Here’s something crazy I just discovered: In 2015 Sam Altman bragged about pulling a “long con” that ensured that Reddit remained under the control of Silicon Valley insiders even though it had been bought by Conde Nast.
As you probably know last year Reddit made a deal with OpenAI to hand over data to train AI; it seems like there’s a bunch of mutual back scratching that happens behind the scenes.
One thing that really shifted my perspective was realizing how many of the people and institutions in these rationalist and rationalist-adjacent social networks are funded either directly or indirectly by Peter Thiel - even people who seem to be ideologically opposed on the surface. I wasted so much of my time arguing with people on forums about their ideology only to realize that I had been hacking at the branches instead of the roots: Peter Thiel’s money.
(Not that I mean to put all the blame on Thiel but he’s clearly a big and highly connected node in this network)
Ziz’s blog had posts that revealed his identity and mentioned some of the BD stuff, once I found them it was just a matter of putting two and two together, so to speak
Damn, I missed this and now the comment is deleted. Do you happen to remember what he said?
Yeah, I think Rolling Stone was worried about getting sued and omitted Helm’s name in the first draft (or something like that).
I know who the alleged victim was, and I think there probably was a crime and blackmail payments but the alleged victim didn’t want to come forward for a number of reasons (among other things, he’s still part of the rationalist community and has faced a lot of harassment from the public after an unrelated newspaper article outed him as being trans). I’d also point out that the only person that miricult directly accused of statutory rape was one of Yudkowsky’s employees rather than Yudkowsky himself. That being said, the journalist who wrote the Rolling Stone article claims she got a copy of the police report Helm filed and only Yudkowsky was named.
Even if miricult was total bullshit I’m confident that the alleged victim was lying about not being exploited by other rationalists; a few years later he and a couple of other people posted accounts of being sexually abused by a rationalist (unrelated to miricult) and it led to the abuser being ostracized from the rationalist community.
Anyways I know a lot more about this but I’d rather not discuss the details on a publicly viewable forum to protect the privacy of the people involved.
That part of the testimony was finally unredacted in the Epstein files that were released to the public recently, it turns out the scientist in question was Stephen Kosslyn, not Steven Pinker. You can see for yourself:
https://ep-nov-12-data.greg.technology/006/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021174.jpg
I searched the files for both Yudkowsky and Pinker, Epstein seems to have known who they were but there aren’t any emails or direct correspondence between them and nothing incriminating (yet)
I’ve thought about making one but I never got really got past the “gathering info” stage as I tend to go on hiatus for months at a time for the sake of my sanity. That being said, here are some things you might find interesting:
Extropia’s Children - a series of substack posts about the rationalists and related groups. One of the better sources of their early history that I’ve found, and has links to the original sources for a lot of stuff.
MIRI’s “Top Contributors” page - which shows that Peter Thiel was their biggest donor until 2015, when he pulled funding because he felt that they had become like a luddite Burning Man Camp (and it was also a year that the Rationalists actually did go to Burning Man). Thiel was also given an honorary position in SIAI. Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz has been their biggest funder since 2015 through Open Philanthropy.
Yudkowsky coined the term “effective altruist”, despite their claims to the contrary. Will MacAskill and Toby Ord were both LessWrongers before starting EA, and LessWrong was EA’s biggest recruitment source for years (I think this is noteworthy because EA now tries to distance themselves from the rationalists rather than acknowledging that they’re an offshoot)
FTX was also an offshoot of the rationalists/EA (hence the polyamorous group house, FTX prediction market, etc). Caroline Ellison was a personal friend of Scott Alexander Siskind and even told him about their overleveraging strategy on tumblr a few months before FTX collapsed SBF financially supported ACX and his psychiatrist, George Lerner, worked in the same office as Scott Alexander IIRC (I’ve lost track of the source, will post later if I can find it).
This recent Rolling Stone article about the Zizians - which filled in a number of gaps in my knowledge, in particular how Yudkowsky and Thiel met.
This a timeline of events related to sexual assaults in the rationalist community that I myself compiled and posted on the subreddit. (I think I have an even longer timeline of events somewhere, I’ll look for it later)
Anyways I’d be up for sharing info, there’s a bunch more stuff I know and I could basically send you a giant list of sites I’ve bookmarked over the years that would aid in mapping out the connections. (edit: I guess that wouldn’t really be “concise” but I think if we want a concise posopography we’ll have to make it ourselves)
My favorite science Youtubers? Nah, those channels are IFLScience-tier, their intended audience is literally children.
Sorry, don’t know how that happened
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/why-your-children-shouldnt-be-your
When they made an alt-right equivalent of Patreon they called it “Hatreon”. This stuff is like a game to them.
If Caroline Ellison hadn’t been in an actual relationship with a “high net-worth individual” I would have said it was just straightforward satire, but given the context I think she’s using mask of irony to pretend she isn’t revealing her true self.
Her words may be satirical, but her actions were more like “this but unironically”.
Apparently Aella and Robin Hanson showed up at vibecamp too, I guess it’s a big deal for the greater rationalist community.
SEO will pillage the commons.
My personal conspiracy theory (not sure if I actually believe this yet):
The idea that people would use generative AI to make SEO easier (and thus make search engine results worse) was not an unfortunate side effect of generative AI, it was the entire purpose. It’s no coincidence that OpenAI teamed up with Google’s biggest rival in search engines; we’re now seeing an arms race between tech giants using spambot generators to overwhelm the enemy’s filters.
The decision to make chatGPT public was not about concern for openness (if it was they would have made the earlier versions of GPT public too), it’s more that they had a business partner lined up and Google search had become enshittified enough that they thought they could pull off a successful “disruption”.
I did not. Got any details?
Also FWIW I discovered this yesterday: https://archive.ph/SFCwS
No idea if it’s true, but even if so I don’t think it would exonerate him (though it would put Aella in a worse light)
Yudkowsky is pretty open about being a sexual sadist
Since they brought up Kathy Forth I’d just like to remind everyone within a few weeks of Kathy’s death it was revealed that they had in fact known about the accusations against Brent Dill.
And yet the market is said to be “erring” and to have “irrationality” when it disagrees with rationalist ideas. Funny how that works.
the cell’s ribosomes will transcribe mRNA into a protein. It’s a little bit like an executable file for biology.
Also, because mRNA basically has root level access to your cells, your body doesn’t just shuttle it around and deliver it like the postal service. That would be a major security hazard.
I am not saying plieotropy doesn’t exist. I’m saying it’s not as big of a deal as most people in the field assume it is.
Genes determine a brain’s architectural prior just as a small amount of python code determines an ANN’s architectural prior, but the capabilities come only from scaling with compute and data (quantity and quality).
When you’re entirely shameless about your Engineer’s Disease
It’s like when he wore a fedora and started talking about 4chan greentexts in his first major interview. He just cannot help himself.
P.S. The New York Times recently listed “internet philosopher” Eliezer Yudkowsky as one of the of the major figures in the modern AI movement, this is the picture they chose to use.
Thank you!