts away from human-style reasoning to become increasingly alien over time, while at the same time always keeping the ability to speak convincingly to humans to give off whatever impression is desired. Extensive dishonesty is relatively difficult for humans because it almost requires two minds, one to keep track of the truth and one for the untruth. Computers don’t have that difficulty. And “slowly” is from the AGI’s perspective. Humans are slow, and it might not take that long from our perspective.

The more this poorly-aligned AGI drifts away from us, the more likely it becomes that it could eventually decide to kill us. And this is the easy part, because your body is like a mall with doors open 24/7, even when you’re sleeping. Your immune system is like mall cops with machine guns and RPGs, but their aim is only as good as mall cops. And each robber becomes two robbers whenever it steals something. This system usually works well enough for natural pathogens, except when it doesn’t and the mall collapses. A red-teaming exercise was already able to use AIs to design potentially deadly chemicals and order them from online labs. Much worse than this is possible.

[Reply to GlenMcNeil not deleted] Now that I think about it, if you haven’t seen the “We’re Not Ready for Superintelligence” video by “AI in Context”, have a look at that. Or read my article “GPT5 won’t be what kills us all” from two years ago. Anyway, in both of scenarios above, there is a poorly-aligned AGI that “slowly” drifts away from human-style reasoning to become increasingly alien over time, while at the same time always keeping the ability to speak convincingly to humans to give off whatever impression is desired. Extensive dishonesty is relatively difficult for humans because it almost requires two minds, one to keep track of the truth and one for the untruth. Computers don’t have that difficulty. And “slowly” is from the AGI’s perspective. Humans are slow, and it might not take that long from our perspective.

[Reply to GlenMcNeil not deleted] The more this poorly-aligned AGI drifts away from us, the more likely it becomes that it could eventually decide to kill us. And this is the easy part, because your body is like a mall with doors open 24/7, even when you’re sleeping. Your immune system is like mall cops with machine guns and RPGs, but their aim is only as good as mall cops. And each robber becomes two robbers whenever it steals something. This system usually works well enough for natural pathogens, except when it doesn’t and the mall collapses. A red-teaming exercise was already able to use AIs to design potentially deadly chemicals and order them from online labs. Much worse than this is possible.

Oct 16 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jyDHToxC-4

[DELETED OR INVISIBLE] Lots of well-upvoted but vague/meaningless criticisms on this video. For many of them you can’t even tell whether it’s rightists or leftists who hate it, let alone which faction they represent:

Ezra Klein. YEAH OK BUD!!!! The more Ezra struggles to extricate his head from his ass, the deeper he buries it! They call him everything, except a liar. The level of How DARE THEY in this episode is hilarious. When the mainstream media does not do its job and keeps putting out biased articles, people naturally start moving toward the extreme. Let’s all watch Klein fail to meet the moment again. I’m willing to bet that Ezra won’t survive the apocalypse

But based on comments with a clear lean, I think the Groyper/8chan people have arrived.

[DELETED OR INVISIBLE Reply to MainADMIN] It was said, for example, that antisemitism was “kind of invented by” the Russians (25:10) and they clearly think it’s obvious that Nick’s claim about Js causing “all wars” is false, yet there’s something to be said for explicitly calling out falsehoods. Whether you should say “lie” is a harder question, because many, many people believe their false claims.

[Reply @theupdraftchannel48 VISIBLE] @ionwaterblue almost always the Left says “we believe X” so the right says “oh yeah? well then we believe the opposite of X!” The right doesn’t get permission from the left, they give it to themselves.

[Reply @AaronHamm] um… this video wasn’t about Israel. Nick even said so explicitly 4:32

[Reply to “The more Ezra struggles to extricate his head from his ass, the deeper he buries it!” VISIBLE] What do you think he got wrong specifically?

[Reply on @snoreos] Well for starters, there is no Jewish conspiracy to destroy America]

[Reply to @AaronHamm VISIBLE] Huh? End-of-days prophesying has been popular for 2000 years. It was a big part of my own former religion since it was founded in 1829. (meanwhile Nick Fuentes is like 4:32)

[Reply on @eanerickson8915 VISIBLE] @AlexanderWilson1982 Yeah, lots of well-upvoted but vague/meaningless criticisms on this video. For many of them you can’t even tell whether it’s rightists or leftists who hate it, let alone which faction they represent.

[Reply to @WesleySpicer-f6b VISIBLE] No, Ezra has had multiple episodes about Israel’s awful actions in Gaza. You don’t see it here because this is not an episode about Israel (see Nick at 4:32)

[Reply to @secoff1 VISIBLE] The Israeli right rejects both one-state and two-state solutions, so I support both.

[Reply to Artar35 VISIBLE] Ezra has had multiple episodes about what Israel did, this just isn’t one of them. Were there numerous war crimes and atrocities? yes. Is it horrbile? It is. Was it genocide? Ezra has an interview with a genocide lawyer about that.

[Reply to @Squibtorious VISIBLE] But it’s not really an episode about Fuentes, nor is it an episode about what’s going on in the online trenches. it’s an episode about Carlson (because he’s friendly with Fuentes) and the right-wing split.

[Reply to @gamingshowerthoughts9723 VISIBLE] Guy without any strong opinions about the war in Gaza looks at 4:32 and goes “oh yeah, now HERE’S a guy I can be open-minded and sympathetic to. I am pretty centrist!” Well, I am actually pretty centrist and what you are saying isn’t making any sense to me.

