Some names are missing like Sabine Hossenfelder, the GMU economists, Brad Delong, and Hoover Institute staff. And I would not underestimate the number of people in this network who just went to the right university, met the right people, got the right job, and started to climb the ladder of fame.
CinnasVerses
joined 5 months ago
The Weinstein brothers, Michael Vassar, Peter Thiel, and Yudkowsky were the names that leapt out at me. I don't know that Vassar has any mainstream intellectual or academic achievements.
Learning that Rebecca Watson emailed Epstein for comment on a quote she was going to discuss, and Lawrence Krauss emailed Epstein because people like Rebecca Watson were outing him as a sex pest, reminds me of what a small world that was.
I don't plan to link every figure, but will do so if they are sleazy or the name is unfamiliar. Many of them seem like distinguished academics or popularizers.
Also likely to be concentrated in the USA, whose government is helpfully screaming at the rest of the world "disconnect your economies and your IT systems from ust!" Most of us are busy doing that as fast as possible although it takes a while to get everyone on board.
its a very useful skill when reading the internet to learn to see when "in the US and UK" or "in SoCal and London" should be appended to a sentence. Once you see it you can't unsee it.
Since it comes up on one in 216 characters with random stats rolled on 3d6, shouldn't INT 18 be three standard deviations above the norm?
Its a surprisingly modest claim about Marty Stu (Cheeliax with 20 million people, most of them poor given stated infant mortality, has 20 equally bright women available for breeding duty).
Some LIbertarians avoid marriage or common-law relationships, not sure if Yud has expressed an opinion on the topic though.
Yud was married to a woman in 2019 and mentions other partners and playmates. He said he met her in 2013. The post from 2013 is an infohazard.
considering his confidence in an AI apocalypse I heavily doubt it
He argues that the way to prevent the AI apocalypse is to breed superbabies from high-IQ stock, and a major plot point of Project Lawful is that the hero wants to prove himself worthy of having more children than average and nation he isekais himself to agrees but wants any future children to use their genes for evil.
I wonder if Yud has biological children? He is mercifully discreet about his home life even if he shares his kinks like he has a five-book contract with Baen Books.
I am starting to suspect that Yud never learned to compartmentalize knowledge and put it in different epistemic categories. To him, AD&D alignments, Large Language Models, and race pseudoscience are all nerdy ideas he read about on the Internet, all equally real and true. He does not seem to file a carpenter telling him how to frame a roof, a rabbi teaching theology, and a random twitter account in different categories like most of us would.
Its Project Lawful, his D&D novel about eugenics and BDSM cowritten on a forum with many of our dear friends
Joscha Bach introduced Michael Vassar to Epstein in 2018 with:
Vassar is best known for the MetaMed startup which bet that LessWrong posters were better at diagnosis than MDs. He also founded one of the LessWrong splinter movements that Scott Alexander warns people against.
There is a MIT computer scientist and popularizer called Michele Reilly although he could have meant someone else. My career has not been very successful but at least I never asked a friend to introduce me to a pederast or accepted an invitation to a sex criminal's private island.