Weird Internet Communities

[dubsartur]

I am wondering whether to give in and do a newspaper-clippings-and-ball-of-string map to show the connections between the American Rationalists, American or Right Libertarians, Effective Altruism, 'human biodiversity' (sic), neoreaction, and the American pundit-economists with blogs (plus a few figures with lives and influence off the Internet such as Steven Pinker and Peter Thiel).  I am so not surprised to learn that the rationalists started writing Harry Potter fanfic and ended up shilling the FTX ponzi scheme.

A lot of effort has been put in to spread these ideas in the California and New York tech spaces.  This Tumblr post is not bad but does not get into the 'scientific' racism or the connections with economists with a PhD and a blog or a newspaper column https://leviathan-supersystem.tumblr.com/post/180724263214/what-is-lesswrong-and-can-you-summarize-why-its (This RationalWiki entry is not bad on them and race theories but focused on one prominent figure rather than the faction within that space which likes to cite Razib Khan and has racist cranks posting in their comments).  OTOH, you can waste your life documenting people on the Internet who push terrible ideas or terrible people.

Edit: thinky professional centre-left mag Vox discovered neoreaction a few weeks ago https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795/curtis-yarvin-neoreaction-redpill-moldbug It also fails to draw the whole network of connections (S. Alexander and R. Hanson are not just "ideas bloggers" but part of specific subcultures where there is sympathy for neoreaction).

Edit: also, back in the Before Times, Dominic Cummings' blog seemed to be drawing on some of these communities (although I don't remember any sign that they noticed him).

Edit: Back in the Internet Feminism Wars of the early 2010s, a famous rationalist blogger wrote an essay with an infamous paragraph comparing feminists to Voldemort.  I am told that was a response to an essay by journalist Laurie Penny who went on to skewer cryptocurrency scammers!  So this is a tiny tiny space with dense connections and far too much public drama.  (Which is one reason why descriptions of these spaces are cluttered with personal attacks and misleading insinuations).

David Gerard cites the following two posts as early attempts to move 'race science' into rationalist discourse

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould

He mentions someone called Aella who I never heard of.

Edit: someone spelled out Cummings' connections to the rationalist movement without being quoted on their connections to shady and not just weird ideas https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/demis-hassabis-the-deep-mind-dominic-cummings-turned-to-as-the-pandemic-hit

as well as being a generally respected scientist, (Cummings advisor Dr. Denis) Hassabis is linked to the rationalist movement, which has guided much of Cummings' thinking.

"We know that Dom is rationalist-influenced from his own blogroll and comments," says Tom Chivers, author of a book on the movement, The AI Does Not Hate You. While Hassabis is not himself a member of the community, his involvement in advanced AI research brings him into the same circles.

"What rationalism implies from a policy perspective is a big question," Chivers says, "but you can see something like it in the effective altruist mode of thinking: trying to separate emotional responses from outcomes. And, by extension, it can lead to serious thought about long-term existential risks, AI and bio-terror, because they have the potential to crush human flourishing in the long term."

[dubsartur]

A blogger in Australia has also noticed that figures and tropes from the Social Media Right from the early 2010s are being talked about again.  Two people tried to restart the Internet Feminism Wars from that period with me in the past week, and I am sorry but I won't touch that with a dragonlance.

[Jubal]

I guess my view with some of this weird Very Online Politics stuff is that I think it's maybe worth working back to it from anything with hitting power (politicians, tech barons, mass media, etc) that it might have influenced, but probably not forward from it starting with it as a core premise. So I think the Cummings or Thiel connection might have some interest as a product of this milieu and its influence on wider society, more than the milieu is per se interesting in and of itself for example.

I never really know if I should learn more about some of this stuff: I suspect it might be information my brain doesn't actually need, in that I'm not sure what I'd usefully do with it if I did know how some of these groups fitted together? My interest in politics is a fairly practical (or at least policy-level) one, and I don't think my own political movement (here meaning "the UK tradition of radical liberalism") has been all that drastically influenced by the weirder end of blogosphere currents.

