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Author works for something called Varda Space (guess who is one of the major investors? drink. Guess what orifice the logo looks like? drink) and previously tried to replicate a claimed room-temperature superconductor https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-diy-race-to-replicate-lk-99/
Some interesting ethnography of private space people in California: "People jump straight to hardware and hand-wave the business case, as if the economics are self-evident. They aren't. "
Page uses that "electrons = electricity" metonymy that prompt-fonding CEOs have been using
I also enjoy :
Radiation/shielding impacts on mass ignored; no degradation of structures beyond panel aging
Getting high-powered electronics to work outside the atmosphere or the magnetosphere is hard, and going from a 100 meter long ISS to a 4 km long orbital data center would be hard. The ISS has separate cooling radiators and solar panels. He wants LEO to reduce the effects of cosmic rays and solar storms, but its already hard to keep satellites from crashing into something in LEO.
Possible explanation for the hand waving:
I love AI and I subscribe to maximum, unbounded scale.
your supporting link names neither
I agree that the following paragraph does not name specific people: "Big names in science and skepticism blundered into scandals both big and small. That didn’t mean their past work was suddenly nullified yet they were socially punished in social media campaigns from foul-mouthed 'science' bloggers and Team Skepchick." I disagree that Sharon A. Hill does not have specific people in mind, or that anyone who was around back then would have too much trouble naming them.
In writing that essay she made a heroic effort to keep the focus on the community not specific names.
A subculture many of his readers are familiar with is pick-up artistry. It was founded by a few charismatic obsessed dudes, who teach how to make outsiders give you want you want, and who often have ways of making money from their disciples which are not open and straightforward (whether advertising expensive seminars with dubious benefits, or funneling them into get-rich-quick schemes and get-hot-quickly schemes). PUA did not have a founding generation of unworldly geeks followed by superficial sociopaths, and the big egos don't just fleece the casual fans but people outside the subculture.
People tell me that the California counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s had a strong entrepreneurial side.
Eg. Yudkowsky is disabled (he talks a lot about that in his autobiography from 2000 and later in terms of akrasia and his struggles with fitness) but some people who know him accuse him of predatory behaviour, and he created a recruiting funnel for an apocalyptic movement and accepts a high salary for doing whatever the eff he wants. The "Geek Social Fallacies" essay talks about the danger of assuming that someone who is marginalized is not predatory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Trying to make money is not what makes you a sociopath in this model. Geeks almost always try to make money from the thing so they can devote more time to it, and until recently Yud kept turning away from chances to make more money (eg. selling his books rather than give them away for free, or learning more programming in the nineties and oughties and talking himself into a software job). Its that you care more about money and sex and social power than the thing itself. I don't think Yud is a fake but I think he can't accept that he is an entertainer and popularizer not a genius researcher.
One problem with Chapman's model is that it does not have room for people who like the thing, but find they enjoy exercising social power more than the thing itself (figures like Michael Shermer, or aging rockers who stop innovating but release just enough music to keep women squealing at them and the royalties coming in). It divides people into archtypes, but most are in between.