Copying what other people tell you should like is not a good strategy whether the others are high-school bullies or a sex worker slash influencer. One of the bangers at the birthday gangbang found he had more fun making out with a strange woman than giving the birthday girl what she wanted and I hope he explored that.
Just in case you thought Yud’s attitude towards minors, sex, and substance use was worse than average for a Rationalist, the NYT asked around (archive):
Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said. One house threw lavish events for the A.I. community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation. … The (Genesis) house (in San Francisco) quickly became a hub for events. Eric Zhu, 19, a tech entrepreneur, said he used to sneak into parties there when he was about 13. No one checked anyone’s age, he said, and “it was pretty crazy.”
They saw a police report where a woman says she had to climb a gate at one of these parties to escape a man who demanded she have sex with him. Sounds like a great environment for a seventh-grader!
Also features “Jimmy Chen, who goes by the social media handle ‘Spice King of Zanzibar.’”
I don’t think Boyle has any education or experience in software development, apocalyptic fringe movements, etc. although he can probably whip up a script jn his hedge-fund day job. His finance and econ vlogging seems fine to me.
Rationalists have a disconcerting mix of boundless confidence that they are so special, and sexual practices and abuse that any beat reporter has seen many times over.
One reason you will see less of me here is that learning about these people turns me off people.
Letting normies who never learned to spot a mailing-list blowhard and a comment-section troll onto the Internet was a mistake.
Back when our friends were just forum and Tumblr posters there was the Center for Critical Thinking and the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Who could be against that?
6 August 2013, SANTA ROSA, Calif. (CN) – In a lurid lawsuit, a former employee claims the Marin County-based Foundation for Critical Thinking is a “cultlike” group whose married bosses tried to make him have sex with the wife, and fired him for refusing. … Hale, a 40-year-old married man and father, claims he quit his job as a high school teacher to accept an offer to work as a “full-time Fellow” for the Foundation for Critical Thinking (FCT) in August 2004. According to the complaint, the Foundation for Critical Thinking, based in Tomales, “trains educators how to analyze information in an ‘objective ‘fair-minded’ manner, without allowing their own biases, prejudices and opinions to influence their objective analysis of an issue. It is a ‘think tank’ of sorts that promotes a casual work environment. Defendants Elder and Paul frequently hold meetings at both FCT offices and their personal residence, where they sit and lie on the floor amongst pillows. To encourage the free flow of ideas, defendants Elder and Paul often discuss uncomfortable topics, and encourage employees to rid themselves of social, including sexual, taboos. … About three years after he was hired, Hale claims, Elder and Paul began bringing up “inappropriate sexual topics” and asking him “about his sex life with his wife” during business meetings. … In October 2010, Hale claims, Elder and Paul graduated from discussing sex to encouraging him to have sex with Elder. After calling Hale to a meeting, Paul “explained to Hale that he was concerned about defendant Elder, his younger wife by approximately 20 years, and wanted to ensure that her sexual urges could be satisfied,” the complaint states. “Defendant Paul proposed that Hale should have sexual intercourse with Paul’s wife, defendant Elder, while defendant Paul observed them. Hale immediately became uncomfortable and anxious, as he listened to defendant Paul, and worried about his ability to keep his job, if he declined. Hale politely declined defendant Paul’s request.”
I wonder how many of our friends deliberately studied other grifts and not just pop psychology books, or if this is just in the water. Their form 990 is here, and shows they lost most of their income in 2019 and are struggling since.
Never heard of him and can’t find him in the archives of SneerClub or TechTakes just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Christiano
Manifund’sTeam page lists just two employees, the CEO and a Carol N who started two months ago. Much professional, so effective, wow. https://manifund.org/about
Noah Smith has an Econ PhD, contacts at YCombinator, and lives in San Francisco. He is in the hot take business. I always felt bad vibes from him.
YT suggested a Dwarkesh interview with Ajeya Cotra next to your video. Cotra is A UC Berkeley grad who works at OpenPhil and promotes and is promoted by Kelsey Piper.
A woman with the Bsky handle genna has them clocked:
a LOT of the techniques and ideologies (faith in unpaid, uncomfortable labour as a way to modify behaviour, impossible/humiliating tasks) seem inspired by the widespread and widely criticized American wilderness reform schools/for-profit troubled teen industry.
At least the sea will swallow Miami like unto Port Royal.
The latest tech bro attack on public education is Alpha School for teenagers. One reporter thinks that if we take the accounts claiming to be students are real then:
…we have to take semi-seriously the question of whether Alpha School is a cult? A set of indoctrination camps for the airport-book class? What the hell is happening here?
A focus on judging people by biometrics, cult criticism, and assertion that LLMs can replace teachers. Someone on Bsky replies:
The cult of Alpha school is strong in Miami-where the Miami tech/finance/crypto bro set is just generally dumber (or less intellectual, less cultured, less educated) and far less ethical than in other parts of the country (not that silicon valley tech bros are awesome, but the worst ones move here)
Hereticon got started in Miami.
Looking back, the pushback against Kathy Forth and Sarah Constantin suggesting that lying or sexual misconduct might be problems in the community would have been a red flag too. So was Yud’s demand that a random German blogger who criticized him post a retraction on every blog post. But I lived in comforting darkness until FTX went bankrupt!
Whisper networks are awful, but the way to prevent them is to not let creeps into your community in the first place. And if you trust someone enough to ask them for advice like this, you should probably listen to what they say, even if it is “vague and hard for me to concretely visualize.”
Nonlinear Fund threatened to sue the person who said they were bad bosses with no boundaries who wasted funds! There was a bet on the Manifold prediction market about it. Narrator: Nonlinear did not sue.
Sabine Hossenfelder says she got pitched to create a series of videos about AI doom with a hint that she did not have to disclose the sponsorship (“e.g. AI job loss, AI surveillance, AI totaliterianism, AI takeover, AI-generated pandemics, AI warfare, etc.”) Someone shared a screenshot where the pitch comes from by Drew Spartz using funds from the “Center for AI Safety” in San Francisco. Hossenfelder is a physicist and science communicator who turned to her connections in the Thielsphere and started to make conspiratorial videos about how science is fake and if scientists don’t watch out they will be defunded after her last postdoc expired. We last met Drew Spartz in 2023, where he worked for an “effective altruist organization” named the Nonlinear Fund (part 1) - (part 2). Nonlinear’s modus operandi was allegedly hiring live-in personal assistants to help them be digital nomads, having “casual romantic relationships” with them, asking them to commit crimes, then not paying them.
It always surprises me when someone starts with “AI safety is a sex cult inspired by bad science fiction” or “prompt engineering is ritual magic without the fun sacred names” and then wheels to “but chatbots and ‘Agentic AI’ are still the wave of the future!”
Muhammad also discovered that God wanted him to marry as many women as he liked, but did not want them to remarry after he died. Joseph Smith ‘married’ a lot of younger women too. So I think if you let people rewrite social rules, many of them will decide that the new rule is “I fuck whoever I want, but they only fuck me.”
Oof, if he was raised by Internet Libertarians, I understand why he became such a shitty person.
Sex at Dawn came out in 2010 and was heavily hyped online. It does not seem to have got positive attention in academia. The 2009 edition of The Ethical Slut has polyamory in the title.
The student who says he was attending these parties aged 13 seems to be the sperm race guy