[dubsartur]

I guess my view with some of this weird Very Online Politics stuff is that I think it's maybe worth working back to it from anything with hitting power (politicians, tech barons, mass media, etc) that it might have influenced, but probably not forward from it starting with it as a core premise. So I think the Cummings or Thiel connection might have some interest as a product of this milieu and its influence on wider society, more than the milieu is per se interesting in and of itself for example.

I never really know if I should learn more about some of this stuff: I suspect it might be information my brain doesn't actually need, in that I'm not sure what I'd usefully do with it if I did know how some of these groups fitted together? My interest in politics is a fairly practical (or at least policy-level) one, and I don't think my own political movement (here meaning "the UK tradition of radical liberalism") has been all that drastically influenced by the weirder end of blogosphere currents.

One thing I noticed is that some American spaces in the 2010s which proudly stated that they were focusing on politics because that was much more important than geekery didn't seem to start acting on politics.  They just kept talking about politics online and yelling at people who had hurting wrong labels.  But to do electoral politics, you need to build coalitions with people you are different from around common interests!  And those coalitions have to be built around electoral districts, not weird global ideologies.

I would also respectfully suggest that many of these figures have serious hitting power in the form of a receptive audience of thousands of professionals, many of whom build and maintain New Media systems.  The average racist with logorhea does not count, but S. Alexander probably does, so so many of the pundit-economists such as Yglesias.

I agree that if you try to learn about these spaces and their influence you will hear far more than you want to hear about who bedded whom, who snubbed whom on Tumblr, etc.  The RationalWiki article I linked has that problem, so do David Gerard's birdsite posts.  And many of these people's most notable achievement is writing or talking endlessly online.

[Jubal]

And those coalitions have to be built around electoral districts, not weird global ideologies.

In fairness this is most true in the Anglosphere: you can have a much more ideologically-driven coalition in theory in a lot of other countries, though there are limits to that (one of the reasons that the Austrian right-liberal NEOS never gets above ten or twelve percent is that it's not socially conservative enough for the conservatives but anyone on the left thinks their economic policies are absolutely nuts.)

I guess I agree that pundits like Yglesias do have a meaningful amount of power, but I do wonder how much: their political preferences aren't terribly well represented in actual policy or electoral results, as far as I can tell. Though maybe their professional-leaning and media-type audiences do mean they have outsize narrative power or possibly outsize financial power or executive power over all the bits of government nobody really looks at much (they might concievably reach and influence a much higher percentage of political donors or special advisors than voters).

[dubsartur]

On the open web, the classlc example was that right or American libertarians were big, whereas that ideology basically only exists as an organized movement in the USA, and even in the USA has very little influence on policy.  It was just fashionable with white American men in the IT industry and SF fandom, and that demographic had an outsized influence on open web culture.

I would argue that in systems with proportional representation, the relevant electoral districts are "the areas across which votes are distributed." Even if you want a national or state policy, then you need to organize people within your nation or state.  Organizing a bunch of fellow travellers from Switzerland and Oregon won't help you get policies enacted in New Hampshire or Quebec.

[Jubal]

Yes, I think that's very fair on both counts. Though "we need to get a chunk of 1% of the ten million or so Dutch voters" is maybe at least in theory a much easier lift for a niche ideology than "we need forty percent of voters in a specific geographical block of 50-60 thousand people in England". That said, the Dutch parliament does actually rather lack e.g. a weird overly-online neoliberal party, though it has various weird far-right brands, a splitting constellation of small parties on the left, and some long-standing niche religious parties. I guess maybe the wide array of "normal" parties give most people some bit of ideological flotsam to hang onto.

[dubsartur]

This is bringing up big nihilistic topics I don't have energy to tackle.

In the USA, electoral politics have to be 'big tent.'  So eg. if you are a Democrat who wants to get things done, you have to be willing to work with Black Christians even if you are neither, and you absolutely can't define yourself by being angry at either even if that goes well on social media.

