I genuinely wonder if a prosopography of internet thinkers and movers and shakers of the 2000s-2010s would actually be a useful piece of research work for someone to build (I'm not volunteering, I should hasten to add, though it's the sort of project where I'd happily give thoughts on the data modelling).
I think some people tried something like that with their projects on Rational Wiki, but they didn't have any thoughts on visualization or organization, and they didn't have a Rankean goal of just figuring out who was connected to whom. Jon Evans, "Extropia’s Children" (2022) tried to be a prose account in the style of Nevala-Lee's
Astounding!Edit: the Pinkerite blog has an essay with diagrams on what it sees as Steven Pinker's racist and far-right connections (they make a good case that Pinker is intrigued by race 'science' and quietly boosts some people who believe in it)
Piper's Vox article certainly did not spell out that she had social connections to Sam Bankman-Fried, although she describes her section of the newsroom as "effective altruism-inspired".
I'm just trying to understand how these weird Internet people were so much more successful at offline networking and getting resources for big projects than my weird Internet people. Ok "do crimes" and "lie a lot" can help for getting access to resources!
Edit: a few years ago I would have pegged all these spaces as somewhere between the Los Angeles SF Society in the 1960s and the kind of people who hang out in comment threads, as big on talk and unconventional opinions but mostly harmless. There are worse things in the world than shy people with opinions I think are bad. But it seems like they got their hands on some levers of power.
Edit: anyone familiar with the rationalists sees
Piper's page at Vox and
her Twitter account, sees "Tyler Cowen Bryan Alexander AI risk existential risk YIMBY effective altruism," let alone the endorsement by Scott Alexander, and hears "here be a rationalist." And that is obviously relevant to a story where an EA- and rationalist-linked fraudster sends her texts confessing to misdeeds. But it took another clever angry lonely person in Australia to spell out the connection.
Edit: David Gerard's blog post has a beautiful sad moment where after criticizing rationalists for disagreeing with (all?) psychologists about IQ, and criticizing the rationalists as lacking offline achievements, he has to criticize psychiatrist Scott Alexander for talking about Adderall in the wrong way. To my knowledge Gerard has no verifiable expertise in psychiatry, he is just a sysadmin and journalist. Gerard thinks offline achievements and expertise are valuable until someone he hates has them (and because he obsessively follows the rationalists' internet posts but seems to rarely attend their parties, he blames a lot on Internet posts and less on the fact that drugs are popular in the USA and Adderall and cocaine are especially popular with bankers in the USA and "its medicinal!" is a really popular excuse for getting zonked)
I have seen this kind of pseudo-skepticism, where people cite 'the authorities' when they mean Wikipedia or what a friend told them experts think, a lot since smartphones came out. Gerard rightfully criticizes the rationalists for reading pop science books and thinking that makes them experts, but that does not stop him from pronouncing about the G/IQ construct with the confidence of Eliezer Yudkowski.