2026年11月精选链接汇总

[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]1: This month in nominative determinism: the smallest inhabited island in the world is entirely covered by a single small house, which is owned by the Sizeland family.2: Related: @milktsunami on Soviet acronym names. The male name “Melsor” stood for “Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, October Revolution”. And the second name in this screenshot only raises more questions:3: Related: @corsaren finds that SAMUEL HARRIS ALTMAN anagrams to MASS UNILATERAL HARM (but also UNREAL ALARMIST SHAM). Also (h/t @techn0_sap1en), DARIO AMODEI anagrams to AI DOOMER AID. 4: ACX grantee Sentinel, which forecasts global disasters and has a pretty good track record so far, predicts a 25% chance of a rogue AI exfiltrating its weights over the next twelve months.5: Related: Sentinel-affiliated forecaster @belikewater reminds Californians that this winter is predicted to be much rainier than normal, and this would be a good time to check roofs, gutters, etc. They mention a “2.5% chance of a major flood”. I asked an AI superforecaster to operationalize this, and it said 8% chance of a flood that causes at least $10K damage to at least 100,000 homes, and 2% chance of one that causes that much damage to at least 1,000,000 homes. This second is mostly a subset of the ARkStorm scenario - the forecaster says there’s a 5% chance of an ARkStorm this year compared to the baseline 1% (with only about half of those ARkStorms reaching the one million houses damaged mark). I feel like this 5% chance of the biggest disaster in California history isn’t getting enough thought/preparation, although this is par for the course for 5% disasters, which are in an awkward zone where they’re probable enough that people should think about them, but not probable enough to actually catch people’s attention.Seems…bad.6: Why Richard Hanania doubts UFOs. I didn’t find the article that novel - it mostly just pounds the prior really hard - but I did appreciate this comment by domain expert Kevin Lacker, who says that nobody takes the ‘Wow signal’ seriously anymore and “nowadays radio astronomers see similar things all the time. Literally millions of them”. Can anyone confirm this?7: Another outbreak of the lab leak debate on an ACX open thread; everyone is asked to cease non-essential activities and stay indoors until the argument passes.8: Clara on Asterisk: We Already Know What A World Without Work Looks Like. The debate on what will happen if AI takes all the jobs usually swings between poles of “it will be great because we can focus on the finer things in life” and “it will be terrible because we’ll lose all meaning”. Clara brings her trademark careful historical scholarship and proposes a third option - groups ranging from hunter-gatherers to aristocrats have lived without productive work for thousands of years, and they spend their time in what could charitably be called “social grooming” and uncharitably “court intrigue” - pointless alliance-forming and backbiting in the pursuit of arbitrary status markers divorced from productive activity. “Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. They’re highly social, cunning, at all times hyperaware of their strict internal dominance hierarchy, and constantly, obsessively tracking alliances, challenges, displays of prowess, and attempts to get ahead.” My only objection to this analogy is that some aristocrats were genuinely better at status games than others and probably had a lot of fun, whereas in the post-AI future the winners of status games will probably be those who check every move with a smarter-than-human AI prompted to help them optimize their status (and if everyone knows this to be true, it’s not clear what the ensuing status games actually look like).9: The most expensive joke in history? NVIDIA recently agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9303 billion. The exact number was an easter egg - “129,303 is the decimal conversion of [the hugging face emoji]”. If we assume that absent this consideration they would have agreed on an even $13 billion, then this easter egg changed the price by about $70 million. 10: News from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community: President Trump got the two competing Satmar Rebbes to meet and shake hands for the first time in a decade. This is maybe not very interesting to anyone else outside this particular community, but I am linking it for the accompanying image, which feels like it ought to be a metaphor for something:Inside you are two wolves…11: Boson Cutter has yet another semi-outsider’s-anthropological look at the Berkeley rationalist/EA community. The usual failure mode of these is that some journalist gets an invitation to a crazy party at Lighthaven, then writes an article saying that the Berkeley rationalist/EA community is all about throwing crazy parties at Lighthaven. Boson Cutter did this, but also got access to the more professional/studious community space Constellation, and writes a second half about its totally different culture. I think the best article - which probably couldn’t be written by an outsider spending a few weeks here - would say that the Berkeley rationalist/EA community contains crazy party people, professional studious people, desperate poor people, normal family people, saints, villains, and almost every other group you would find in the general population.12: I’m not a fan of Bentham’s Bulldog’s tendency to call his articles things like “[Position I Disagree With] Is Obviously The Stupidest Thing Ever With A Literally 0% Chance Of Being Correct”, but I have to admit that his Natural Law Theory Is Obviously False is either pretty devastating, or else has to imply that natural law theorists are trying to do something I don’t understand which is very different from what I would expect moral philosophy to be. Related: Joe Schmid and Noah McKay Are Wrong About Fatima.13: One of the big forecasting stories of the past few years has been normie superforecasters (ie not from the rationalist/EA communities) constantly underpredicting the speed of AI progress. Ben Todd has a good summary of this, and there’s some more on revenue predictions in particular here.14: Claim (X): You can figure out if someone is a North Korean scammer/hacker by asking them to insult Kim Jong-un - North Koreans won’t do it even to save their scam.15: Donald Trump recently made the seemingly-inexplicable choice to force everyone in the US government to refer to AI as SI, for “super intelligence”.I went to an awkward conference that included both rationalists talking about superintelligence and DC Republicans talking about “super intelligence” - the latter eventually distinguished themselves by saying “super space intelligence”, which sounds like an even more sci-fi concept.This is quite weird even for Trump, and I’m tempted to believe the conspiracy theory that the point was for insiders to buy up relevant domain names early (.si is Slovenia, which is Melania Trump’s homeland), then resell them to AI companies at vast profits. There was a spike in .si domain names a few months before Trump’s announcement, but nobody has been able to determine which ones or who bought them. If this was the plot, it seems to have worked: TechCrunch reports that “.si domains were selling for over a million dollars”.16: @jayvanbavel: A new paper provides strong and robust evidence for a positive relationship between ingroup and outgroup prosociality. Across six datasets that span multiple domains of prosociality and group distinctions with 743,402 individuals in 121 societies, finds that people who are prosocial toward the ingroup also tend to be prosocial toward the outgroup.In other words, the people who talk about “s