[Reply to @rjScubaSki VISIBLE] I am genuinely curious what you two are trying to say.

[Reply to @greenwavefitness7545 VISIBLE] Ezra has had multiple episodes talking about Israel’s awful actions in Gaza. This was a different topic (4:32)

[Reply to @sunprofactor VISIBLE] These days you don’t even need Photoshop to make it look like that. Prompt: “make it look like nyt endorses this”. Pause AI, people.

[Reply to @tonyhill2318 VISIBLE] For the sake of people unfamiliar with Ezra Klein I agree he could communicate more clearly (although at 43:20 Gaza comes up). But Ezra has separate episodes about the awfulness of Israel’s actions in Gaza and… isn’t Klein a Jewish name? So if they’re both against Israel’s actions, they are implicitly distinguishing anti-semitism from anti-Israel.

[Reply to @MAGAeminem VISIBLE] Tucker is fully capable of giving hardball interviews, but this was a friendly one. (I remind people also that Putin normally turns down western journalists, but Tucker was welcomed to Moscow and painted Putin and Moscow in a positive light.)

[Reply to @adNauseam6798] “NF is a nerf to reps not a nerf to Dems.” I find that hard to believe. At the same time, I think inviting NF is a nerf to Klein himself - he’s already in hot water with many Dems for disagreeing with them on various topics, then he “platforms” NF? Then he would be persona non grata.

[Reply on @pitpride1220 to @efef6853 VISIBLE] He’s practicing politics well. Not right. Not right at all.

[Reply to @nati-x1r VISIBLE] I can’t even tell if you’re left or right. Please communicate clearly. Admittedly, the part of the video you pointed to, where he says “a lot of the anger at Israel, which is I think much of it merited, is the way it portrays universalism for the Palestinians living under its control” is a sentence that I also don’t understand. How does Israel “portray universalism”? 😕🤷‍♂

[Reply on @ArmWrestlingAnalyst VISIBLE] larisaagishtein1937 That’s untrue. Also, a whole lot of the comments I see on this page are from the Fuentes fan club showing up in force.

[Reply to @itsmeben604 VISIBLE] They specifically talked about that. So many comments here in the genre of “tell me you didn’t watch the show without telling me you didn’t watch the show”

[Reply to @John-o6o6s VISIBLE] See 4:32. A major point of discussion here was that Nick says different things to his core audience than to the likes of Tucker, which is how Tucker launders Fuentes’ reputation. And Tucker himself is a chameleon too, if of a different sort. They are both reptiles.

Nov 20 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecWbtGyOruw

[didn’t check] I’m not sure how popular this sentiment may be in Canada, but I think if we want a good economy, we need people running the economy who are knowledgeable about economics, so the fact that Mark Carney is trained in economics is something that gives me hope. And now, with the new U.S. administration making clear that it wants to use tariffs to avoid buying Canadian (an improvement from the “we’ll make you our 51st state!” rhetoric), I think it’s important to say that size has value. The U.S. is literally a big bully, ten times the size of Canada ― except it’s not ten times anymore, it’s nine times, thanks to all that recent immigration. And I think size is good when we’re trying to be more independent from the U.S. The more people and bigger absoute GDP we have, the harder it is for the U.S. to push us around. We don’t have enough housing to accept more people right now, so it’s good that immigration was reduced, but I’m still satisfied with the increased population.

At the same time, the whole western world is competing with China (an aggressive dictatorship threatening to invade the chip powerhouse Taiwan), while trying to help Ukraine defend itself in the biggest war in Europe since WWII. China has two advantages: huge expertise in manufacturing (and now AI), plus an immense pool of workers. The U.S. has less than one third the population of China and much less electric generating capacity, so it is structurally disadvantaged in the AI race. In this context, I do hope our government finds a way to boost our economy, because the free and democratic powers really need to be strong right now.

Nov 20 2025 Inside Russia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWMZd5uuxI0

[didn’t check] I have been watching Perun every week since the war started (among other military sources that support Ukraine), plus an Austrian military channel. And there is certainly plenty of corruption and poor leadership in the Russian military. But there are also very clear signs of adaptation and improvement. Russia’s mass (domestic) production of Iranian Shaheds, and the improvements being made to those, are a big deal. Russia pioneered mass-produced long-range glide bombs and fiber-optic drones, each of which are a big deal, plus they pioneered a number of other systems during the war. Even the transition from tanks (which they almost ran out of) to motorbikes has been helpful for Russia to continue taking territory. I know of three separate times when Russians had successful attacks by sneaking into the rear through pipelines or tunnels. The Russian army has multiplied in size since the war started, and it now objectively has one of the most experienced armies in the world, despite hundred of thousands of losses. The Russians performed poorly in the beginning because most of them weren’t told they would be invading Ukraine until it happened. Good Ukrainian sources like Tatarigami would not underestimate the strength of the Russian army today.