I don't see any way of knowing who is actually influential this century.  Journalists on birdsite say that they sometimes write opinion pieces for American policy magazines with an intended readership of one (and people in Washington DC have seen very specific ads posted along commuter routes to specific agencies and departments).  Journalists in Canada say that all important federal policy decisions are made behind closed doors at the PMO by appointed (not elected) advisors whose only interest in evidence is the evidence of polls.  I would expect that politicians have the same lazy epistemology as most people, so their opinions come from their friends and newspapers and magazines and social media.  There are lots of policies which are widely supported but can't get enacted because of status quo bias or because a small group is very firmly for the current policy (eg. marijuana legalization / decriminalization had won all the arguments by the 1990s but took until the 2010s to be enacted). 

As a heuristic, I would assume that anyone who earns their living sharing opinions on policy is influential (unless almost all their income comes from a single patron).  So the pundit economists would qualify, and arguably S. Alexander since the NYT doxed him (although he gets paid through Substack which is funded by other people's money, and its possible to create a bunch of fake subscribers to funnel money his way and make him look influential - the same scam as buying birdsite followers).  But I agree that their influence is mainly in New York State and California tech communities, where people are often not very good at electoral politics (although they build media systems and allocate capital).

As far as I can tell, most people are not interested in electoral politics at all!  That is why newspapers used to print the story of a trial every single day, to catch the people who just flipped through a paper every so often rather than read the same paper every day.

I have a conversation about anything serious with people I don't live every month or so during the pandemic.  My friends are scattered around the world.  Yes, the Internet is written by crazy people with too much time on their hands.  But how on earth could I know what most people in my area think? 

The Old Media are mostly dead and get most of their info from social media and press releases these days anyways.

[dubsartur]

The Effective Altruism movement came up on Mastodon.  That seems to have a number of factions.  There are groups like GiveWell whose point is "if you claim to be doing good with donations, prove it!  and isn't it generally easier to reduce suffering and death in poor places than rich places?"  There are a lot of well-funded charities whose mission is "raising awareness" or "advocacy" or who can't produce photos of all the schools they say they built.  https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities  As far as I can tell, they are still around and still have the same basic approach of reducing sickness and death among people alive today (these are easy to measure, whereas its hard to measure the effect of "raising awareness").

There is Longtermism who like speculative risks and who have been infiltrated by the people who are worried that chatbots will be like the AI in Terminator or Reign of Steel or The Forbin Project.  "Longterm" or "existential risk" means the future of humanity and avoiding human extinction (or keeping humans alive long enough to transition into digital minds).  If you believe that the welfare of trillions of potential future humans is an end that can justify any harm to actually existing human beings today, you can talk yourself into doing terrible things.  This is a known danger of Utilitarianism as well as Christianity, Communism, and other belief systems which envision an end.  Eg. someone got on twitter and started calling for bombing unlicensed AI research facilities, even in the territory of other nuclear powers, and there are a lot of people whispering "why help millions of poor brown people when we should be focused on stopping engineered bioweapons from wiping out humanity oh look I have the blueprints for a lab to do that right here and for just a billion dollars plus operating costs ..."

There are the 80,000 hours people who argue that the best way to do good is to get a high-paying job and donate the proceeds (80,000 hours is the time you spend in a 40-year career).  This can clearly be an honourable way to live, but because humans are rationalizing not rational, this can become an excuse to live in luxury on other people's work doing all kinds of damage in the name of the Cause.  What is publishing propaganda for a tobacco company or mining a few mountaintops if you build some nice libraries?

And there are the grifters like Sam Bankman Fried who wanted to donate to improve their reputations, or want to suck up donors' money.  They seemed to find longtermism and 80,000 hours useful smokescreens.

If you read things published before Sam Bankman Fried's Ponzi scheme collapsed, you can find hints that groups 2-4 were gaining more influence because they brought money and charisma https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism  And a lot of people are outraged by the grifters and frightened by the Longtermists / AI risk movement so they have launched a propaganda counterattack with the whole Effective Altruism movement as a target.  I don't have the contacts in that space to say how much of it the Longtermists and the grifters control, I suspect the answer is "more than I would have guessed."

The New Yorker estimated the EA movement's assets at around USD 30 billion in August 2022.  That is also much more than I would have guessed in the early 2010s when groups like GiveWell seemed to be a small part of the charitable sector.

