LessOnline is a festival celebrating truthseeking and blogging, the totally not race science is just a bonus
LessOnline 2025: A Festival of Truthseeking and Blogging
yeah i'm sure Matt Levine, qntm and Wildbow are gonna be champing at the bit to attend wordy racist fest
Matt Levine, qntm
I can see why these would appeal to LW crowd. One of them writes cosmic horror about monstrous alien phenomena that can't be directly perceived preying on humanity and all life in the universe, and qntm writes wordy science fiction.
No comment on Wildbow. I'm sure Worm is excellent but I'm just not in the market for three HPMoR wordcounts of capeshit, so I don't know what his deal is. Bummer for him to have one of his characters be the indirect namesake of a notorious murder cult.
Worm is excellent capeshit, honestly. It's way closer to Boys capeshit than Marvel capeshit. It's a pretty dark and largely realistic take on what people with super powers would be like, and it's not a flattering one overall. Even the hero is an anti-villain, and not really for "badass" reasons. She is of course a bad ass, but that comes later.
Still, like any capeshit, even the sardonic kind, it plainly loves superheros. It is indeed like 12 novels long. Gripping, though. I read it over a couple of months at a slow job and was glad to have it.
Worm is great at what it does, which is to lure in people wanting to read power fantasies about being a superhero and then smashing every trope. (All the powers involve deep trauma. Everyone needs a therapist. Very few get any therapy. The world ends because we can't take care of each other nicely.)
Having a large list of people who will not be attending but making it look like they might seems a bit fraudulent to me.
E: "and now our special guest, you know him from your comment sections Steve Sailer!"
I hope Sailer is happy he finally got the "African 'big man' presidency" he was sure Obama would be, from Trump.
Of course they use shitty AI slop as the background for their web page.
Like, what the hell is it even supposed to be? A mustachioed man writing in a journal in what appears to be a French village town square? Shadowy individuals chatting around an oddly incongruous fire pit? Guitar dude and listener sitting on invisible benches? I get that AI produces this kind of garbage all the time, but did the lesswrongers even bother to evaluate it for appropriateness?
It is what happened to look good in the valley between the Adderall comedown and yesterday evening's edible really starting to hit
I propose we pool funds, buy an old motel on the other side of the city limits in Oakland, and rename it Farthaven
Yakshaven
Laudatory quote number 3 is from Cremieux....
And the photos from a previous event are an ocean of whiteness. Hard to argue that they're not, uh, cultivating a certain demographic...
...a trip to an alternate universe, a road not taken, a vision of a different life where you get up and start the day in dialogue with Agnes Callard
Who? Oh, right, her:
In 2011, Callard divorced her husband, fellow University of Chicago professor Ben Callard, who she had married in 2003.[20] She began a relationship with Arnold Brooks, who was a graduate student at the time.
Dear fellow academics: Live so that the "Personal life" section of your Wikipedia article is empty.
Jesus Christ, $550?? That's a bit steep for a forum meet.
Spose that's a good way to ensure all attendants are enlightened centrists.
To be scrupulously fair there were multiple banners on LW announcing that prices would rise unless locked in early. NFC what they started at though, maybe $400?
Personally you would have to pay me $5,500 + room and board to force me to attend.
The wayback archive tells me: $450 👍
Wow, what an honor it must be to get invited to speak with such luminaries as Scott Siskind, Jordan Lasker, Eric S. Raymond, Paul Graham, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Vitalik Buterin and Aella. Maybe if I write ten million words of high-concept genre fiction I can make the organizers think I'm also a white supremacist and/or a neoliberal vampire.
8 thousand words of Daria/Hellraiser crossover fic has not been enough to get me invited anywhere.
8kw is rookie numbers. That's like a median Eliezer tweet.
I wonder if anyone's going to show up naked because they assumed it was an orgy.
I think I speak for everyone here when I say, "Ew."