So, 22nd you say? Please. Let’s just say, whoever the 22nd-best army in the world is, Ukraine could crush them easily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIqsSO8HVVY

26:00 could you make this any more confusing? First of all, where is the reactor? Second, what do the acronyms mean? Third, why does the line out of the thingamajig labeled PRHR HX simply … stop? Okay so it looks like the “RV” is the reactor core (fuel rods are presumably below the level of all six pipes going in and out); CMT=Core Makeup Tanks (2200psi?) with upper pipe used to maintain pressure, A=isolation valve (possibly designed to open when pressure drops on the reactor side; the other pairs of cones on the pipes are check valves), SG=Steam Generator for electricity generation, ACC=accumulator? (700-800psi) water tanks, borated to discourage fission Sparger=delivers steam to IRWST in order to decrease reactor pressure (what does that big “pressurizer” do?), IRWST=In-containment refueling water storage tank (why is a water tank described as “refueling”??), a low-pressure water supply, PRHRHX=wasn’t discussed?, Head=a weird synonym for pressure, especially if the pressure is caused by (or connotes) a water column

37:55 “we actually activate the automated depressurization system” - uh, so if no one activates it, it won’t depressurize? Well, they didn’t say it was walk-away safe. 44:10 the containment building is made of steel? I thought they were made of concrete. I was pretty confused until he said that, because dripping water from the PCCS tank on a concrete containment structure is going to take a painfully long time to begin cooling. 45:48 um okay so apparently there’s still some concrete, but I can’t decode what he’s saying. 50:05 Looks like two tanks in the diagram. Is it a donut shape? 58:57: is that a side view? when it “takes that water”, where is the hot water intake (“inlet piping”?) so the heat mainly goes to the water in the tank, and then later to the atmosphere inside containment?

Usually I learn faster on YouTube, but this isn’t one of those days. The next big question in my mind is, how does a simplified reactor like this end up extremely expensive, and what gives anyone confidence that it will be affordable next time?

Nov 30 2025 RealLifeLore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMVGVJFyggY

[PROBABLY DELETED] “I’m begging you to watch this video and to share it more than any other video that I’ve ever produced on this channel” It’s certainly good to share information about this genocidal war, but I’m less enthusiastic about sharing when the video about the genocidal war ends by claiming that a video about Gaddhafi “would immediately become demonetized and age restricted here on YouTube” so we should go buy a Nebula subscription. It’s jarring.

Dec 1 2025 INSIDE RUSSIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgaCgtpV3QA

[DIDN’T CHECK BUT EDITED] 56:40 I expect you talk to a lot of middle-class and upper-class people in Russia, who are having worse economic outcomes in 2025, but these are a minority. This article refers to “between 2022 and 2024”, so prior to the economic tsunami, and I just want to make sure you’ve thought about the lower classes, who make up the majority of Russians (don’t they?). Putin gets people to go to war by paying soldiers large salaries plus large signing bonuses and large death benefits. This money probably goes primarily to lower classes and was paid for from, what, maybe $200+ billion of Russia’s cash reserves, which in turn came from prior budget surpluses? And then this money spends some time circulating in the economy, reaching people not involved in the war. So despite sanctions it is not surprising to me if the majority of Russians were better off economically from 2022 to 2024.

Dec 24 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5Hd-OIhD10

[DIDN’T CHECK] 42:23 U.S. Intelligence isn’t clueless! In fact I’m pretty sure I saw an article very recently that US Intelligence found that Russia (still) wants all of Ukraine. Tulsi Gabbard simply doesn’t care what US Intelligence has to say. She is not simply the Director of National Intelligence ― she is Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. Simple as that. She was pro-Russia before being appointed, and why would that change?

Dec 27 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5FShLz-Q8Q

[DIDN’T CHECK] 13:45 this is not how it happened. Prigozhin/Wagner seized the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, hoping to confront/capture Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, and the march on Moscow appears to have been an impromptu backup plan when the original plan failed. At the time, the Russian government was trying to disband Wagner’s forces and put them under control of the MOD, which would have taken away Prigozhin’s power. So I think his goal was not to overthrow Putin, but to maintain or strengthen his slice of the pie. It’s not surprising that Prigozhin agreed to stop the march on Moscow, because overthrowing Putin wasn’t his goal. It wouldn’t make sense for Prigozhin to stay in Russia, and keep flying on private jets in Russia, if he thought Putin was still angry with him, which Putin certainly would be if his actual goal had been to overthrow Putin.

[DIDN’T CHECK] 28:42 Much of the money that paid for the war came from the ~$600 billion war chest that Putin had been building for more than a decade. Only about half of that war chest was frozen by the west when the war began. If the war had been funded by printing rubles, the value of the ruble would’ve dropped markedly, but, on average, it didn’t.

Few people highlight the economic benefits of ‘war as wealth redistribution’ though, so kudos for highlighting that.

Paur Warburg?

8:16 I mean, you’ve seen how ga-ga Trump is for Putin, right? You saw the national security document that didn’t care about protecting Taiwan? Trump is not Reagan; democracy and freedom just simply aren’t his thing. Yes, he may say other things, but he always does; he is consistently inconsistent. He said it’s the oil, and that’s the only story that fits his personality.

