Not being paid for it doesn't make it okay. They still promote holocaust revisionism, vaccine denialism, and the white replacement conspiracy theory. One could make the argument that it actually makes it worse: he believed in the cause so much he was willing to work for free. (I'm personally agnostic as to whether it makes it worse or not, but again, it doesn't make it okay)

The fact that this reply has positive karma and positive agreement karma is baffling.

"Castles", plural. The purchase of Wytham Abbey gets all the attention, but everyone ignores that during that same time there was also the purchase of a chateau in Hostačov using FTX funding.

You should mention that this graph is not from academics testing nootropics on a random sample, but self-reported from nootropics users. So it is non-random, uncontrolled, and unblinded.

The survey also had probabilities of side effects. Maybe include those? A cost-benefit analysis really should also include the potential costs, and not just the potential benefits.

So I read this and your original subreddit post "Compassionate Eugenics as a Cause Area" and I have some concerns. You say:

We might consider programs that pay for people with desirable traits to reproduce.

The question is: who gets to decide what the "desirable traits" are? Eugenicists seem to focus a lot on the desirability of racial traits, which I vehemently disagree with. If the eugenicists got their way, I don't think the future they'd create is one I would consider desirable. And this has been a central part of the movement since its inception. The founder of eugenics, sir Galton, created a racial hierarchy with whites at the top and wrote things like:

There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race.

Now, just because you've named your account after him and advocate for eugenics doesn't automatically mean you secretly share that view, but hopefully you can forgive someone for becoming somewhat concerned.

Uber's activities were deliberately illegal in many countries and I probably on balance support that.

I don't think you should.

I appreciate the work that went into this post, but I do think you understate the link between LW and neoreaction. You say:

Gerard’s second project, to create an association in people’s minds between rationalism and neoreaction, was much more ambitious than the first. [...] Rationalists and neoreactionaries, on the other hand, were distinct and well-defined groups, neither of which particularly liked each other.[...] But Gerard had two cards to play: first, a glancing, single-sentence note in an article from the Reliable Source known as TechCrunch that neoreactionaries occasionally “crop-up on tech hangouts like Hacker News and Less Wrong, having cryptic conversations about ‘Moldbug’ and ‘the Cathedral,’”

Assuming this was true at one point, it seems to no longer be the case (and it's also not a purely online thing anymore) as we could see recently with e.g. Manifest and Yarvin's afterparty.

The post complains about "scientific racists" at the conference, with there being a minimum of eight:

I would be comfortable putting a total of eight people under the eugenics/HBD label. There might be more, but I am not an expert.

We can debate whether it's closer to eight or closer to twelve but let's take eight as the conservative estimate. You say:

we had about sixty such special guests

And:

i think that, on balance, we were like ~5% too edgy or something — but the way that i’d aim to correct this is by having the makeup of speakers more accurately represent my internal set of beliefs and interests (which happens to be like ~5% less edgy)

So 8 out of 60 means that 13.333% of the speakers were "scientific racists" and if we decrease that by 5 percent we end up with five "scientific racists". So is this correct? Will you invite five "scientific racists" as speakers next time?

It would be really worth clarifying that. I mean, there are people who are anti-technology for sure. You’re mentioning degrowthers: people who just actually think the world is getting worse because of technology

This is a claim that I've seen a lot in the EA/rat-sphere that's simply not true. Degrowth is not about being against technological progress, it's about being skeptical of exponential economic growth:

Degrowth is an academic and social movement critical of the concept of growth in gross domestic product as a measure of human and economic development.

Technological progress can help us reduce our ecological damage even in a world where GDP is not growing year over year.

One example I can think of with regards to people "graduating" from philosophies is the idea that people can graduate out of arguably "adolescent" political philosophies like libertarianism and socialism.

Despite the people in the EA/rat-sphere dismissing socialism out of hand as an "adolescent" political philosophy, actual political philosophers who study this for a living are mostly socialists (socialism 59%, capitalism 27%, other 14%)

If we look at the socialist public figures, both the politicians (e.g. Bernie Sanders, AOC, Jeremy Corbyn etc) and the public intellectuals (e.g. Žižek, Naomi Klein, Richard Wolff etc) always advocate for the former and not for the latter. The only reason that pro-capitalists keep steering the conversation towards command economies, despite there being no real support for it in socialist movements, is because they know that that's a conversation they can win much more easily than actually engaging with the position of contemporary socialists. This is a red herring.