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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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I'm seeing lots of memetic breathlessness on twitter as if he is a Person That Matters, but...I don't get it.

I have been noticing many such people come out of the woodwork recently. They retweet each other, they go to each other's parties, they go on each others' podcasts (and on Dwarkesh's podcast in particular), they seem reasonably smart, but as far as I can tell it's a kind of accomplishment-larp. There's a very noticeable line between people like Sutskever who have accomplished something and people like this guy who write long posts.

Who are some other of the many people you noticed?

I mean all kinds of people are on Dwarkesh‘s podcast, some certainly have achieved something (Zuckerberg) others maybe less (Aschenbrenner … though he has definitely done a lot with his so far fairly short adulthood).

But I am not sure I see a strong pattern here (unless your threshold for accomplishment is very high).

Lex Fridman. Yuval Noah Harari. And let's be honest : Big Yud.

Kiwi Farms has a good phrase for this sort of thing: rat king. There are a lot of extremely online trans people that all seem to know each other, promote each other, carry water for each other when one is accused of bad behavior, etc.