Rationalists 🤝 Postrationalists Writing screeds about how following the advice of Internet posts and self-medicating with controlled substances can be good if you are very smart

Also had a beef with Aella when they were both in Austin!

They are not beating the allegations that a Postrationalist is a Rationalist who admits Yud is just a dude and their goals are religious goals.

Update: There is a partially cached Facebook post where MacDonald states what he claims is Eigenrobot’s government name and says that Eigenrobot’s “(self admitted) BPD wife used to want to fuck me” (Google and Bing saved snippets, but do not share the full cache). That could have been what got him kicked out of VibeCamp for doxxing.

The simplenote post from a VibeCamp attendee claimed that “prior to Scott Alexander’s articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall,” Any idea what post he was thinking of? Know Your Amphetamines archive was from January 2021 so about the time VibeCamp got started.

The post is undated but mentions Hereticon in January 2022.

invest

If you are broadly invested in US stocks, you are already invested in the chatbot bubble and the defense industry. If you are worried about that, an easy solution is to move some of that money elsewhere.

You would need a non-self-published source which says u/TPO = Lasker

GeneSmith who told LessWrong “How to Make Superbabies” also has no bioscience background. This essay in Liberal Currents thinks that a lot of right-wing media personalities are using synthetic testosterone now (but don’t call it gender-affirming care!). Roid rage may be hard to separate from Twitter brain-rot and slop-chugging.

I could one day but nitter and the Wayback Machine and public tools have gotten me this far!

Sounds like a typical young make seeker (with a bit of épater les bourgeois). Not the classic Red Guard personality but it served Melon Husk’s needs.

Two of the bsky posts are log-in only. Huh, Killian is in to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (blockchain), high-frequency trading (like our friends at Jane Street), veganism, and Effective Altruism?

Does anyone have an explainer on the supposed DOGE/EA connection? All I can find is this dude with a blo wobbling back and forth with LessWrong flavoured language https://www.statecraft.pub/p/50-thoughts-on-doge (he quotes Venkatesh Rao and Dwarkesh Patel who are part of the LessWrong Expanded Universe).

The February 2024 Medium post by Moskovitz objects to cognitive decoupling as an excuse to explore eugenics and says that Eliezer Yudkowsky seems unreasonably confident in immanent AI doom. It also notes that Utilitarianism can lead ugly places such as longtermism and Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. In the comments he mentions no longer being convinced that its as useful to spend on insect welfare as on “chicken, cow, or pig welfare.” He quotes Julia Galef several times. A choice quote from his comments on forum.effectivealtruism.org:

If the (Effective Altruism?) brand wasn’t so toxic, maybe you wouldn’t have just one foundation like us to negotiate with, after 20 years?

Max Read argues that LessWrongers and longtermists are specifically trained to believe “I can’t call BS, I must listen to the full recruiting pitch then compose a reasoned response of at least 5,000 words or submit.”

A few weeks ago, David Gerard found this blog post with a LessWrong post from 2024 where a staffer frets that:

Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz. Importantly, Open Phil cannot make grants through Good Ventures to projects involved in almost any amount of “rationality community building”

So keep whisteblowing and sneering, its working.

Sailor Sega Saturn found a deleted post on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/dustin-moskovitz-1 where Moskovitz says that he has moral concerns with the Effective Altruism / Rationalist movement not reputation concerns (he is a billionaire executive so don’t get your hopes up)

I can imagine Peter Singer’s short-termist EA splitting off from the longtermists, but I have a hard time imagining any part of the EA movement aligning itself against global capitalism and American hegemony. If you are in to that there are movements which have better parties and more of a gender balance than Effective Altruism.

I agree that “publicly owned, publicly funded” would be a fine option (but which public? Is twitter global or for the USA or for California?) Good luck making the case for $5 billion/year new tax revenues to fund that new expense. Until then, there are small janky services on the Fediverse which rely on donations and volunteer work.

Yes, all of these services should perish. But if you repeatedly chose to build community on a for-profit service that is bleeding money, you can’t complain that it eventually runs out and either goes bankrupt or is restructured to make more money. Valente wants the perks of a site that spends a lot of money, but democratic government and no annoying ads or tracking.

you run an overpriced web hosting company and run conferences for race scientists. my bayesian intuition tells me humanity will probably be fine, or perhaps better off.

Someone in the comments calls them out: “if owning a $16 million conference centre is critical for the Movement, why did you tell us that you were not responsible for all the racist speakers at Manifest or Sam ‘AI-go-vroom’ Altman at another event because its just a space you rent out?”

OMG the enemies list has Sam Altman under “the people who I think have most actively tried to destroy it (LessWrong/the Rationalist movement)”

I agree that a big part of the problem is financialized capitalism (whether VC money or Reddit’s stock market speculation or the Putin regime realizing that they could just buy LiveJournal). We also have the right to take generous paychecks from Substack, or host all our video on Youtube for free. But we can’t expect that Substack will be as generous forever or YouTube could offer exactly what it offers today minus the ads and tracking and pay for itself. There are lots of Internet communities which are decentralized or nonprofit or democratically governed but they don’t have the budgets of giant corporate services.

Online communities can also fade for mundane reasons like “failure to recruit new members as fast as old members leave” or “founders have a tiff and the community breaks up into warring factions” or “old site was designed for laptops and dialup, now we have smartphones and broadband, but our user base does not want to change.” Financial speculation make this worse but community management is hard.

Not at all. I am saying that we cannot all have our own digital Versailles and servants forever after. We can have our own digital living room and kitchen and take turns hosting friends there, but we have to do the work, and it will never be big or glamorous. Valente could have said “big social media sucks but small open web things are great” but instead she wants the benefits of big corporate services without the drawbacks.

I have been an open web person for decades. There is lots of space there to explore. But I do not believe that we will ever find a giant corporation which borrows money from LutherCorp and Bank of Mordor, builds a giant ‘free’ service with a slick design, and never runs out of money or starts stuffing itself with ads.

A point that Maciej Ceglowski among others have made is that the VC model traps services into “spend big” until they run out of money or enshitiffy, and that services like Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal offer ‘social-media-like’ experiences on a much smaller budget while earning modest profits or paying for themselves. But Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal are never going to have the marketing budget of services funded by someone else’s money, or be able to provide so many professional services gratis. So you have to chose: threadbare security on the open web, or jumping from corporate social media to corporate social media amidst bright lights and loudspeakers telling you what site is the NEW THING.