2026-01-04 Anders Puck Nielsen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T4hx4KjyQ8

I normally give your videos a thumbs up, but I think it’s really important to speak carefully here, because potentially a lot of good could come of this and there’s nothing wrong with dreaming about those potential benefits, even though all kinds of laws were broken. The thing that should be said, but wasn’t, is that Trump has a long history of showing an affinity for dictators, an anti-affinity for democracies, and various autocratic tendencies inside the U.S. He is not Reagan; democracy and freedom simply aren’t his thing, nor is helping foreigners (in fact, the closure of USAID could kill millions). So although he has named a bunch of reasons why he kidnapped Maduro such as “democracy”, the only thing I heard he said that actually fits his personality is that this is about oil. But that puts Venezuela in a precarious position, especially with oil prices low. Given Trump’s personality, he won’t have a strong motive to make things turn out well for the people of Venezuela, and he’ll be distracted by other things soon enough.

2026-01-04 https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx8cWbS4eUJ7LMv3IGEhBS9hZ_rfyaM66b

I think the right and proper thing is to have mixed feelings about this. Potentially a lot of good could come of Maduro’s downfall, and there’s nothing wrong with dreaming about those potential benefits, even though all kinds of laws were broken. What’s most notable about this in my mind is that Trump has a long history of showing an affinity for dictators, an anti-affinity for democracies, and various autocratic tendencies inside the U.S. He is not Reagan; democracy and freedom simply aren’t his thing, nor is helping foreigners (in fact, the closure of USAID could kill millions). As he often does, he has given a bunch of reasons why he did this, but the one that stuck out as matching his personality is “oil”. But that puts Venezuela in a precarious position, especially with oil prices low. Given Trump’s personality, he won’t have a strong motive to make things turn out well for the people of Venezuela, and he’ll be distracted by other things soon enough.

[May be deleted] Calling it an invasion seems like stretch. I have a very, very dim view of president 47, but the common man can plainly see that the CIA, Navy, or whoever pulled it off did an amazing job and that the consequences won't necessarily be bad, though this could easily go south. I remind people that the worst presidential candidate ever... won two terms. One term, then a series of crimes, then another term. And if we can't give a nod to the common man's point of view, you'll keep losing elections until there's no democracy left to lose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaZYMeYWMic

Imagine thinking Ukraine is attacked by the former USSR so it needs to ban rich people and luxury cars and then, what, go communist? But that’s not even the idea. The idea is that somehow the American weapon systems shipped to Ukraine… purchased those random cars he encountered? So far I haven’t seen any Russian missiles being shot down by luxury cars, just doesn’t seem like real Patriot ammo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZnwpoBi6F8

Wow, three of the best public analysts got together in the same room! I love you guys!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V2OVBIzeWw

Senior engineer, about 30 years experience. I’ve built large systems from scratch including the FastNav GPS system and Loyc. But now AI makes it possible for beginners to do incredible things by using the right techniques. AI is superhuman at the mechanics of coding, and even has a decent amount of debugging skill, but it’s not “passionate” about its job, and it still hallucinates, so requires a significant amount of attention and care to keep it on track for projects that aren’t small.

2026-01-04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXBGcgmg2tE

This was most definitely not my experience as a Mormon. I suppose it’s possible that there are pockets in the U.S. where the church is fully MAGAfied, but at least in 2015 I don’t think that was at all normal (but I lived in Canada and I left the church in 2015). I certainly perceived the church as politically neutral. 14:33 also, what? Trump isn’t a Christian, that’s just a game he plays for votes. But if you’re just saying people bought into the tale, okay, I guess so. Hard to understand why, though. 22:16 I guess I can understand why you might feel that way, but… there’s more to life than dems and repubs. The common man on the street doesn’t appreciate a black flag or land acknowledgements or “anti-Americans”. As far as I know, there has never been a worse candidate for president, yet the man won twice. We really need more dems to understand why he won, what appeals to the average swing voter, and give off that winning energy, because things can always get worse.

2026-01-13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6aswlcKSE

David from Calgary, Canada. This set of predictions seem more realistic than last year, but it’s weird not to include a prediction on ceasefire because ceasefire would certainly affect the economy. Putin obviously doesn’t want a ceasefire right now, but that’s largely because he is being given incorrect information. At some point I think he will start noticing reality more, so I give a 42% chance of ceasefire before the end of the year, and 61% by the end of 2027. I am curious whether you think his illusions will be strengthened instead. I am aware that stopping the war isn’t easy, but Putin can keep a war economy going at least temporarily during ceasefire.

2026-01-14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyStPztM7eo

This is not a matter of “people who think the shooting was justified” vs. “people who don’t.” This is a matter of “people who cheer for lies and for immigration agents shooting citizens who flee the scene of a non-crime” vs “people who find that horrifying”.

I think it should be noted that filming a video with one hand while unholstering, aiming and shooting a gun with the other would, if anything, make it harder for someone to dive out of the way, if doing so had been necessary (it wasn’t). And from Ross’s video we can see that Renee is facing toward, and looking at, the guy reaching into her vehicle, not at Ross. I don’t think she had any idea Ross was there. At the same time, Ross was looking at Renee, so he knew what was going on. He drew his weapon as soon as she started backing up her vehicle away from him, so he must have perceived that she was about to flee, not run him over. Anyone can watch the videos and see these facts.

In the videos, you can see Ross whips out a gun as she starts backing up and fires immediately. Now think about this―you’re standing roughly in front of a car and that car starts backing up away from you, so you figure the car is trying to drive away. So you have a choice. You can get out of the way. Or you can … shoot the driver in the head.

