All of Elon Musk’s heroes are frauds

I’ve always thought of Nick Bostrom as a font of bad ideas, but that’s not his self-estimation. He considers himself a genius!

Bostrom considers himself to be a towering intellect of cosmic-historical importance. He is not shy when boasting about his supposed accomplishments, even quoting on his website an article that describes him as the “Swedish superbrain.” For many years, he bragged that — to quote his profile on Edge.org — “his performance as an undergraduate set a national record in Sweden,” though he backed away from this after Simon Knutsson pointed out that there is no evidence to support such a claim. (See the “Potentially Dishonest Self-Promotion” section of this article.)

The kinds of ideas he claims to have come up with are, for instance, the belief that AI represents an existential risk comparable to a nuclear holocaust which must nevertheless be pursued zealously, making him a hero to the capitalists building massive data centers right now. He also promotes the belief that potential people could be so numerous that it’s more valuable to create conditions that enable space flight and virtual people in computers than to actually help the poor and develop an egalitarian politics, again endearing him to the hyper-rich.

In brief, the paper argues that if we colonize space — especially as digital posthumans — the future population could be enormous. Bostrom estimates some 10^38 digital people within the Virgo Supercluster, a cluster of galaxy clusters that includes our own Milky Way. (That’s a 10 followed by 38 zeros, by the way.)

If one accepts a utilitarian perspective, this means the expected value of ensuring the realization of all those future people (assuming they have net-positive lives) far exceeds the value of, e.g., helping poor people today. If you’re a truly altruistic person who aims to maximize your philanthropic impact, then you should focus not on present-day people but those living perhaps millions or billions of years from now. It’s not that future digital people are inherently more valuable. It’s just a numbers-game: there are so many more of them (potentially) than present-day people, they overwhelm the simplistic equations of utilitarianism’s moral mathematics.

Bostrom’s conclusion is that we should colonize the universe as soon as possible, because every single century, decade, and even second of delaying this results in an “astronomical” loss of potential value — i.e., the non-existence of people who could have otherwise been created in some distant galaxy if only we had started colonizing just a bit sooner. However, Bostrom also concludes that “priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.” Space colonization should therefore be priority number five once we secure our survival. Perhaps you can see why Musk loves this paper.

It’s an incredibly stupid idea — it also has ties to eugenics and natalism and other flawed beliefs — and I have weird feelings about this article. It’s mainly functioning to excuse Bostrom from fault. Bostrom didn’t come up with all these bad ideas! No, he just stole all of them. He doesn’t have original ideas!

Yet, because I’m so conversant with the foundational literature of the TESCREAL movement, I’ve noticed that a large number of the “original,” “novel,” even (supposedly) “groundbreaking” ideas attributed to Bostrom actually originated with other thinkers. As early as 2018, I was posting about this on social media and privately sharing examples with colleagues — some of whom were rather shocked to see Bostrom’s work juxtaposed with that of others (from whom he borrowed without sufficient attribution). I wrote to one colleague that Bostrom’s “genius” seems to be taking ideas from other theorists and repackaging them in his own language such that they’re just different enough for him to avoid being accused of intellectual plagiarism. His oeuvre reminds me of the line, often misattributed to Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

It’s a long and thorough article, and traces Bostrom’s soft plagiarism back to multiple sources, but one of them is notorious crackpot and self-promoter Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Shouldn’t that be instantly disqualifying?

Oh no, science to get the Trump “gold” treatment

This is not good news. The Trump administration wants to radically change how science is done in this country.

On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a report entitled “Science: A New Golden Age,” in which it lays out how it has viewed science, found it lacking, and believes the Trump administration is in the perfect position to fix things. It’s a bit unexpected coming from an administration that has been proposing crippling funding cuts to research and trying to enable political appointees to terminate grants awarded based on scientific merit.

The report presents itself as the spiritual successor of “Science, the Endless Frontier,” a policy document that laid out the case for government-funded science in the wake of World War II. The New Golden Age (SNGA) says that, while the concepts promoted by the original remain vital, the circumstances have changed such that we need major revisions to how the government is implementing things.

The result is an odd mix. It completely ignores or glosses over many things that the administration is doing to harm scientific progress. In some cases, it identifies issues that have already been discussed as problems within the scientific community. Elsewhere, it’s a mixture of political grievances, ideas without a solid intellectual foundation, and an injection of Silicon Valley’s perspective on innovation (Michael Kratsios, the director of the OSTP, formerly worked with Peter Thiel). As a result, it’s unlikely to have anything like the impact of “Science, the Endless Frontier.”

“Gold standard”? So he wants to buy some cheap crap from Home Depot, spray paint it gold, and call it science?

Jesus, but he made the oval office kitschy and cheap, and now he’s going to give science the same treatment.

You can’t get a philosophy degree in Wyoming

Wyoming students aren’t allowed to get a degree in philosophy.

Wyoming will become the first state in the US where you cannot receive a B.A. in Philosophy. The University of Wyoming will be the only R1 institution, the only state flagship university, and one of two land-grant universities that do not offer a B.A. in Philosophy.

It is unclear what the justification for this decision is.

It’s not unclear at all. Wyoming is a very Republican state, and the people who run the government there are doofuses who’ve never taken a philosophy course or even thought about philosophy. Ignorance breeds ignorance.

Everything is looking Odyssey now

Apparently, the Odyssey is fully engaged with pop culture now.

