I feel so sad because so many of his examples are ways to make people think you won. And we are about to see what happens when you take 20-30% of global fossil fuel and helium production offline for six months to a few years. Public relations and cooking the books can’t change that.

Its easy to make people believe you are wise and know the future. There is no way to predict the weather one month out much better than we can now, and if you plant your crops and the sun scorches them, those crops are dead and you have to wait until next season to replant.

It looks like the guests are mostly LW/EA/postrationalist bloggers, Bay Area tech executives like Paul Graham, and wealthy Libertarian pundits like Tyler Cowen. They are trying to recruit some general geeky figures:

• Bret Devereaux of ACOUP (shows no interest! I think he is serious about being a centrist Liberal who would happily shoot slavers with the 16th Maine and say his prayers afterwards)
• Dan Luu (software developer in Vancouver, BC, not SF or Seattle, hosts a critique of HPMOR )
• oktrends (our friends like data and have trouble with dating, and the original OK Cupid blog played with race thinking)
• smbc
• Tim Urban of Wait but Why, Also present at Hereticon)
• Worm web serial
• xkcd (really does not seem like someone who would like them)

Does anyone spot any outsiders they are hoping to bring in?

They also don’t want to believe in chaos theory. This post tries to explain it to them, but check out Gwern in the comments being skewered by a book written by Freeman Dyson around the time he was born. They want the future to be perfectly predictable (even though Yud says that 1 and 0 are not probabilities) and they don’t like game theory, repeated games, or non-zero-sum games, because those reward people from building trust then violating it.

I think this is why the guests are listed as blogs not names or handles. Newbies are not supposed to know that many of them have funded or boinked each other.

That is just life as a creator who makes meaningful amounts of money (you can’t control your fans or prevent them from misreading), but in addition, I think one purpose of these events is to corrupt people. Lobbyists host events in nice hotels with fancy catering for a reason.

Her last mainstream media appearance in 2021 said Luke Muehlhauser and Galef were engaged and living together. Her last big Twitter thread in 2022 was about genetic determinism.

Sounds like someone in a jurisdiction which requires all-party consent to record a conversation could sue them

Yes, promising “returns like a good year on the stock market, but no risk” usually says Ponzi.

When the forensic accountants go through OpenAI’s books in 2027 or 2028 I would like to see whether anyone but staff and suppliers made money from it.

The subtext sounds like “we guarantee your returns, then go public. If we go bankrupt you get the retail investors’ money, if we become the next Google you get your own private island.” All you have to do is trust Sam Altman and (breaks out in hysterical laughter).

Do they mean 17.5% a year? My balanced bond-equity portfolio made 14-15% annual returns over the past three years by the radical method of buying “shares of companies that make profits” and “bonds backed by my local and national government.” (Update: I made about 12% a year because I backed out of American stocks years ago, but the blandest 60% stock, 40% bond index fund in my country returned that 14-15% a year after expenses).

Vassar was trying to argue with Robin Hanson on Twitter back in 2024. Funny how the ‘mainstream’ LW posters and the ‘weird scary’ figures keep in contact!

The Behind the Bastards podcast says that a CFAR workshop or workshops was a big part of Ziz’s story of how she decided to found the Vegan Sith. It drew some connections to rationalist discourse and named the person who taught Effective Altruists that saving the shrimp might be more important than human welfare. Pretty soon that gets into the kind of sexual and emotional abuse that I’m not comfortable sneering about though. Its one thing to say that someone tweets creepy things, another to tell a story about an affair between two people I never met.

I think that many people take the techniques for social and psychological manipulation, and Yudkowsky’s narrative that he is the Chosen One, and ask “could I be the real Messiah?”

Wait, Julia Galef the skeptic married the guy who took Scientology courses and joined their Toastmasters club?

Valentine also asked Where’s the economic incentive for Wokism coming from? in 2022. He was one of the four co-founders of CFAR and left because he had been too close to Brent Dill. Previous discussion here. Someone tried to explain:

The reality is that in the Anglosphere there are lots of progressive people with money to spend on media. You can sell “woke” media to those people, and lots of it. Even more so when there’s controversy and you can get naive lefties to believe paying money to the megacorp to watch a mainstream show is a way to somehow strike back against the mean right-wingers. And to progressive people it doesn’t feel like “being lectured to about politics”, because that’s not what media with a political/values message you agree with feels like. So going woke is 100% a profit-motivated decision.

