Architeuthis

There's an actual explanation in the original article about some of the wardrobe choices. It's even dumber, and it involves effective altruism.

It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.”

That's the trouble with talking about thoroughly disingenuous people, you get bogged down with defining if they meant to mean what they wrote. It's all optics.

Also, since no one has mentioned it in the comments so far, it says he used to actually send money to fucking Quillete.

Either that or he let his performative contrarianism get out of hand, he did delete the post after all.

Still, it's just like an HBD enthusiast heavy into eugenic optimisation to think that there might be something to measuring skulls, even if it didn't pan out the first time, maybe if they had known about IQ it would have been different, it's a shame the woke mob has made using calipers on school children a crime, etc.

To be really precise it was about measuring the size and distribution of all sorts of skull irregularities (the proverbial 'bumps') and mapping them to various traits, it's basically palm reading for the head.

Siskind is just being his usual disingenuous self, i.e. 'everyone always uses skull shape' (to indicate that my intellectual precursors were clowns) is obviously referencing phrenology, then immediately motte-and-baiieys it to a claim of correlation of cranial capacity and IQ.

Except for M&B sleight of hand to work the claim shift shouldn't happen in the same sentence, otherwise it's extremely obvious that you are claiming one thing while carrying water for the other thing (phrenology), which is probably why he ended up deleting the post.

Alexandros Marinos, whom I read as engaged-with-but-skeptical-of the “Rationalist” community, says:

Seeing as Marinos' whole beef with Siskind was about the latter's dismissal of invermectin as a potent anti-covid concoction, I would hesitate to cite him as an authority on research standards.

Article worth it just for mentioning Scotty hilariously attempting to whitewash phrenology for counter-culture clout, found in another account that seems to be deep in a covid conspiracy rabbit hole at the moment.

Over time FHI faced increasing administrative headwinds within the Faculty of Philosophy (the Institute’s organizational home). Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down.

Sound like Oxford increasingly did not want anything to do with them.

edit: Here's a 94 page "final report" that seems more geared towards a rationalist audience.

Wonder what this was about:

Why we failed [...] There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities. When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders is important.

If I remember correctly SBF taking the stand was completely against his lawyers' recommendations, and in general he seems to have a really hard time doing what people who know better tell him to, such as don't DM journalists about your crimes and definitely don't start a substack detailing how you felt justified in doing them, and also trying to 'explain yourself' to prosecution witnesses is witness tampering and will get your bail revoked.

Model City Mondays is thing in siskind's substack, and Prospera is featured constantly.

It's seasteading that's the strictly libertarian thing where you fuck off to the ends of the earth to do drugs and marry twelve-year-olds. Despite the considerable overlap charter cities seem more of a rat/stembrained thing were you decide you're going to be the one to do a polis from first principles but get it right this time.

conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics [...] overcivilized and effete Teutons

Kind of off topic, but this piece of wall to wall insanity reminded me how Steven Pinker tried to explain away southern US crime rates that didn't fit with his Violence Is Declining And In Fact Everything's Improving Inexorably (As Long As You Don't Rock The Boat) thesis by randomly blaming irish-catholic sheepherder genealogy.

Maybe he's the guy who goes to the orgy just to hold hands.

In yet another part of the article:

She had found herself in both an intellectual community and a demimonde, with a running list of inside jokes and in-group norms. Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.

More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.