I think the threat that a whole civilization will die is kind of like the prophecy that Delphi gave to Croesus. Another phrase associated with Croesus is “Count no man happy until the end is known”, and I’m waiting for the ending.

I’m hoping the end will be something like that of another fabulously wealthy man of the ancient world, Marcus Licinius Crassus.

Grandpa3!

Oh no. I’m getting so old. Now my oldest son, Alaric, and his partner, Katarina, have announced that they are expecting, and that we can expect our third grandchild in November. We’ve been sent a gift registry and have been invited to a baby shower next week. I guess this is real. This will also mean that each of our 3 children have produced one grandchild each.

The baby is a boy, and they’re planning to name him Vittorio, after his mather’s grandfather.

It’s weird how we suddenly start thinking we need more grandkids, because they’re so fun and we don’t have to do any of the work. Three’s enough, and it’s actually four, since this event brings along an additional boy from a previous relationship. I guess I should be calling myself Grandpa4, but I don’t want to encourage an increasing series of exponents.

Also, the baby shower is going to have a Lilo&Stitch theme to explain the illustration above. That’s not a picture of the baby, but I won’t complain if he’s big-eared, furry blue, with big teeth. He’ll fit in perfectly with the rest of us weirdos.

>huuuaaaallllp<

This grubby-handed gentleman left a jar of raw milk outside, in 90°F heat, for two days, until the solids started to separate, chunks formed, and I see some discoloration appearing, although that could just be from the filthy state of his glassware. He says this is an “experiment.”

I’m not showing you the video, because next…he takes a big swig of the rotten, curdled milk, and I nearly lost it. Would you drink any milk, let alone raw milk, that had been left to fester in the sun for a few days? I wouldn’t make you watch that.

But if you insist, here’s a link to instagram. Mmmm. Warm lumps of slimy coagulated milk.

Then he insists that it was probably better for him than when it was fresh, because the bacteria have had time to culture and develop more complexity. He reassures us that it is totally safe.

The raw milk fanatics are totally insane.

Hey atheists — I have a question. Is Lily Jay fake?

If you’ve hung out with the atheist communities on YouTube or Instagram (and if you haven’t, congratulations!) you’ve probably encountered Lily Jay. She’s a chirpy blonde Australian woman, and convert to Islam, who makes short videos in which she tries to poke holes in atheist ideas. Her content is incredibly stupid, but she does have 3 million followers. Here’s an example of the bad, but fortunately brief, arguments she makes.

You want more evidence of stupidity? Here’s another example. There’s so much more on her YouTube channel.

She also rejects evolution for the dumbest reasons.

We evolutionists say we all evolved from one-celled organisms, but we don’t have any 2-cell or 3-cell organisms. Checkmate, atheists!

She’s all over social media. She doesn’t just pester atheists with her nonsense, but there are also lots of videos that start Hey Christians, Hey Hindus, Hey Buddhists, Hey feminists, Hey vegetarians, etc., etc., etc. all with the same sort of stupid gotcha claims. She is incredibly obnoxious. I’ve long been in the habit of instantly scrolling away when that face and the word Hey… appears.

She not only has a huge personal following, but she claims to have built a charitable organization, the Lily Jay Foundation, which has been opening up orphanages and mosques all over Africa. Or has it?

The foundation she recently established, the Lily Jay Foundation, also has a massive following.

Its logo often adorns banners that appear in her videos, usually fixed behind her.

In one of those videos, posted in February, viewers are introduced to “our newest children in Africa”.

They wear white T-shirts, adorned with the same Lily Jay Foundation logo and the Ugandan flag.

“We washed them, gave them new clothes, everything a child needs to grow up in a positive environment,” the voiceover says, over images of happy children.

Except…these propaganda videos all seem to be made with AI.

The woman who appears at the start of the video, enthusiastically announcing the establishment of the orphanage, is not the real Lily Jay.

This blonde woman is a fabrication, made with artificial intelligence. So too are the children with lollipops, and the foundation’s banner behind her.

Further, no one seems to be able to find these charitable constructs via independent sources.

The Ugandan Registration Services Bureau initially confirmed to ABC NEWS Verify that there was no orphanage registered under the Lily Jay Foundation name, or “Ada Nur”, the name Lily Jay has given to the orphanage on her website.

It turns out the foundation isn’t even registered as a charity — it’s a logistics firm.

The Lily Jay Foundation registered its first ABN in 2025, but at the bottom of the foundation’s website is the admission that it is not an actual charity.

“Lily Jay Foundation is a next-generation social enterprise and high-speed humanitarian logistics firm executing rapid aid deployment in global crisis zones,” it read.

“To maintain absolute speed and independence, we operate as a private commercial structure funded by voluntary project sponsorships, which fuel our high-speed supply chain and are currently not tax-deductible.”

If you’re curious about what anyone would have to gain by setting up a fake charity, or why they would do it, the answer is simple.

Lily Jay — real name Lily Jay Hinson — does not appear to currently reside in Australia and details about the 31-year-old’s life are difficult to pinpoint.

Her social media account shows a life of jet-setting luxury, business class travel and expensive-looking jewellery.

Clues online indicate she is originally from the Sunshine Coast and had attempted a career in music and dance before pivoting to become an Islam influencer.

I will be curious to see if her popularity starts to drop, or if YouTube or Instagram kill her lying, phony channels. But I’m not holding my breath — she says what believers want to hear, so it’ll probably continue.

Oops. Her instagram account has already been deleted.