Listening to Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich (audiobook, not podcast), and learning heaps about people I’ve known were part of the Rationalist orbit for years, but hadn’t dug too much into, like Balaji Srinivasan. He apparently used the red/blue/grey tribe setup in The Network State, which was published long after Scott’s SSC post using the same language.

I remember that Balaji went nutty when the NYT published about Scott Alexander. Durán attributes that to Cade Metz reporting on Balaji telling Yarvin that they might need to intimidate/harass journalists to keep them from reporting on their fascist bullshit, but all the parallels make me wonder how long they knew/read each other. Did Scott influence Balaji first, or the other way around?

Certainly I am amused that none of the Rationalists have been named yet, 3 hours in. I wonder if it rankles, knowing how bad Eliezer has wanted to make something that people would actually pay for, having a whole book written about Thiel and Yarvin and Srinivasan where he doesn’t rate at all because he’s just some podunk little cult leader who has to beg for grants and find girlfriends to live with and do his laundry while he eats the crumbs off of their tables. Or if it stung Scott when Srinivasan’s book was panned as idiotic, knowing that at least some of those ideas were his.

EY has recapitulated a ton of bullshit he learned as a teenager hanging out on the Extropians listserv with older shitty libertarian dudes. The archives are like a proto-LW, with conversations about race and intelligence, sex and kinks, gender differences, armchair geopolitics, etc, mixed in with fantasizing about the glorious transhuman future. I don’t know that anyone was using poly as a term at that point, but everything I’ve read about the Extropians suggests they were eager early adopters of bullshit Evo-psych ideas about men having “evolved” to fuck lots of women.

While I wouldn’t rule out family pressure, Scott went to med school in Ireland only after he couldn’t figure out how to do anything else. He only barely achieved a residency by asking his dad to pull strings (after sneering himself for ages about the classes he was taking, the arrogant asshole). His Livejournal is a whole fucking read.

Ezra Klein appears to be an SSC/ACX reader from way back, and posted one of Scott’s pieces about race and policing in Vox more than 10 years ago (or maybe he was still at the Post?).

Dylan Whosit who is still at Vox has been a Scott superfan for forever (interviewed him around the time the Metalculus gathering - hosted at Lightcone campus, of course- was profiled in the NYT), Kelsey Piper got hired at Vox as a 23-24 year old on the basis of her rationalist Tumblr blogging, Vox even hired Scott to write an article once. Another major LWer/fanfic partner of Eliezer’s also got hired at Vox for a few years, Miranda Dixon-Luidenberg.

Klein is quite open about being an EA, asked Julia Wise to cover his podcast when he went out on paternity leave a few years ago, interviewed Kelsey and a number of SAC/ACX faves on his NYT podcast, and spent his first few years sanewashing AI safety issues in between his deeply uncritical conversations with conservatives and analyses of policy. I’m pretty sure he knows a lot of the rationalist bigwigs socially.

Open Philanthropy has kept the lights on at MIRI and CFAR since the beginning (also now Lightcone), as well as funding lots of offshoot “AI safety” entities like Redwood Research, the MIRI/CFAR summer AI camps at Berkeley and in Europe (that one itself almost certainly split off in response to the behaving-inappropriately-with-teenagers issue), academic AI groups founded or led by MIRI alums (Berkeley Existential Risk, others), I could go on. Ajeya Cotra (not sure if she’s still there) was active on LW for a while, maybe founded a magazine with Kelsey Piper? She I think was a program manager at Open Phil and oversaw a lot of the AI-safety funding work.

Kelsey Piper isn’t a guess, she is absolutely and unequivocally the co-author of Project Lawful. She’s been using the screenname for years, with documentable links to her legal name, she participated in the fan Discord using personally-identifying info, the fan base talked about it as an open secret. It’s particularly wild given that she reported on EY at Vox multiple times while they were writing it.

Gretta writes other erotic glowfics with EY. He also has written some with Miranda Dixon-Laudenberg (sp?), another LWer (who got a job at Vox for a time, likely through Piper).

Given the organizer’s abysmal response to your own assault, I wonder about all the things that didn’t rise to the level of an incident report, or that participants didn’t even bring to the organizers because they think it was a them problem (“I should be able to take this much pain” / “I don’t want to lose access to this community” / “but he’s So Important For The Movement” / “I could have been clearer”, etc).

An orgy and no one standing off to the side making sure everything is ok? That sounds fucking stupid. Allowing people’s personal info, including PHOTOS, to be shared with a whole email list? And we’re supposed to believe them that they’re the world’s smartest people?

Jesus Christ these fucking people. Greta, EY’s girlfriend, erotica co-author, Discord moderator, one-time MIRI communications director (now having stepped back to just be his “executive assistant”), is fucking Duncan Sabien? Who I’m pretty sure is still married to EY’s ex-spouse?

I just came across CJ the X recently, apropos of an interview he did with C. Thi Nguyen about his book The Score. CJ mentioned, mid-interview, that they were a speaker at Slutcon, and I was a bit surprised. The interview wasn’t taking any turns I would expect from someone into the rationalists (AI, power, gender, intelligence, control, immortality, etc.) Does anyone know their deal? Why are they joining this scene?

Uh, the “less straight and male” aspect of this lineup seems pretty blatantly aimed at enticing straight male applicants - this is not a lineup that encourages women to apply, this is honey-trap tactics.

Whose photos show up at the top? Hot girls! Don’t you want to come be forced to make videos living in a swanky hotel with hot girls who also care about the end of the world?

I wonder if they even do! Mark Ruffalo and Stephen Fry gushed over the Kill book, so maybe these influencers actually have been posting to LW since they were tweens, like Kelsey Piper. But something tells me that the MIRI/CFAR/Lightcone team has just been networking, looking for hot, mathy girls who believe in race realism to be the face of the movement, to hide behind. I wonder what they’re being paid.

Fucking gross.

These details are great, CinnasVerses. I haven’t looked for the past year or so but don’t think I ever saw CFAR report other business income from event rentals, which is the way they keep the lights on and why they hire operations staff paid a ludicrous amount of money. CFAR also has the B&B/event center out of town they bought that Anna Salomon mentioned in her recent “I’ve been paid a salary the past five years to do nothing but meditate on how I want to spend Eliezer’s coattail money going forward” announcement. I’m swamped at the moment, but maybe I’ll go back and look this stuff up in a month or two.

Co-written by Kelsey Piper, onetime preteen fan of HPMOR who grew up to land a sweet Effective-Altruism “journalist” position at Vox based not on any actual journalism experience but rather on the strength of her rationalist tumblrblogging.

This from a man who runs an all-ages Discord to discuss his BDSM teacher-student AI-doom philosophy fanfic, including users who have identified themselves as minors