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. (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.
When they made an alt-right equivalent of Patreon they called it “Hatreon”. This stuff is like a game to them.
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
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.
update: Verdon is now accusing another AI researcher of exposing him: https://twitter.com/GillVerd/status/1730796306535514472
I highly suspect the voice analysis thing was just to confirm what they already knew, otherwise it would have been like looking for a needle in a haystack.
People on twitter have been speculating that someone who knew him simply ratted him out.
“Our goal is really to increase the scope and scale of civilization as measured in terms of its energy production and consumption,” h
old and busted: paperclip maximizer
new hotness: entropy maximizer
In a world of moral totalitarianism, sometimes freedom looks like a short story about sex tourism in the Philippines.
I literally lol’d. Beyond parody.
the answer is to get Peter Thiel to try to magic up Dimes Square out of nothing, isn’t it?
On a actually serious note: When I look back at the multiple years I spent on sneerclub and otherwise following the rationalists, I increasingly feel that I had been tilting at windmills. I had spent most of that time making fun of them instead of looking into their finances, and in doing so I had missed the big picture and simply hadn’t realized how integral Peter Thiel was in propping them up and building a network to support them.
Thiel funds or funded MIRI, EA groups, Curtis Yarvin, FTX and OpenAI.
Thank you!