Is there a prosopography of MIRI/SIAI/CFAR? (awful.systems)

submitted 1 month ago by CinnasVerses@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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Form 990 for these organizations mentions many names I am not familiar with such as Tyler Emerson. Many people in these spaces have romantic or housing partnerships with each other, and many attend meetups and cons together. A MIRI staffer claims that Peter Thiel funded them from 2005 to 2009, we now know when Jeffrey Epstein donated. Publishing such a thing is not very nice since these are living persons frequently accused of questionable behavior which never goes to court (and some may have left the movement), but does a concise list of dates, places, and known connections exist?

Maybe that social graph would be more of a dot. So many of these people date each other and serve on each other's boards and live in the SF Bay Area, Austin TX, the NYC area, or Oxford, England. On the enshittified site people talk about their Twitter and Tumblr connections.

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[-] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future by Keach Hagey has potential https://archive.is/22O9z

Two members of the Extropian community, internet entrepreneurs Brian and Sabine Atkins—who met on an Extropian mailing list in 1998 and were married soon after—were so taken by this message that in 2000 they bankrolled a think tank for Yudkowsky, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. At 21, Yudkowsky moved to Atlanta and began drawing a nonprofit salary of around $20,000 a year to preach his message of benevolent superintelligence. “I thought very smart things would automatically be good,” he said. Within eight months, however, he began to realize that he was wrong—way wrong. AI, he decided, could be a catastrophe.

This excerpt on Wired slams down names and dates and social connections without getting distracted by all the things that are wrong with what it describes.

this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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