13
Is there a prosopography of MIRI/SIAI/CFAR?
(awful.systems)
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.]
See our twin at Reddit
I've thought about making one but I never got really got past the "gathering info" stage as I tend to go on hiatus for months at a time for the sake of my sanity. That being said, here are some things you might find interesting:
Extropia's Children - a series of substack posts about the rationalists and related groups. One of the better sources of their early history that I've found, and has links to the original sources for a lot of stuff.
MIRI's "Top Contributors" page - which shows that Peter Thiel was their biggest donor until 2015, when he pulled funding because he felt that they had become like a luddite Burning Man Camp (and it was also a year that the Rationalists actually did go to Burning Man). Thiel was also given an honorary position in SIAI. Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz has been their biggest funder since 2015 through Open Philanthropy.
Yudkowsky coined the term "effective altruist", despite their claims to the contrary. Will MacAskill and Toby Ord were both LessWrongers before starting EA, and LessWrong was EA's biggest recruitment source for years (I think this is noteworthy because EA now tries to distance themselves from the rationalists rather than acknowledging that they're an offshoot)
FTX was also an offshoot of the rationalists/EA (hence the polyamorous group house, FTX prediction market, etc). Caroline Ellison was a personal friend of Scott Alexander Siskind and even told him about their overleveraging strategy on tumblr a few months before FTX collapsed SBF financially supported ACX and his psychiatrist, George Lerner, worked in the same office as Scott Alexander IIRC (I've lost track of the source, will post later if I can find it).
This recent Rolling Stone article about the Zizians - which filled in a number of gaps in my knowledge, in particular how Yudkowsky and Thiel met.
This a timeline of events related to sexual assaults in the rationalist community that I myself compiled and posted on the subreddit. (I think I have an even longer timeline of events somewhere, I'll look for it later)
Anyways I'd be up for sharing info, there's a bunch more stuff I know and I could basically send you a giant list of sites I've bookmarked over the years that would aid in mapping out the connections. (edit: I guess that wouldn't really be "concise" but I think if we want a concise posopography we'll have to make it ourselves)
It was in an ACX blog post, siskind just admitted it out of nowhere. edit: Well ok because he was obviously discussing him, but the possibility of any connections between them wasn't really on anyone's radar by then I think.
edit: Got it: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopharmacology-of-the-ftx#footnote-anchor-1-84889532
Thank you!