• blakestacey@awful.systemsM
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    10 months ago

    I can barely get past the image caption. “An AI made this”. OK, and what did you ask it for, “random shit”?

    And then there’s the section that seems implicitly to be arguing that we should take the risk estimates made on “internet rationality forums” seriously because they totally called the COVID crisis, you guys… Well, they did a better job than an economist, anyway.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      10 months ago

      fucking everyone who was paying attention saw COVID coming in February. I spent that month pushing OpenVPN for the whole company forward as urgently as possible. (We’d coincidentally set it up in Dec 2019, but readied it to be rolled out to ordinary users and not just tech.) The UK only got lockdown in March because of public outrage.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsM
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        10 months ago

        It had already reached the university where I work by February 1!

        And QAnon loons were already telling people to drink bleach in January.

        (I remember a “welp, we’re in for it now” moment when Trevor Bedford tweeted on the first of March that a genome analysis “strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for the past 6 weeks”. The e-mail from the university chancellor saying that classes were canceled went out during the middle of a statistical-physics class I was teaching, the evening of March 11.)

    • mountainriver@awful.systems
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      10 months ago

      Isn’t “pandemic preparation” one of their longtermist causes that they grift money to? Shouldn’t they have been able to show some results?

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      10 months ago

      yeah sorry to say but if i have to choose between someone who thought covid might blow over in january 2020 and a fucking prepper i’ll go with the first one no hesitation