Weird Internet Communities

[Jubal]

Teacher-student relationships (not just mentor-mentee relationships) seem very common between tenured faculty and students at wealthy US universities.

This is one of those things where I'm not sure how much it's the case everywhere, or if the US has a specific problem, or if the US is just more on it with calling out the problem, or what. I've definitely seen a lot of US scholars with a very particularly forceful public approach against staff having relationships with anyone who is in a study position, whereas it just doesn't seem to be something European academics discuss and that may mean there's a bit more quietly sweeping it under the table or it may mean there's less of a problem and I'm not sure what the balance of those things is (though I've heard enough stories from the European side to suspect that there's a lot of sweeping it under the table going on).

[dubsartur]

Teacher-student relationships (not just mentor-mentee relationships) seem very common between tenured faculty and students at wealthy US universities.

This is one of those things where I'm not sure how much it's the case everywhere, or if the US has a specific problem, or if the US is just more on it with calling out the problem, or what. I've definitely seen a lot of US scholars with a very particularly forceful public approach against staff having relationships with anyone who is in a study position, whereas it just doesn't seem to be something European academics discuss and that may mean there's a bit more quietly sweeping it under the table or it may mean there's less of a problem and I'm not sure what the balance of those things is (though I've heard enough stories from the European side to suspect that there's a lot of sweeping it under the table going on).

It is hard for me because I mostly see the version from people who like to share strong opinions on old or social media.  My understanding is that universities with such policies imposed them in response to a lot of bad behaviour and essays by tenured professors insisting that there is nothing wrong with it, and that in practice these policies are more often enforced against TAs than tenured faculty.  The social media discourse on the topic adds jealousy and discomfort with the fact that humans vary and are not infinitely maleable (easier to forbid than engage with the complexities of a relationship between a yoga instructor and her cutest student, or a 25 year old and a 19 year old).  A lot of bad people have discovered that sexually frustrated people are easy to line up behind a CAUSE, so they contrive reasons to sexually frustrate junior members of their community.  And a certain kind of bad person learns to climb in an organization to on one hand get sexual access to more people, but on the other hand use power in the organization to cover up any complaints ("the most active people in our community are spending so much energy getting together, breaking up, and talking about it that our official activities are stagnant" is a complaint).

I also believe that some of the absolute discourse during the Internet feminism wars grew out of cases like the ones discussed here, where a powerful person was using his place in the community to get laid and either treating partners badly or preferring them, and nobody with concerns dared name them directly just speak of general principles.

[dubsartur]

An American financier named Eric Falkenstein thinks that the California Effective Altruism movement of young, unattached, ideologically committed people was used to create a network of trusted people at key international locations in the same way that say Armenians in 16th/17th century Old World or Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia dealt efficiently with each other across long distance because they spoke each other's language, were married into each other's families, worshipped the same way, and so on.  Wikipedia says that Falkenstein converted to Christianity at the age of 51 which might be why he does not use the term 'affinity fraud' (when someone joins a church or a club, makes friends, convinces them to invest in a venture, and runs off with the money)

A casual reader might get the impression that William McAskill the philosopher was part of the California branch, but as far as I know he never lived in CA and just saw fellow travellers at events.

He found a FTX white paper circa 2019 on how to spot fake trading which is amusing.

[dubsartur]

An (rolls dice) effective altruist from (rolls dice) New York with a background in (rolls dice) trading assets at Jane Street has written a longform retrospective on SBF which starts "anyone could have been fooled!" but then moves on to "wait, after SBF offered me a job, after one conversation with someone familiar with financial fraud I had several dozen questions for him, and the first time I talked to a friend outside the world of finance he said 'this business sounds like a scam.'" It does not ask why effective altruists and LessWrong rationalists keep being involved in major frauds, scams, and cult-like movements beyond "moving people to another country, working them long hours, and encouraging them to date each other makes it easy to manipulate them." https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/michael-lewis-s-blind-side

[dubsartur]

After the collapse of MetaMed (the startup which promised to revolutionize medical care through the power of LessWrong Rationalism!) Sarah Constantin wrote essays like: https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html

It seems to me that the increasingly ill-named "Rationalist Community" in Berkeley has, in practice, a core value of "unconditional tolerance of weirdos." It is a haven for outcasts and a paradise for bohemians. It is a social community based on warm connections of mutual support and fun between people who don't fit in with the broader society.

