Weird Internet Communities

Started by dubsartur, November 23, 2022, 06:57:52 PM

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Jubal

Quote from: dubsartur on January 04, 2024, 06:48:59 PM
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).
The duke, the wanderer, the philosopher, the mariner, the warrior, the strategist, the storyteller, the wizard, the wayfarer...

dubsartur

#46
Quote from: Jubal on January 04, 2024, 07:13:10 PM
Quote from: dubsartur on January 04, 2024, 06:48:59 PM
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

#47
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

#49
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

QuoteIt 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

Quote
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

#50
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

#51
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.

dubsartur

#53
Some of the ghouls and renfields flocking to Orange Julius want cryptocurrency deregulated (say a law requiring that any US bank open an account for any legal business registered in their state).  The cryptocurrency Tether appears to already be one of the biggest frauds in world history. (They claim to back crypto currencies with other assets, but as the number of Tethers has rapidly increased there has been no visible flow of those meatspace assets into the organization, and their approach to accounting is not one you learn in college).  If they get a foothold at a bank in a rich country again, that will be very bad.

Zeke Faux, "Anyone Seen Tether's Billions?," Bloomberg Businessweek, 7 October 2021 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-mystery-where-s-the-69-billion-backing-the-stablecoin-tether

Edit: accused CEO-assassin Luigi Mangioni was interested in pop philosophy such as LessWrong Rationalism, stoicism, and Effective Altruism https://www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna183996 and a splinter called This Part of Twitter https://sfstandard.com/2024/12/10/this-one-internet-subculture-explains-murder-suspect-luigi-mangiones-odd-politics/  Note the description of people they admire as "agentic" and "generative" and Maciej Ceglowski's old warnings that people in Silicon Valley were acting the way they imagined a digital superintelligence would act and this was an actual present danger whereas the digital superintelligences are hypothetical.  Generative AI will supposedly become useful when it gets agentic models.

I like this quote on the LessWrongers or TPOTers from a journalist: "It's a very verbal culture. People really love to have long-form discussions, state their opinions," she said. "Really, just people who like to talk a lot."

dubsartur

#54
I have talked about how the TESCREAL idea is a bit of a simplification, and not everyone in these spaces is awful just strange or naive.  But then S. Alexander comes out with a long blog post which starts with Richard Lynn's estimate of National IQs which just happened to reproduce racial stereotypes from Richard Lynn's culture, briefly mentions that Lynn made his figures for poor countries up, and then goes on babbling about how nevertheless they are true and important and only misguided sentimentalists would deny this https://archive.ph/BJ6bd

Mixed in with the Internet racists in the comments are a few things which give hope like:

QuoteI spent 18 months in a country where people are supposed to have an iq of about 70, according to the map. My neighbors and friends were mostly non-literate. They did not seem less intelligent than the people I know in my current (US) neighborhood or the people I grew up with (in the US). Most of them would not have performed well on IQ tests, though. They'd never attended school and had no familiarity with puzzle-solving. This was 35 years ago and most people had not seen movies or even photographs. I remember sitting with one older woman and helping her interpret a black-and-white photograph: this is the arm, here's where it connects to the body, etc. It's hard for people from literate societies with tons of exposure to text & graphical representations to see the extent of the gap.

So many people in these spaces think the race theorists are nuts too, but if you hang out in these spaces you will meet someone enthusiastic and articulate who wants you to hear the good word of 'race science,' just like if you hang out with working-class Brits you will meet some who read the Daily Mail and want you to know about sinister foreigners.

White American men with college degrees tend to be really really into race-and-IQ like white American men without college degrees are into Ancient Aliens and cryptozoology or European men in 1913 were in to nationalism.  And as we have seen, these subcultures are hotbeds of race-and-IQ thinking, and the leaders read each other's Internet writing on race-and-IQ even if not all of the believers post about it under their main handle.  If you have been on the Internet before smartphones you know how this goes, it was one of the things like Star Wars v. Star Trek or right Libertarianism or creationism that a few Americans always wanted to talk about.  I have been pitched by at least one believer over email.

Even if you accept the validity of g/IQ (Cosma Shalzi's counter-argument, Nicholas Taleb's, there are others), and you accept that g / IQ is something like smarts and not just an obscure psychometric concept, the differences on Lynn's chart seem implausibly high, the variation inside Africa surprisingly low, and my own experience traveling and living with people born all over the world does not suggest that people anywhere are much smarter or wiser than people anywhere else.

A long list of ideas from the garbage-bin of history are on the march.  They have been circulating in very influential online communities while it was hard to say them on TV or in the newspaper, and many fellow travelers don't believe they need to hide or dissimulate any more.  If you want to know what is happening in the rich Anglo countries it is a very good idea to familiarize yourself with these people and spaces so you can see when a proposed bill implements a Substack post paraphrases a crank in comment threads.  British journalism, as far as I can tell, failed to do this under the Tories.  Ask yourself whether journalists in your country will do better, or whether you need to spend a weekend reading strange websites.

dubsartur

#55
If you cannot read this list and give pocket bios of a dozen names you are not prepared to understand what is happening https://www.manifest.is/#speakers  One of the guests had the following people endorse his podcast.



His publicist seems to like Broadway musicals.  The podcaster studied with Scott Aaronson who is another figure on the edge of these spaces.