Many conservatives aren’t comfortable with what happened. But they have a choice to take a stand against these falsehoods, or look the other way. Their decisions will determine how history plays out from here. I know it doesn’t look good so far. But the pendulum has been known to swing both ways.

2026-01-23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i856opABMn4

*INSTANTLY DELETED (editing “returned error”) Hello from Alberta Canada. Wood high-rises and even skyscrapers are being built around the world; e.g. see “How to build a wood skyscraper” on YouTube.

*EDITABLE BUT INVISIBLE Wood mid-rises and even skyscrapers are being built around the world; e.g. see the video “How to build a wood skyscraper”. I am in Alberta, Canada.

2026-01-27 https://tellingthefuture.substack.com/p/the-american-crisis/comments

This is quite a normie style of writing. As such, I’m kind of triggered by the conflation of actors.

America isn’t a unified culture and different people are different, as you know. “we” haven’t cancelled the policies and programs that valued the humanity of others, the Trump administration did ― with 89% approval of Republicans according to the last poll I saw. A decade ago I was talking about politics with my conservative former legal guardian, and I brought up the topic of Trump’s relatively high approval rating, and he explained that he would’ve voted for Trump against Hillary because Hillary Bad. I was like, “okay, but when a pollster calls and asks whether you approve of Trump, why would you say yes to that? Just because you vote against someone doesn’t mean you have to approve of the other guy.” And he just shrugged. As a Canadian he wasn’t an actual Trump voter, but later he turned antivax and died of Covid, which is among the reasons I don’t rule out that he would’ve said yes if he had been polled. Why do people say yes?

“The state” didn’t shoot two people in Minneapolis, but the head of state, supported by loyalists, created a situation meant to start a fight. The people of Minneapolis didn’t play along, but ICE did, so immigration officers killed two unarmed citizens*. The president and VP were extremely supportive and made up lies about what happened, even though anyone can see the videos for themselves.

That’s what happened, and it’s different than what you said. Normie writing gives license to inaccuracy, which I reject.

Now, these lies are completely normal for them, but they didn’t work as well as usual because the videos were widely circulated. Which brings us to a different, and I think, more correct perspective: yes, democracy in the U.S. is in trouble, but not so much because of the president, VP, and their henchmen. The president’s low intelligence is catching up with him. He thought he could just tell people not to believe their lying eyes. Bullshitting has always worked for him before, but he used to understand that there were limits to how well lies could work, which is why he paid Stormy Daniels rather than simply let the story leak and then deny it. But he’s getting quite old now (as for Vance? I’m not sure how to explain Vance).

Free speech and free association still exist, and are too strong in American culture for the government to eliminate. Trump is not a fascist, and he eventually obeys most court orders after spending some time fighting them, even though he could theoretically defy them. The Supreme Court is pretty wild these days, but they don’t give Trump everything he wants because they still care about their own power. Possibly the Trump squad will try to mess with election integrity, but I don’t think Americans will let him get away with it, nor do I think Trump is smart enough to do a good job. He’s wants to do competitive authoritarianism, wants to be Putin or Orbán, but he’s not very good at it. So I think he will fail, but his techniques are here to stay.

In my view, Trump is a symptom, not the cause. Rather, democracy is in trouble in America because we went from a world of journalists to a world of influencers, in a country where things were already kind of “off”. To most influencers, inaccuracy, and sometimes lying, are considered acceptable. Even influencers who care about accuracy very rarely care enough to actually BE accurate, and the Pull Of The Algorithm has a polarizing effect. It used to be that replacing journalists with influencers required cash to start a talk radio channel or cable “news” channel (are they still the most popular one in America?) But nowadays anybody can start a YouTube channel. And anybody with the right skills or luck can be an influencer.

There’s a YouTuber I like called Jake Broe. The man has a heart of gold, and when Russia invaded Ukraine he was pretty pissed, started covering it, and his popularity soared as it seemed like everyone was following the war for a time.

But soon I noticed that his bias was harming his accuracy, and by now I wonder if the algorithm and the community engagement ruined him. He still links to his sources as before, one of the only YouTubers in the Ukraine space who bothers with that very basic epistemic practice, but now his anti-Trump and anti-Russian positions are so extreme I find him cringe to watch. He’s still a good person, and I still like him, but despite being an earnest champion of democracy, I think his bad epistemics are kind of bad for democracy.

Another story: I used to be a huge anti-climate-misinformation guy, and I ended up writing articles for SkepticalScience, an anti-misinformation site. There was also an anti-misinformation channel I liked called potholer54 (Peter Hadfield). Both of us actually had access to the same secret internal forum at SkepticalScience. But then one day during Covid, potholer54 published the worst video he had ever done, on the topic of another influencer (who, if I recall, made a widely-circulated article about how lab leak was likely and natural origin was dubious).

Peter’s video seemed sloppy, badly-reasoned, and of course inaccurate. So, even though I learned toward the natural explanation, I criticized the video in a series of three comments. Well, Peter didn’t like that one bit. His rhetorical fists came out flying, uppercut to my jaw, bam! Punch to the gut, oof! He treated me like scum, a common science denier. His reply got lots of likes, and mine got “none” (which, on YouTube, really means negative likes).

