Weird Internet Communities

[dubsartur]

Why does all of this matter? First, these movements still control billions of dollars and have the ear of oligarchs.  Vitalik Buterin gave one EA organization cryptocurrency which they were able to sell for USD 658m through FTX because of price fluctuations. The collapse of FTX cost them some funds and donors but they have not burned through everything. They are very active in the Internet for young smart technical people, so if you read a forum like this its wise to learn the signs that something is a LessWronger/Longtermist project so you know what to do when you are talking to a new student group and they start to use buzzwords.

Second, as power centralizes and the media are defunded the world today is full of shadowy forces manipulating policy and the media.  Most of us can't attend a prayer breakfast in Washington or an Institute for Social Justice soiree in Ottawa, but these movements post endlessly online and move their money in the form of cryptocurrency the least discreet means of payment since we stopped rolling giant stone wheels from village to village.  So you can study how some of these people used GiveWell EA as a milk-before-meat scam, or how Timnit Gebru, Emile P. Torres, and David Gerard tried to push a counter-message on the media in the service of a higher truth and their own passions, and think about how much else that you read on your feeds or hear on the radio comes out of shadow battles like that which are not planned on web forums and in comment threads.

Justin Trudeau attended a conference in Paris on AI policy recently and I promise that representatives of some of these movements were speaking there and looking serious and respectable.

I agree that if money and power were not so centralized, this would all be of no importance to people outside SoCal, NYC, Boston, and Oxford, because these people agree that their full program has no appeal to most people.  But we live in a world where you can get billions of dollars by impressing a few rich people.

Edit: a characteristic of the early smartphone age is online movements optimized for social media bursting into meatspace which works differently. We saw that with the Tiki-Torch Brigade and Tumblr-flavoured social justice eight years ago, this is one of the latest outbreaks.  And because longtermists and LessWrongers write so much in public (so very very much), they may be easier to understand than whatever has been festering on whatever replaced 4chan (one theory that maybe focuses too much on the people who really really like party politics on their smartphones).

[dubsartur]

On 29 January LessWronger, Effective Altruist, and (Effective-Altruism-funded) journalist Kelsey Piper https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper mentioned that she helped James Damore get a job after Google. 

https://xcancel.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1884702831451754548#m

James Damore was a Google software engineer who wrote a memo arguing that, while diversity and inclusion were good goals, bias was not the main reason there weren't more women in tech, and differences in personality between men and women probably explained a lot of it.  ... The internet was outraged. He got fired from Google. And he applied to the tech hiring startup I worked at, Triplebyte, which offered background-blind screening to anyone who wanted to be a software engineer. We really believed in the mission, at Triplebyte. I think I ended up kind of badly calibrated about how earnest to expect people to be everywhere else. We found people working as janitors and line cooks and homemakers who could code, and we got them 6 figure jobs, and we were proud of it. ... I'd been at Triplebyte for like six months at this point, it was my first job after graduation, and I was honestly way out of my lane, but I made a pretty big fuss internally. (It helped that I suspected a lot of people agreed with me but I was a woman and it was safer for me to say it.) I said that we were not in the business of deciding who had good politics, that we shared this country with many people who profoundly disagreed with each other, that companies could assess for themselves if he worked respectfully with female engineers, and that we should put him on the site and let them decide. We did. ... James Damore was egregiously wronged. To my knowledge he's a good software engineer with extremely reasonable, approximately accurate opinions about the reasons there were fewer women in software engineering, which he shared in good faith, and a lot of people who should've known better really did try to drive him out of the industry for it. It was wrong.

Piper consulted with Scott Alexander on how to get proscription medication (I hope she was not a patient since he shared her name and diagnosis), and a confidant of Sam Bankman-Fried until he confessed his crimes.  She is also one of the few women whose ideas Scott Alexander acknowledges.  So this is a very small world, and everyone dates, hires, parties with, or exchanges messages with everyone else.  The only special thing is that they got the attention of big money which is now trying to bring some of their weird Internet ideas to life.

[Jubal]

Has anyone done a proper network graph of these people?

[dubsartur]

Has anyone done a proper network graph of these people?

I suppose I could apply for a grant funded by some software billionaire ... oh, bother.

The long blog series on the Extropians was by a fellow traveler but OK, and the paper on the Effective Altruists by an academic in Amsterdam, but neither had a visual display let alone an editable one.  The paper clued me in that her job with Vox is paid for by a donation by one of the big Effective Altruism sponsors.