Note that they are networking face to face, that the speakers are quite young, and that they have Internet writers, (new media) journalists, academics, and people in finance or banking.  This is a type of Internet movement that I have no direct experience with, an Internet movement with support from offline money and institutions.  And what was basically harmless while it was brilliant sad people writing to other brilliant sad people is going to get very strange as people in charge of billions of dollars or government agencies try to bring it to life.

I don't know how "unschooling centre and mutual aid" go together with "lets invite all the Internet's tireless racists to give us talks" in Berkeley but they do somehow.

dubsartur

#56
A trans woman named Ziz founded a cult in Vallejo, CA which was involved in a series of unfortunate events between 2022 and 2025 including six or seven violent deaths (one a border patrol agent shot trying to arrest a cult member in Vermont, another a landlord whose property some cult members had been squatting on).  The cult leader once attended a workshop at the Center for Acquired Rationality (group is based in Berkeley about 20 km from Vallejo, Julia Galef from NYC is involved), managed to get herself banned, and picketed one of their events with her followers; her patter and framing of herself as a self-help blogger should sound familiar to anyone who knows the LessWrongers, as should her framing of herself as a Sith Lord fighting non-vegans like Yudkowski got famous for "what if Harry Potter were a child prodigy and scientist?" Rationalist internet personality Aella says that the cultists were well known to the SoCal LessWronger community.

Per a blogger called Max Read, someone on Twitter claims that one of the cultists killed by police in Vermont was a German citizen who had worked for Jane Street Capital, whose former employees also include Sam Bankman-Fried. See previous discussion about how these movements seem to have deliberately colonized institutions in SoCal, NYC, and England to get access to money and recruits.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-death-cult-zizian-murders-20064333.php
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/leader-alleged-bay-area-death-cult-faked-death-sf-20066610.php
https://x.com/aella_girl/status/1884481375690223684?mx=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877910
https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationalist-death

So one step from the Bay Area LessWrongers gets you charities and 'research institututes' getting tens of millions of dollars to play with, another step gets you classic California cults.  And the public message "here are the intricate Internet discussions! here are our institutes using other people's money to work on serious-sounding issues! here are our face-to-face events with cute articulate girls and guys! we are cool and powerful engage with us!" hides a lot of darkness and bad character.  These groups are actively recruiting in geeky spaces online so if you are the kind of person who posts on a forum like this its wise to know some of the lingo and names which raise red flags (today they seem especially active on Substack because the Other People who fund that site are the same reactionary tech-bros who are intrigued by parts of all this).

dubsartur

#57
Jon Evans who wrote Extropia's Children says that Artificial General Intelligence will exist when "the return on AI inference investment is within 25% of the average return on the equivalent average human salary for at least 50% of occupations, as taxonomized by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, for which interaction with the physical world is not essential."  Does that make sense at all to any of you?

We didn't redirect the postage budget to email servers, or the accounting and clerical budget to Excel and Quicken and Lotus 1-2-3, or the translation budget to machine translation, mostly we stopped paying much for those things and spent the money somewhere else.  It seems to take for granted the "big chatbot" model where you pour in chips and electricity and data and get out money (all the "big chatbot" companies are losing vast sums of money but they promise investors that they will make huge profits one day).  And the neoliberal model that human beings are engines to produce USD (1990 purchasing-power parity).

Its notoriously hard for the leaders of big organizations to tell the rate of return from internal spending, which is why big organizations are organized more like families than downtowns.  I think that businesses often have a task they need doing and they look for the cheapest and most hassle-free way to complete it.  So for many processes they are not thinking about "return on investment" as much as "will electronic labels on the shelves which we can update from a central server be cheaper than printed labels that someone has to walk around and update?"

Occupations and their roles also change with technology (no typesetters before the 15th century or after the 20th century).

Evans is selling his own front end to a chatbot from the San Francisco Bay Area so his take on all this is not entirely disinterested and the level of confidence he expresses may be more "American salesman" than "German academic."

Jubal

Quote from: dubsartur on February 04, 2025, 03:59:53 PMJon Evans who wrote Extropia's Children says that Artificial General Intelligence will exist when "the return on AI inference investment is within 25% of the average return on the equivalent average human salary for at least 50% of occupations, as taxonomized by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, for which interaction with the physical world is not essential."  Does that make sense at all to any of you?
It makes sense in the sense that I understand the meaning of the sentence: I assume the occupations he refers to are e.g. programmers, writers, artists, and his logic is that if per pound a company spends, they get 50% of the return from using an AI replacement than they'd get from spending the same amount on salaries, that's his bar for AGI. So it makes sense in the purely grammatical, parse-able sense of "sense". It also does not make sense in the sense that it's utter nonsense as a definition of AGI.

Quote from: dubsartur on February 03, 2025, 02:25:18 AMtoday they seem especially active on Substack
It amazes me how much substack is nominally set up for the sorts of things I like - interesting deep-dive reporting and blogging across politics and culture and art - and yet somehow seems to attract all the people I'd rather not bother reading, whereas the people I do want to read mostly have regular blogs.
The duke, the wanderer, the philosopher, the mariner, the warrior, the strategist, the storyteller, the wizard, the wayfarer...