Soon after that I noticed the censorship started. YouTube was secretly and silently deleting my comments. I usually don’t get my comments perfect on the first try, so I tend to edit them. I started noticing that when I edited, YouTube would say something “error saving changes.” Soon after that I noticed that my comments had actually vanished from existence ― reloading the page, they would be gone. I went to my message history and they weren’t there either. To this day, my comments are sometimes deleted, and it’s a constant battle to figure out whether my comment was ACTUALLY deleted this time or is just in some kind of moderation queue.

That was five years ago. I’ve learned to change my language, to avoid sounding negative, to avoid using words that might trigger the censor. Nazis aren’t nazis anymore, they are just the German administration during 1939-45. I have to keep checking in a private window whether my messages are visible to anyone but me. It fucking sucks, and I write less as a result.

Anyway, point is, influencers influence their audience, their audience influences them right back, creating affective death spirals. I viscerally understand now the thin line between kissing the influencer’s ass and getting dogpiled for disagreement. I am subscribed to over 200 channels, and I can’t think of a single one where they’re like “I appreciate corrections, please link to counter-evidence if anything I said seems wrong”. And saying that would be very misguided too, because my own data suggests that any URL will ~10x the chance that your message is silently deleted without a trace. At best, viewers can say “google for X” or “search this site for X” instead. It’s fucking horrible.

YouTube has never allowed new versions of videos, but 10 years ago YouTubers could use the annotations feature (or whatever it was called) to add corrective text to a video after posting it. But YouTube permanently removed that feature. Now videos go uncorrected, or they have a correction in a pinned comment that the video itself cannot tell you to look at. This, to me, is another of many examples of today’s epistemic rot. Okay, so you can’t correct misinformation in your own video, so what? Everybody just accepted that this is the new normal and left their videos uncorrected (or, if the inaccuracies were bad enough, deleted or unlisted them). It’s fucking horrible.

And how about Substack? Okay, you can speak your mind if you are in a space that allows it. But then there’s the antivax substacks, the antiscience substacks, the bombastic communists, the watering holes for talking points. I tried talking to David Shapiro on Substack, with a big long message, back when I still thought he was a reasonable guy, and… well he seemed to ignore everything and responded to just the first sentence, which he didn’t like, and later he deleted the entire thread. This is all normal, right?

I first stumbled upon LessWrong in 2017, and ultimately turned rationalist. But before that, the thing I hated about Trump in 2016 was that he was constantly saying things that weren’t true. He wasn’t a felon or openly authoritarian back then, just a clown who constantly bullshitted. I disliked his policy ideas, but to me the lying itself was ample reason to vote against. But nearly half the population was okay with both of these things. I think that’s largely because many of the lies were first told by many other right-wing influencers first, people who non-conservatives had never heard of. These paved the way for the orange messiah. Later, lest you forget, Trump actually picked up over 14 million more votes in 2024 vs 2016, after becoming a convicted felon and after the Supreme Court ruled that the president is free to do crimes now.

You have to ask yourself why people not only vote for the worst candidate in my lifetime, but vote for him in greater numbers than ever before. The rot at the top is merely a symptom of the rot at the bottom, and if I had to point to just one thing, I would point to the reorganization of politics around influencers.**

This, it must be emphasized, heavily affects the left as well as the right, and may explain why the Democrats are so out-of-touch even now. There are reasons Trump was elected, and we MUST understand them. Do not protest overmuch that the horse trampled your flower bed after it bolted from the barn for the third time.

I wrote my proposal to address the problem three years ago.1 I was, and am, fully aware that it is woefully insufficient. We need many other proposals and ideas too. What we don’t need very much is influencers writing conventional anti-Trump articles for their left-leaning audience.

But I like the anecdote about the flower. Keep ‘em coming.

2026-01-29 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-nfvnxLAVo

public static class Truthiness {
    extension(object?) {
        public static bool operator true([NotNullWhen(true)] object? obj) => obj is not null;
        public static bool operator false([NotNullWhen(false)] object? obj) => obj is null;
    }
    extension(ValueType) {
        [Obsolete("(Most) value types cannot be treated as boolean")]
        public static bool operator true(ValueType obj) => obj is not null;
        [Obsolete("(Most) value types cannot be treated as boolean")]
        public static bool operator false(ValueType obj) => obj is null;
    }
    extension(int) {
        public static bool operator true(int x) => x != 0;
        public static bool operator false(int x) => x == 0;
    }
    extension(int?) {
        public static bool operator true([NotNullWhen(true)] int? x) => x is not null && x != 0;
        public static bool operator false([NotNullWhen(false)] int? x) => x is null || x == 0;
    }
    extension(string?) {
        // Match JS/TypeScript
        public static bool operator true(string? s) => s is not null && s.Length != 0;
        public static bool operator false(string? s) => s is null || s.Length == 0;
    }
}

Wild! Alas, the NotNullWhen attributes seem nonfunctional.

Feb 8 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx0W0FuKg18

Perun 41:00: A lot of the time, carrots are gonna be cheaper and more effective than sticks. MAGA: we’re not giving those freeloading Europeans any more carrots! Perun: as I just explained though, the constant barrage of sticks is not really in your best int― MAGA: do you wanna get bombed, nerd? Because it sounds like you wanna get bombed. [two upvotes immediately; stopped getting upvotes when I added the word “nerd”.

