Thank you!

Here's something crazy I just discovered: In 2015 Sam Altman bragged about pulling a "long con" that ensured that Reddit remained under the control of Silicon Valley insiders even though it had been bought by Conde Nast.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the_best_long_con_you_ever_pulled/cszwpgq/?context=1

As you probably know last year Reddit made a deal with OpenAI to hand over data to train AI; it seems like there's a bunch of mutual back scratching that happens behind the scenes.

One thing that really shifted my perspective was realizing how many of the people and institutions in these rationalist and rationalist-adjacent social networks are funded either directly or indirectly by Peter Thiel - even people who seem to be ideologically opposed on the surface. I wasted so much of my time arguing with people on forums about their ideology only to realize that I had been hacking at the branches instead of the roots: Peter Thiel's money.

(Not that I mean to put all the blame on Thiel but he's clearly a big and highly connected node in this network)

That part of the testimony was finally unredacted in the Epstein files that were released to the public recently, it turns out the scientist in question was Stephen Kosslyn, not Steven Pinker. You can see for yourself:

https://ep-nov-12-data.greg.technology/006/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021174.jpg

I searched the files for both Yudkowsky and Pinker, Epstein seems to have known who they were but there aren't any emails or direct correspondence between them and nothing incriminating (yet)

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)

My favorite science Youtubers? Nah, those channels are IFLScience-tier, their intended audience is literally children.

When they made an alt-right equivalent of Patreon they called it "Hatreon". This stuff is like a game to them.

Here is the document that mentions EA as risk factor, some quotes below

Fourth, the defendant may feel compelled to do this fraud again, or a version of it, based on his use of idiosyncratic, and ultimately for him pernicious, beliefs around altruism, utilitarianism, and expected value to place himself outside of the bounds of the law that apply to others, and to justify unlawful, selfish, and harmful conduct. Time and time again the defendant has expressed that his preferred path is the one that maximizes his version of societal value, even if imposes substantial short term harm or carries substantial risks to others... In this case, the defendant’s professed philosophy has served to rationalize a dangerous brand of megalomania—one where the defendant is convinced that he is above the law and the rules of the road that apply to everyone else, who he necessarily deems inferior in brainpower, skill, and analytical reasoning.

the cell’s ribosomes will transcribe mRNA into a protein. It’s a little bit like an executable file for biology.

Also, because mRNA basically has root level access to your cells, your body doesn’t just shuttle it around and deliver it like the postal service. That would be a major security hazard.

I am not saying plieotropy doesn't exist. I'm saying it's not as big of a deal as most people in the field assume it is.

Genes determine a brain's architectural prior just as a small amount of python code determines an ANN's architectural prior, but the capabilities come only from scaling with compute and data (quantity and quality).

When you're entirely shameless about your Engineer's Disease

“Our goal is really to increase the scope and scale of civilization as measured in terms of its energy production and consumption,” h

old and busted: paperclip maximizer

new hotness: entropy maximizer

If anyone finds pictures of the wooden unaligned AI effigy they should post them.

In a world of moral totalitarianism, sometimes freedom looks like a short story about sex tourism in the Philippines.

I literally lol'd. Beyond parody.

the answer is to get Peter Thiel to try to magic up Dimes Square out of nothing, isn’t it?

On a actually serious note: When I look back at the multiple years I spent on sneerclub and otherwise following the rationalists, I increasingly feel that I had been tilting at windmills. I had spent most of that time making fun of them instead of looking into their finances, and in doing so I had missed the big picture and simply hadn't realized how integral Peter Thiel was in propping them up and building a network to support them.

Thiel funds or funded MIRI, EA groups, Curtis Yarvin, FTX and OpenAI.