Rationalists love markets in theory, but not when they give ordinary consumers too much power or when actually making a profit is hard.

Vassar’s Twitter feed is retweets about solar power is awesome, the state should summarily execute murders if they are “drug-addicted parasites,” the UK should attack Iran because Iran attacked the US base on Diego Garcia, and Crémieux Receuil / Jordan Lasker. To me that is clearer and more important than exactly what he said about psychedelics ten years ago!

By Rationalist standards, Aella and her friends are good at asking “what could go wrong and how could we mitigate it?” I think most attendees understand “I might get bruises or herpes” better than most donors to MIRI understand that Yudkowsky might take $600k a year and just tweet some more. I would not trust them on the implementation!

This community has trouble with getting a man and a woman through a meal together before the man starts talking about pedophilia or how programming might not just not be for women. I don’t think most of them are ready for rape parties.

I forgot that Ivy Astrix says that someone called chaosprime who was active in Vibecamp and TPOT (a rationalist-adjacent Twitter community with a summer camp) turned out to be a convicted child molester. Funny how that keeps on happening!

chaosprime ran an “alternative Tantric lifestyle community” which briefly hosted Brent Dill after he was chased out of California.

My first degree was a professional degree, so after college I went out and got a paid job doing that, using the experience I had developed in paid summer jobs. Even when I was young I think I would have said no to Leverage Research.

I think that some 1980s and 1990s fantasy like The Mists of Avalon and a sprawling unfinished series has the “women are magical, men are not” trope. The author of Mists covered up for a pederast. I did not know this idea also comes up in Satanism.

Some forms of sex magic have the idea that men need a female ritual partner to be complete, which echos Scott Aaronson’s idea that he needs a woman to bear his babies to be complete and in a just world he would be the chief rabbi and the peasants and craft workers would give him their prettiest daughter.

Someone called Lennox posted some thoughts on “ideological drift” or Of Marx and Moloch where he seems to say that his time in Effective Altruism was channelling his frustration that he had not pair-bonded yet. Even though he sees many problems with EA, like the gigantic probabilistic models with incredible numbers of assumptions layered on assumptions which can only ever approve of a limited range of interventions, he still seems to think their approach is right.

Someone shared a list of incidents at these parties with me but I don’t have the link handy and I would be uncomfortable posting it anyways. Right now we have the stories by people close to Aella that they are responsible and fun, and the Buddhist poster who says there are drugs and unclear boundaries. I would not recommend that anyone explore risky things with our friends.

Edit, was the sprawling series Wheel of Time?

Edit, Lennox’ post features Bob Jacobs in the comments politely explaining that Effective Altruists don’t understand socialism and are very open to race pseudoscience/HBD and hostile to arguments like “a variety of studies show that cooperatives are more effective than hierarchical corporations, and EA orgs could easily be structured as coops”

Back and forth a few years ago on the SlateStarCodex subredit, roughly:

Scott Alexander: Bay Area rationality is wonderful, we have foundations and group homes and jolly social activities and a Solistice ritual and even “Reciprocity and Propinquity: two different rationalist dating/matchmaking services”

Rando:

I don’t know, I live in a nice community in a different city where people I know have lots of Shabbat dinners, choirs, board game nights, discussions, etc. And zero people I know have joined a cult, and one person I know has developed psychosis, but she had a family history of psychosis, starting having symptoms in early adulthood, and pretty quickly went on antipsychotics and got a lot better.

Is it just that California attracts weird shit and if you put people in California, whatever they’re already doing will get culty?

Alexander: base rates! how do your demographics compare to ours?

Rando:

Probably similar size and age? Nearly everyone I knew has parents who are teachers/lawyers/doctors/therapists/etc, so I guess upper middle class according to that book you wrote about a while ago.

It’s not like everyone’s doing great, lots of people have depression and anxiety and probably smoke more weed than is good for them. Most of those people already had those problems from their adolescence.

But our rates of weird problems, like multiple people with overlapping psychoses tied to some guy, are low.

Has the person in the comments musing about whether women like to quantity things ever watched a mother with small children or a retired woman on a fixed income juggling membership rewards points, coupons, and competing places to shop?