this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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SneerClub

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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.]

See our twin at Reddit

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Is there a prosopography of MIRI/SIAI/CFAR? (awful.systems)
submitted 1 week 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 week 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.

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The blogger Pinkerite has studies of people around Steven Pinker but focuses on public intellectuals over the kind of people who serve on boards and organize meetups. Ever since I learned about the face-to-face, Bay Area aspect of all of this I have been wonder how to rethink it. The people who post the most on the open web are not necessarily the most influential.

Extropia's Children show that you can do scholarship with someone you disagree with (he is a chatbot fan but his timeline is reasonable).

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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)

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Pinkerite is interested in what RationalWiki calls the ThielSphere. I think its likely that the two Scotts or some of the Jane Street people have connections to Thiel which they don't talk about on the Internet.

Reason (American Libertarians) and Vox often introduce LW and EA people into US mainstream media.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Jane Street has an interesting cachet in at least my nerd circles because they require everyone they hire to learn Ocaml[1]. It would not surprise me if they are fash-adjacent, but only because I believe everyone in Wall Street is fash-adjacent.

[1] I think - maybe it's only the technical staff

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago

Jane Street have an 'old money' secretive culture but have employed SBF, Caroline Ellision, and Kelsey Piper's patron James McClabe. McClabe created a $37 million foundation to fund EA causes (although he spends more on campaign contributions than Vox Future Perfect and GiveWell). Given the 80,000 hours side of Effective Altruism I suspect Jane Street have other friends of Yud who post pseudonymously if at all.

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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)

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

[SBF's] 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).

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

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That reminds me of Kelsey Piper randomly posting that she helped James Damore get his first job after Google and she would do it again gosh darn it! So much of social media is people in the Bay Area recruiting people for their petty feuds. One of the shibboleths as ScienceBlogs broke up was posting that Damore was a bad bad person and not just a very ordinary clueless wealthy young dude you never met.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Do you remember where Piper said that? Somewhere on Xitter? It sounds familiar. (Edit: here it is. I remembered the "James Damore was egregiously wronged" part but had mostly forgotten the rest.)

Damore's memo blew up in 2017; ScienceBlogs was a shambling husk after most of the serious writers left in 2010, when management decided to offer Pepsi an advertorial disguised as a "nutrition" blog. (I left too, but I wasn't a serious writer by any stretch of the imagination.) That capped off a long trend of the Seed Media Group management not listening to the bloggers, even though SB was the best thing they had going for them. Complaints on the back-channel forum were downplayed or ignored, etc. SB puttered along under National Geographic's ownership through the Damore era, but the writing was on the wall in 2010 that the site couldn't last.

The community that had formerly focused on SB got another nasty knock a few years later, when sexual harassment allegations came out about Bora Zivkovic, one of the prime organizers of the ScienceOnline conferences. That was a real betrayal that wounded a lot of people, and the organization only held on for one more conference before going belly-up.

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Kelsey Piper has an up-to-date RationalWiki page including how she connected with SBF (she was on the board of an Effective Altruism club with Caroline Ellison at Stanford)

There was a creepy time when all the ex-Scienceblogs / Atheism Plus / Skeptic circle of bloggers posted an angry post about the enemy of the day. That was not at all what I understood as skepticism or free thinking, but they had already discovered that original, independent, research-based posts are hard and repeating the party line about what someone said on the Internet is easy. So is beefing with a friend who had the wrong take about what someone said on the Internet.

I must have confused my memories of the really nasty era around 2010-2012 with my occasional checks on FreeThoughtBlogs afterwards. I have not really thought about that world in the COVID era.