The biggest crossover between skeptics and rationalists I can think of is Julia Galef, and she podcasted with a philosopher who debated Yud once then decided it was infra dignitatem. She also dropped out of CFAR when it became more open that the rationality workshops were for finding Sarah Connor.

I don’t think that the Rats are an offshoot of the Skeptics and New Atheists just a space which competed for the same young, male, educated, Autistic Anglo audience. They deliberately removed the parts of the skeptic curriculum which involve introspection and ethnography, because they all wanted to run some grift on their audiences so the audiences needed poor epistemic hygiene.

I also don’t get it because they already hate pre-social-media institutions, so why are they still angry that American journalists were bad at transmitting public health science at the beginning of COVID? Even if you believe in a COVID lab leak, the United States broke the global public health response while countries in East Asia and the South Pacific showed what to do. There are lab-leakers who blame a partnership between traitorous American scientists and sinister Chinese labs to conduct research that was illegal in the USA.

Edit / this guy just comes out and uses COVID lab leak theories as an analogy for AI-box fantasies, but these people don’t just cite it as a parallel, they are MAD about what they think happened and want you to be mad too.

That was the party line in the American foreign-policy crowd since winter 2021/2022. They thought that if the ‘great power’ Russia invaded, Ukraine would fall. So Burja’s tweet was not even original, just the same thing any 23-year-old staffer in a new suit was writing.

Lining up by IQ and number of sex partners is another example of our friends obsessing about ranking each other numerically. Remember Caroline Ellison’s Chinese harem fantasy? Its all very adolescent.

Can imagine the computer heaven, can’t imagine things to do with someone eager and delicious that are hard to describe as “sex” or “not sex.” Berkeley should glitter-and-lube them and ride them out of town on a very phallic rail.

Edit / One of the men at Aella’s gangbang realized that he had more fun making out with a beautiful naked woman than in two minutes tussling with the birthday girl. That guy has a lesson that many inexperienced male rationalists should heed.

Decker is a GMU Econ PhD student getting distracted by Twitter and Aella. I don’t think he has figured out that for a nerdy dude, “economist/quant” is a much better career path than “social media provocateur” (so delete X, get your PhD, sign on with a financial-services company, and frolic with sex workers on your own time).

Edit / he dropped out of his PhD program but wants to start a new one at Cambridge. I would not bet that he becomes Dr. Decker. He also has a date-me Google Doc.

Good for him mentioning Caroline Ellison, the proscription amphetamines, and the ketamine. The icebreaker exercise is from one of Aella’s blog posts “This practice made men arouse me.”

Ajeya Cotra

RationalWiki says that Kelsey Piper helped Cotra launch her Substack blog https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kelsey_Piper There are not many Indian-American rationalists, Dwarkesh Patel and his GF come to mind and Venkatesh Rao is adjacent.

He is a successful pulp writer and pop nonfiction writer and fundraiser, and women like him, but he does not seem like a riveting speaker. In some ways his withdrawal to Twitter and Washington State makes it easier for fans to imagine that he is whatever they need.

He cites Samo Burja and Nicholas Decker? And Cremieux is the twitter account he cites second most often, with Richard Hanania in 4th place?

Samo Burja (“How Roman Emperors Handled the Succession Problem”), SlateScott, and POTUS have all expressed interest in Herbert Hoover. Is this part of a broader online right thing in the USA?

I think Yud does not want the responsibility. LessWrong and Effective Altruism attracted so many people, and he discovered that trying to manage the communities was too much work, so he just tweets and publishes fanfic. This is convenient for his fans because they can pick and chose which of his ideas are the Real Yud Thought.

In a quick DuckDuckGo I can’t find any site that claims Samo Burja has a degree.

His concept of live player is just another way of saying that most people are NPCs. The manuscript appears to call Elon Musk an engineer which is like calling Cheops an architect (alternatively, Musk must “fundamentally understand engineering”).

Samo Burja of Leverage Research and Palladium Magazine is trying to pivot to respectability https://samoburja.com/ He also has a Substack blog. People call him a sociologist and a political scirentist but he seems (echo me) entirely self-published except for a few opinion pieces and his highest educational credential is “studied at the University of Ljubljana.” The Long Now Foundation gave him money which is disappointing.

Everything from the eugenics to the Social Darwinism to the ritual magick to the Jung to the goldbug economics is reviving ideas from the 1880s-1920s. If academics gave them up 50 or 100 years ago, that just proves that mainstream wisdom can’t be trusted!

I love this bit on “did they use goat’s blood in a silver chalice? Rookie mistake, my teacher used a brazen chalice and he was only carried off by demons once.”

Because Leveragers believed in the great potential of psychological change, naturally it became important to access seemingly cordoned-off areas of the psyche, to explore or to reprogram them. A student of other psychological and spiritual models might call mental space Leveragers now sought to understand “the unconscious,” or “the Abyss.” If more Leveragers had been following certain spiritual teachers or methods, they might have learned ideas about containment, such as “perimeters” — or “protection” practices, ranging from prayers to ritual cleansings. But, as many a serious practitioner could tell you, it’s hard to say whether any of that would have been truly protective, in the end.

Also, the Leverage Staffer who appeared on LessWrong to defend Geoff Anders’ practice of taking his disciples to bed was at one time CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism in the UK. https://old.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/1tyr0y0/request_can_someone_please_write_a_deep_dive_on/

The author characterizes EA as being more “businesslike and professional” than LW, then spends the article talking about how their plans all hinge on getting a rich patron.

The image of the beautiful gardens floored with Astroturf is sad.

Leverage published The “Post-Experiences” Inquiry Report: Factors and Mistakes that Contributed to a Range of Negative Experiences on Our 2011-2019 Research Collaboration. It does not mention demons, Buddhists, neoreactionaries, or bodywork.

The emphasis on how Geoff Anders is very sorry (but not how he claimed he had solved philosophy and was about to solve psychology and by the way he could help his disciples better if they stripped and assumed the position) reminds me of Anna Salamon not-talking talking about what went wrong at CFAR 1.0.