Brent Dill has appeared on YouTube and was invited to a weekend event by a VibeCamp organizer. There is a 2 hour 39 minute twitter video about how he was supposedly wronged, and a lot of tweets back and forth about the specifics. Even his defenders say that a lot of messed up things happened in Bay Area LessWrong including lying and sexual / emotional abuse.
I posted some quotes on the Stubsack. I don’t know what to do because it looks like some messed up things happened between our friends and unnamed young people, and there were coverups, but the details will only be known if someone gets access to their email and text history and interviews them. Some of the same people are probably victims and perpetrators. We don’t need all the details to tell anyone curious about them “these spaces are full of abusers, grifters, and cult recruiters and use a lot of drugs, stay away.”
Stories about Dill putting his arm around people and telling them that they were the only two who saw what was really going on in society / their group house remind me of stories about Michael Vassar.
Dill once lived in Idaho where Aella grew up.
hello friends some extra info here:
the person in question (not Brent) is a former organizer, the two stories are either that he did something bad (possibly sexual harassment?) or that the main Vibecamp founder pushed him out, I’ve seen some google docs hinting at the latter but as with everything in this ouroboros of awfulness impossible to really say what happened
brent’s original cancellation dates back to early MIRI, the author of that video was careless with one of the codenames such that if you know a few things about the person you can tie them to a real life identity
the two loose possibilities (i’ve learned to not really trust anyone unless they have actual documentation) are that brent raped someone (possibly underage? this part i’m not 100% sure on) or the victim wanted to cover for her actual rapist and blamed brent
i find the latter really highly unlikely but that’s the scoop