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PaperclipPerfector  7hr ago (text post)   574 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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This kind of thing is why I'm finding the current tizzy over AI doom so hard to believe. Because the same companies that are dressing up in the robes of Cassandra and crying "Doom, doom, unless there is a pause!" are...

... building biolabs for Claude to frolic and play in, doing research (to cure all human ills, of course!)

In a Reuters interview on Tuesday, Anthropic's head of life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, confirmed the startup's wet lab.

"We believe that to do biology, the final test is still and will be for a while in real lab work," he said. "We absolutely are doing that today, and I would describe our approach as being typical of what you would see in most biotech companies, where there's some amount of that that we're doing in our own facilities and some amount of that that we're working with external partners on."

A spokesperson later clarified that Anthropic's lab is not for drug discovery specifically, declining to elaborate.

...Like other biotech companies, Anthropic is embracing physical automation, said the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The startup wants to push how its Claude AI can direct robotic units to carry out science experiments with limited human intervention, one of the people said. Still, Anthropic believes that human oversight and involvement are essential for safety, its spokesperson said.

Gosh, it is so reassuring that Dario Amodei isn't doing anything to hasten the chances that AI will create some kind of bioweapon to kill off humans, like the doomers fear!

Do you see why people think all these calls for a pause are only some kind of scam by the big companies to get regulations passed that will favour them and copper-fasten their positions as the only sources for AI in general?

Who is up for re-reading The Sequences together? It seems like a good time to refloat the idea since everybody's all in a tizzy about AI.

In addition, my related side project is far enough along to be useful:

https://skeptics-annotated-sequences.vercel.app/

I had various AI models go through and annotate with what studies were referenced, whether they've held up, and any other objections. I also did a few passes of an AI rebutting the previous AI, but didn't get far before I ran out of tokens. IMO Opus' comments are garbage, but Fable's are actually pretty good. But I haven't read them all, and this would be a good opportunity to. See https://skeptics-annotated-sequences.vercel.app/ReligionsClaimToBeNonDisprovable.html for a particularly annotated example. Summaries of the findings are all linked from https://skeptics-annotated-sequences.vercel.app/About.html

Who else is interested in a read-through? Anybody want to donate some tokens to get more sympathetic bot comments?

Crazy that Yud wrote them almost 20 years ago

Posted in wrong thread?

Possibly, although Yud discussions can go CW pretty quickly. Where should it have gone?

The latest round of German state election results are in, with great gains for the left-wing parties and the AfD, and a crisis of confidence for the center-right CDU, which had its worst election results in modern German history.

After the AfD’s historic win in Saxony-Anhalt two weeks ago, all eyes turned to the state elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin, which were held yesterday. In Berlin, the CDU dropped from the largest to second-largest party, which will push it out of government. This result was not unexpected: the Left, Greens, and SPD had won enough seats to form a left-wing coalition government in the 2021 Berlin election, and the CDU only snuck into power after those results were overturned due to election irregularities. The Left, led by Turkish dual-citizen Elif Eralp, saw the greatest gains, at 26% of the vote, while the AfD also did quite respectably, at 16%. The CDU, Greens, and SPD all lost seats, but the Left, Greens, and SPD will be able to easily form a coalition government.

(Incidentally, for anyone who was hoping that the AfD would do better in Berlin, the city’s demographics makes that almost impossible. “As of December 2025, about 42.3% registered residents of Berlin had a migration background, compared with 29.9% in 2015. Out of that, 976,419 residents (24.9%) were foreign nationals and 678,774 (17.3%) were German citizens with a migration background.” (Wikipedia) Even if the AfD were to somehow convince every single ethnic German in the city to oust the Ausländer, ethnic Germans will soon be a minority in their own capital city.)