[Jubal]

I suppose I could apply for a grant funded by some software billionaire ... oh, bother.

I wonder if you actually could get a billionaire to pay for it by enthusing about it as a "social chain powered networking display tool" or something! The right buzzwords can get one surprisingly far with these things...

[dubsartur]

I suppose I could apply for a grant funded by some software billionaire ... oh, bother.

I wonder if you actually could get a billionaire to pay for it by enthusing about it as a "social chain powered networking display tool" or something! The right buzzwords can get one surprisingly far with these things...

Let me shelve that for a moment.

Scott Alexander published http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/05/mapmaker-mapmaker-make-me-a-map/ but its about websites and social media accounts not who is living in whose spare bedroom.  Many of these people had pseudonymous Tumblrs, LessWrong profiles, etc.  Its also from before they got very rich people to bankroll them, back then a million or so was big money in these circles.

[dubsartur]

As early as 2015, The Atlantic published a story on how computer science professor Scott Aaronson blogged about how a younger self had felt there was no acceptable feminist way to express sexual interest in a woman, then writers Laurie Penny and Amanda Marcotte made a snarky reply, then Scott Alexander replied with frustration to them, and many were the posts that followed.

Aaronson, Penny, and Alexander are all Jewish by ancestry, blazingly neurodivergent, and very clever.  All had white-collar careers with a lot of autonomy (professor, writer for chattering magazines and news outlets for the educated, psychiatrist).  Marcotte went to university in Austin TX, the same city where Aaronson worked.  One of the Zizians was educated at Oxford, Nick Bostrom's employer and sometimes William MacAskill's.  Penny recently thanked Scott Alexander on her blog for endorsing Kamala Harris so they still follow each other's writing.

So even back then this was a small world. What changed is that a few businessmen, fraudsters, and cryptocurrency speculators have put billions of dollars behind all this and now what was just interpersonal drama or an excuse to post and post and post has bigger consequences.  David Gerard likes to tell the story that Grimes and Elon Musk first bonded over the story of Roco's Basilisk, and the breakup of that relationship has something to do with Musk's radicalization.  Peter Thiel saw something of value in the LessWrongers back in 2012, and bankrupted another chattering web magazine with snarky feminist writing (Gawker Media, host of Jezebel).  Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Tallinn, and Zuckerberg (the five billionaires who have expressed interets in this space) are obviously part of another small world (I note without comment that Tallinn has six children and wrote a Bachelor's thesis about the physics of interstellar travel, let him who is brave pull those strings).

[dubsartur]

Eliezer Yudkowsky has now joined Alexander, Bostrom, and Gwern by endorsing a project to genetically engineer people for IQ and create "superbabies" (yes, he has also said that superhuman computer intelligence is coming in the next two years, and that is not many generations Yud, but don't try to understand this it will break your brain).  The project is run by a software developer who is sure that the field of genetics is too cautious and unwilling to admit the truth.  /s Sure sounds like someone I would let experiment on my future children s/.

In the original post, an academic said they were not sure what kinds of policies Cummings' rationalist sympathies would imply.  One of Dominic Cummings' twenty-something cronies proposed sterilizing the underclass! "Whoever has ears, let him hear." https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/new-downing-street-adviser-called-for-universal-contraception-to-stop-permanent-underclass

I mentioned Libertarians on the first page.

A useful way of thinking of LessWrong is comment-section Libertarians who are conning moderates and liberals and being conned by neofascists and oligarchs because that is the function of Libertarians. The British longtermists are slightly different but also into eugenics, transhumanism, etc.  I suspect that if you get them in a bar and they like you most will share the same ideas abut the poors and the coloureds that their American friends post on main, because this all comes out of the same mailing lists and early blogs.

All of this (waves with immense fatigue) is old and moderate compared to what was bubbling on Twitter and whatever is replacing it.  I just talk about it because I knew about some of these people ten or fifteen years ago and saw them being promoted on Hacker News and American right-wing twitter, and because its so easy to pull strings because they all post like they are getting paid by the word.  Nazis and eugenicists are not interesting, you mock them mercilessly, you fight them in the courts, and if necessary you liquidate them with naval blockades, air strikes, and Ordnance QF 25-pounder fire.