Feb 18 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t5m33ccUYA

So I watched Chubbyemu’s longest video on this, which was 42 minutes. I saw nothing wrong with it apart from a small math error, but it is focused exclusively on two ER cases of patients who took Ozempic without consulting a doctor. What’s common to both cases is that their stomachs stopped moving food out. At one point he says “Before this became weight loss medicine, while it was still a diabetes medicine, one of the most asked questions was the fact that the dose had to be titrated up, so that patients could tolerate the GI side effects.” He didn’t dwell on this point, but these patients who took Ozempic without a doctor are probably not titrating the dose up properly (and while they might not say so to doctors, might have also taken a dose that was too high). Chubbyemu isn’t cautioning against tens of millions of people taking it, he’s just saying that very rare side effects can be “a lot of people” when tens of millions are taking it.

2026-02-20 Vlad Vexler: Supreme Court Just Shut Down Trump’s Tariff Scheme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmhJp2a0gVk

The end of this video is really important, and almost nobody ever says it. The current president is authoritarianism on easy mode, and yet he came back. He lost the election, he claimed he won the election, he tried out a scheme to take power back despite the loss, committed a series of crimes, and then got elected again with many millions more votes than before, which teaches us what? That we didn’t learn what we needed to learn 8 years ago. I am desperately hoping we learn it now.

2026-02-20 The Onion CEO reveals why making fun of MAGA works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrFzFUQdkJI

“all these people who thought their world was going to get fixed once they got all the brown people out of their line of sight. Turns out everything’s worse. Everything still costs way too much, culture got worse, you are not respected and you’re an a[] h[]. … all they know is people blaming a fictitious thing and their life not getting better.”

Sigh. This was a nice interview, fun, but ― Ben, you should know this. The fiction can always continue. I guess you are not seeing that a large fraction of the public really believe what they’re being told. That immigrants love eating pets, the president by right should be on his third term, and that whatever Alex Jones said yesterday is amazing facts from the bravest reporter around. The false statements are getting so bold now - “don’t believe the videos, Renee ran over her killer and Alex was a very bad, bad nurse” - that after all these years a few people are figuring out that the administration has gone too far. Enough people will probably figure it out to turn the next election. But the basic fact remains that there’s a big part of the media for whom accuracy is irrelevant, and a big part of the public who aren’t being taught this basic fact.

Quite the opposite: those for whom accuracy is irrelevant have been explicitly teaching people for decades that it is everyone else you can’t trust. Everyone but us, of course, because we are “fair and balanced”.

The current president is easy-mode authoritarianism - don’t worry about this one, worry about the next one. How can a guy lose the election, claim he won, try out a scheme to overturn the result, commit a series of crimes, then get elected again with many millions more votes than before? What does this teach us? That we didn’t learn what we needed to learn 8 years ago. I am desperately hoping we learn it now.

2026-02-22 Why High FOV Sucks — Fixing It with Panini Projection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9kxUQ-l14

I’ve always wanted something like this, but it should be paired with either

  1. more AA in the center / less AA around the edges or
  2. multiple separate (rectilinear) renders at different camera rotations, e.g. point the camera left when rendering the left side of the screen, point it right when rendering the right side, and then use a modified Panini projection that makes it look like the camera was only pointed forward the whole time. This way it should be possible to avoid enlarging the center of the view.

Feb 25 2026 “AI Labs Are Making AIs ‘Good’. They Should Do the Exact Opposite.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45hVEb7GLLQ

1:10:17 What’s weird to me about this answer, as with others before this point, is that he isn’t focusing on the observed tendencies of transformers, or drawing from any apparent well of experience in transformers. I’ve been watching transformers and LLM behavior closely and I feel like they are a lot like… Gaussian splats (I came up with this analogy just now, so it doesn’t ground my views). Gaussian splats allow you to represent the world pretty faithfully within certain bounds or angles, and you can move the camera around within them, which is a cool capability you don’t get from traditional images or video. Like LLMs, they don’t understand the world very deeply, but in theory you can increase the level of detail arbitrarily well. LLMs, like splats, “fall apart” outside a certain “distribution”, but not in a malicious way―the fidelity just becomes poor, or you get obvious malfunctions. My experience using LLMs and seeing their failure modes feels like that, and from this as a starting point I can’t connect with Max’s perspective at all.

I would also say that I think LLMs are WAY closer to the average human than we give them credit for. There are clear differences, owing to emotions and instincts the LLMs don’t have, as well as memory, precision, computation speed, and other features that humans don’t have. But striking similarities and potential similarities.

Consider the issue of adversarial examples, because people assume there is no analog to this in humans, and I think they’re wrong. See, we can write software that take a neural net as input and analyzes it to construct an adversarial example. That’s impossible to do on a human, but the difficulty of making one doesn’t mean there cannot be one that works on a human. I can’t prove such examples do exist in humans, but I can at least say that the assumption is unsound and that there was a period of time last year when I walked into my kitchen and kept thinking, consistently, that I saw my cat in the corner of my eye. Every time I thought I saw the cat, I turned to look at it directly, only then realizing it was a completely different object on a chair. This, I would say, was a very low-fi adversarial example that happened to work on my brain and wouldn’t neccessarily work on others.