Yesterday’s real electoral drama wasn’t in Berlin, however, but in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the CDU failed to overcome the five percent hurdle and so won zero seats in parliament. This is the first time that the CDU/CSU has failed to receive any seats in a state or federal election. The AfD, on the other hand, surpassed all recent polls, gaining 38% of the vote and 32/71 seats. Of course, this will still result in a left-wing government, as all of the remaining seats were won by the Left, Greens, and SPD.

One thing I can’t quite understand is where all of the CDU voters went. Looking at opinion polls in the run-up to the election, the AfD was at a stable ~35% of the vote for the past year, while the CDU dropped from 13% to ultimately less than 5%. Did the center-right CDU voters mostly switch to the center-left SPD? This is what seems to have happened, but I have no real insight as to why, except that no one seems to like the CDU these days. If any of our resident Germans can chime in, I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts.

Foreign Nationals are allowed to vote? Something feels quite wrong to lose the ability to control the destiny of your people in such a short time period.

It’s amazing how far many of us have gone since only 20 years ago and believing we could Democratize the world to now I would not consider myself a believer of Democracy in Germany because of the simply fact that ethnic Germans in half a generation lost the ability to control their own politics.

Naturalized citizens and their citizen descendants can vote, including those who still hold citizenship in their home countries. As those numbers increase, the AfD will have a harder and harder time gaining traction. Not that it really matters in Berlin. The city is so left-wing, they passed a non-binding referendum five years ago to seize thousands of apartment buildings from their corporate owners, compensate them at less than market rates, and then convert the buildings to social housing projects. Now that the CDU is out, there’s a good chance the new government will try to pass a binding referendum to the same effect.

Foreign Nationals are allowed to vote?

No they aren't? Although Germany's state-funded propaganda outlet wrote an article last year about how hopelessly unfair it is that almost 60% of immigrants are not allowed to vote (because they aren't citizens of Germany), even they conclude that that's unlikely to change any time soon.

One exception is that EU citizens who live in Berlin can vote in city council elections, per https://voteberlin.eu/en/who-is-eligible-to-vote-in-the-bvv-elections/

Berlin is a city-state, so "Berlin city council" has the powers of a state government - this is a case where EU law (which allows EU citizens to vote in "municipal" elections wherever in the EU they live even if they are not a citizen of the relevant country) gives non-German EU citizens more power than the EU intended.

I don't actually know much about the German government, so "city council" might have been the wrong term. On the website I linked it's called a "BVV", which Wikipedia describes as an "assembly of borough representatives". Each BVV administers one of the twelve districts in Berlin, and it seems to be a separate thing from the Berlin House of Representatives that acts as the state government.

It’s amazing how far many of us have gone since only 20 years ago and believing we could Democratize the world to now I would not consider myself a believer of Democracy in Germany because of the simply fact that ethnic Germans in half a generation lost the ability to control their own politics.

My thoughts as well. Sweden is also in this situation and several others are rushing headlong into it.

I've been trying for a while to think of any mistakes nations have made of the same magnitude, throughout history. Vortigern hiring the Saxons might be an instructive one.

It's so weird to me, though fitting in retrospect, that sanctimonious grundyism is what's finally killing Europe. Old ladies tutting reproachfully at anyone who makes non-socially-approved arguments turns out to be an existential threat. Or perhaps it's just that the men have forgotten God and their own right place in the world.

Old ladies tutting reproachfully at anyone who makes non-socially-approved arguments turns out to be an existential threat.

I am also often stunned by the power of consensus in a variety of fields but don't they also just arrest you for wrongspeech over there? It's not like it's a fair playing field.

I've been trying for a while to think of any mistakes nations have made of the same magnitude, throughout history.

The Soviets walking out of the UN and this allowing the West to fight the Korean War.

Did the center-right CDU voters mostly switch to the center-left SPD?

Isn't the more likely possibility that they abstained?

I’m sure many did abstain, but I didn’t think the polls included an abstention option. If that’s accurate, the CDU voters should have shown up in the polls somewhere.

Don't they normally include "likely voters"? If someone says "I'm not going to vote" don't they just get excluded?

Good point.

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