[dubsartur]

The New Yorker article also has a hint of sexuality:

In graduate school, "I started giving three per cent, and then five per cent, of my income," he (Effective Altruism philosopher William MacAskill) said. This wasn't much—he was then living on a university stipend. "I think it's O.K. to tell you this: I supplemented my income with nude modelling for life-drawing classes." The postures left him free to philosophize. Later, he moved on to bachelorette parties, where he could make twice the money "for way easier poses."
...
When MacAskill took his vow of relative poverty, he worried that it would make him less attractive to date: "It was all so weird and unusual that I thought, Out of all the people I could be in a relationship with, I've just cut out ninety-nine per cent of them." This prediction was incorrect; in 2013, he married another Scottish philosopher and early E.A., and the two of them took her grandmother's surname, MacAskill.

That is harmless but compare the polyamorous household which ran Bankman-Fried's ponzi scheme (and his girlfriend Caroline Elison making comments about a Chinese harem) and the reports that LessWrong guru Eliezer Yudkowski encourages female fans to compete for his attention at sex parties.  I don't like sticking my nose into people's private lives but powerful men among the grifters and LessWrong 'rationalists' use power in ways that raise red flags (cp. Ayn Rand deciding that Objectivism demanded that she trade husbands with one of her students and the student could not object without rejecting Objectivism).

Edit: some good keywords to bring up cultlike behaviour among the 'rationalists' if cults are not a trigger are "Leverage Geoff Anders"

[Jubal]

Yeah. I feel like the pushback against EA stuff is a bit linked to the big pushback against Net Zero in environmentalist circles, and in general against the idea of "I can do a bad thing and balance it with a good thing" which utilitarianism kind of has a risk of. It probably helps that these causes tend to have the traditional villains of the left heading them in that it's largely a movement among people in high paying and somewhat more damaging sectors.

[dubsartur]

I have not seen that connection!   Net zero seemed like a figleaf for "maybe we can save some of the ways things are done right now if we invent magical technology." (or for scams pretending to plant trees in Brazil)

I agree that the 'scientific' racists with lots of time to post on the Internet, the LessWrong and SlateStar 'rationalists', and the Longtermists are not likely to cause more destruction than one airliner crash.  Rich people give money to strange or scammy things all the time, so while spending $80 million to prevent Skynet seems like a bad use of that money, its probably no worse than a donation to a church, or We Charity, or the PAC for Electing Bad People.

[Jubal]

I'm not sure it's a very visible connection, just two things that have the same zeitgeist and underlying argument of "the things that the rich people are doing that nominally are about saving the planet are actually about protecting their ability to do harm in a deniable way". And yeah, in terms of bad impacts 80 million to prevent skynet is probably a lot better than the Electing Bad People PAC, but it certainly doesn't count as a good use of money either.

[dubsartur]

And while you can quibble about the GiveWell style of Effective Altruism, I think its true that donors who follow their strategy will reduce suffering and death more than donors who give more or less at random to worthy-sounding causes with honest-looking local representatives.

The problem with risks which have not happened yet is that its not clear how to tell how likely they are, or how damaging different outcomes would be, or what actions that we can take today might actually reduce them.  Humans are terrible at predicting the future and since chaos theory we know that many aspects of the future are inherently unpredictable.  Eg. nobody predicted how much containerization would change the logistics of transport, not the longshoremen, not the shipping companies, not the business press, not militaries with logistics problems, not the port authorities.  Many of them believed that it could reduce transport costs, but not that it would almost complete replace breakbulk and enable whole new modes of manufacturing based on importing subassemblies by sea.  And if the Port of London and the Longshoremen of New York had funded a Containerization Research Institute in the 1920s, its not clear that they could have stopped the transition (or that that would have been good!)

[Jubal]

Yes. I don't think trying to work out what will happen in the future is a wholly valueless exercise, but in general, I think it's a good rule of thumb that you're likely to get a better future first and foremost by producing a better now: if we had a society more robust at fixing its present problems, that'd be likely to be a society better able to cope with the strain of any new problems.