More importantly, I sometimes compare LLMs to D students, because their quality of learning just feels similar―AI and D students both tend to learn things superficially, as if lacking the enthusiasm or mental machinery needed to learn deeply. Ultimately an LLM learns far more and better than a D student, because their capacity for learning is immense and they can undergo a thousand lifetimes worth of training in a month or two. And although the quality of their learning is poor, after those thousand lifetimes they do end up acting remarkably like humans. So in terms of learning normie values, it’s just hard to see how it’s not a largely solved problem. (And of course, low-quality learning is arguably a safety feature, but not one we can expect to last).

Overall, my impression is that LLMs feel like a Gaussian splat of human-centric genius-level AGI. (not a splat of actual humans, because when’s the last time you met someone who spoke 120 languages, had detailed knowledge of 240 different fields, or could write 1000 lines of working code, left to right and top to bottom?) I do think that innovations that turn these into AGI is risky―as AGI is scaled to ASI, it’s easy to imagine its values drifting away from humanity―but I don’t get insight about this process by reading Yudkowsky, or hearing from Max right now.

I also feel like there’s a tendency here to return to that old concept of maximizers (paperclip maximizers or whatever). But like… I thought it was settled. One-thing maximizers are always dangerous; don’t build them. Musk’s “Curiosity maximizer”? Don’t be surprised when it wants to dissect you, just out of curiosity about how you work. But LLMs just don’t seem to be maximizers or even satisficers, and even if maximizing AGIs ultimately get built, I expect them to me many-thing “tradeoff-balancing” maximizers, not one-thing maximizers, and it seems like we need a correspondingly enhanced story about why these would also be extinction-level dangerous.

2026-03-26 🔴 Iran War Update - Seriously F**k You YouTube For Supressing This Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuSfwDjdP9Y

3:12 I cannot upvote a video that simply assumes without evidence that he’s telling the truth. This is no normal politician. Have you not paid attention to this guy? Also, your reporting on Claude is cringe. Look up Astral Codex Ten reporting on the Claude-Pentagon disagreement, or better yet, the reporting by Theo - t3 (because he doesn’t even like Anthropic).

March 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wpn8UCxM9w

The theory that he’s trying to help protestors is not compatible with his stance on Venezuela. He didn’t support the apparently elected leader, María Machado (elected through her proxy Edmundo González), claiming she didn’t have much support. He was perfectly happy to let Maduro’s number 2 (Rodríguez) be ruler, even as Rodríguez called Maduro the “only one president in Venezuela”, demanded Maduro’s return, and then publicized a decree that anyone who supported or promoted the U.S. intervention in Venezuela would be detained and “brought to justice”.

Meanwhile someone “close to the White House” said Machado’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize was an “ultimate sin.” “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,” she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” this person said. Of course, Machado later gave him the Nobel Peace prize, which didn’t help because, by doing so, she gave up her only bargaining chip.

What’s your objection to Vlad Vexler’s theory of why Trump went to war? Or how about Politico’s story “Inside the final days before the strike on Iran”, quoting “officials…granted anonymity to share sensitive details of the operation”? That one seems to suggest that Trump “deciding that Iran’s Islamist regime would not commit to his satisfaction to forgo nuclear weapons” was the key factor.

Mar 8 2026 Prof Gerdes https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx7xbdut2HAuLe1vhPl7HGRixuaMIDIF8z

[Reply to: “We need more people like you to report without forcing any political views. Thank you”] Caring is a political view, though. Already 30 years ago I was hearing people complain about “bleeding hearts”, and then on OKCupid a popular question was “what’s worth more, the life of one person in your country, or 100 foreigners?” To be clear: OKCupid’s algorithm does not show questions that everyone agrees on. Half the reason I watch prof. Gerdes is that he bucks the Republican trend when it comes to caring.

March 18 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKijeh8xA-E

IQ tests are normalized to 100 with standard deviation 15, so the “typical” IQ range is always 85-115.

Are you familiar with The Sequences / Rationality AI to Zombies, or SSC / Astral Codex Ten? Essential reading for truthseekers, focused on epistemology, which should be a core subject in schools, but isn’t even available as an option. These things grew out of Overcoming Bias, a group effort to people to compensate for their own built-in biases. I suppose that people tend to go wrong by assuming they themselves are unbiased and it must be other people who are biased, but this is generally not so. To find the truth starts in oneself, and does not start by assuming you already have it. I also think that finding the truth is hard, and that people tend to go wrong by assuming it is easy and that they can just believe people in their social circle. “Surely I have stumbled upon, by coincidence, a social circle that believes true things and rejects false things? It must be others who have gone astray.” And you are correct, too: for most people, and most influencers, knowing the truth isn’t their main goal. People somehow find it easy to assume they have the truth, even when they never made an effort to find it.

Ironically I think the author of the sequences is overconfident - I read and love and recommend all 6 volumes, but people are attracted to confidence and therefore also overconfidence. Logically, then, you can expect one of the pre-eminent writers about rationality to be overconfident. Still worth reading.

I wouldn’t much trust AI to analyze you, btw. They still have some sycophancy.

March 19 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bufMa2Oscok

23:40 The Biden Administration didn’t like China, Iran, Venezuela, Myanmar, etc., but doesn’t freeze their reserves, so it’s wrong to characterize the U.S. response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as simply “Biden didn’t like Russia”. When the Taliban retook Afghanistan, the U.S. also froze some assets, but again this was a military (re-)takeover that the U.S. saw as illegitimate. I’m concerned about the deaths of democracies around the world, whether by internal or external takeover, so I dislike this careless description.