We've built, over the years, a number of sharehouses, a serious plan for a baugruppe, preliminary plans for an unschooling center, and the beginnings of mutual aid organizations and dispute resolution mechanisms. We're actually doing this. It takes time, but there's visible progress on the ground.

I live on a street with my friends as neighbors. Hardly anybody in my generation gets to say that.

What we're not doing well at, as a community, is external-facing projects.

I have heard the same kind of phrasing from people in other geeky cultures which emerged out of SoCal, such as the Society for Creative Anachronism.  And the way these communities have sometimes ended up covering for members who commit violent crimes, let alone a bit of embezzlement, has been written about elsewhere.

Edit: she has another post from 2017 Effective Altruism has a Lying problem https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/01/17/ea-has-a-lying-problem.html

if there are signs that EA orgs, as they grow and professionalize, are deliberately targeting growth among less-critical, less-intellectually-engaged, lower-integrity donors, while being dismissive towards intelligent and serious critics, which I think some of the discussions I've quoted on the GWWC pledge suggest, then it makes me worry that they're trying to get money out of people's weaknesses rather than gaining from their strengths.

I think that somehow these movements were good at creating both online spaces and social scenes in key areas such as Oxford, Greater NYC, and the SF Bay Area (did not know about Berkeley).  I have to be honest that this kind of commune culture is totally beyond my experience.  But it would be relevant to know (for example) did Dominic Cummings just read their web postings, or was he part of the face-to-face culture?  And how did this geeky SoCal community end up controlling real money, when the LA SF Society mostly just held meetings and argued with each other?  Close-knit nerdy communities have been full of drama since Plato died and his students had to decide who was in charge of the Academy, or the Pythagoreans tossed someone off a boat for proving there are irrational numbers.

[dubsartur]

A software person in the USA just told his followers that big parts of this (gestures to the thread) are just a typical California apocalyptic cult as has been common since the 1930s.  That person has a cryptocurrency address and wants you to know that spicy autocorrect will change everything for the good as creatives become AI-feeders.  A typical California Ideology is that if we turn everything into data and feed it into the computer our problems will be solved, and if actually existing computers don't seem so helpful we just need to give them more power.

So there are a lot of messages about the impending doom or rebirth of the world circulating in parts of these spaces, and someone can reject one of them ("my company which is currently raising funds with several well-known VC firms is not building Skynet" or "anomalous sensor readings on classified hardware are neither aliens nor angels") but fall for others.

The NXIVM cult / self-help movement / pyramid scheme was also based in New York City and had many tropes which will be familiar to anyone who has looked into all of this (lots of bad Latin, 'rationality', 'doing well by doing good', a male Leader surrounded by adoring women)

[dubsartur]

Cathy O'Neil interviewed someone who dropped out of the Effective Altruism movement while still practicing some of the belief system.  Interviewee reports that a philosophy professor thinks EA is getting major influence in philosophy departments in the UK through donations. Contrast the LessWrongers whose preferred way to interact with academe is to read pop science books and computer science and psychology papers and who tend to be dismissive of philosophy, history, philology, etc. https://mathbabe.org/2024/03/16/an-interview-with-someone-who-left-effective-altruism/ (And Sam Bankman "if you wrote a book you made a mistake" Fried the son of two professors)

Interviewee, like the people above, noticed that many of the movement leaders are thinky talky people not doers ... except that some EA people now control big money!

Edit: American on how he spent a year working for a crypto company trying to decide whether it was as scammy and fly-by-night as it seemed then left when he decided the answer was "yes" https://johnsundman.substack.com/p/100-bafflegab

[dubsartur]

An ex-Mormon blogger has a long essay looking at David Gerard's very active Internet postings since the oughties.  Apparently he is an active Wikipedia editor as well as RationalWiki editor and uses Wikipedia to fight his beefs with other weird Internet people and movements.

So again, be suspicious of anyone who wants you to feel angry or scared about weird Internet people, but some of these movements have acquired offline power and they have a long history that is very well documented.