Is there a survey of our friends' ventures into the worlds of personal finance and investing?

• a group of EAs worked for Jane Street Capital in NYC (sounds impressive) but went on to found FTX (incompetent at business mechanics but really good at manipulating people)
• their Jane Street sponsor James McClave seems like old money since he has a family foundation
• Aella invested heavily in crypto in 2013 but was not able to turn it back into real money at a profit; she was also involved with a dating site in the Terra/Luna ecosystem
• so many other failed cryptocurrency schemes
• MetaMed their quack medical startup (hired Scott Alexander between medical school and residency!)
• investment posts on LessWrong are few and unimpressive, on the level of "if I need money in a few years and emerging market stocks tend to do best, should I invest all the money in them?" The people with clues tend to disappear from the site.
• they are obsessed with prediction markets but their favourite uses their own brand of play money not hard currency https://manifold.markets/
• EA staff don't seem to understand the terms under which they hold $20m of real estate in Berkeley, and frequently misuse accounting terms
• I don't know anyone in this space who has founded a profitable business bigger than one person, and the one-person freelance businesses are scarce
• Leopold Aschenbrenner who is one step away from FTX and Anthropic just blew up his $45 billion hedge fund with too much leverage
• JueYan Zhang had a ten-year career as a hedge-fund manager but switched to redistributing donations
• many of their friends are fringe economists at George Mason University like Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson

It seems like their problem is less their quack economics and overconfidence than that learning the basics is hard, practicing them requires self-discipline and willingness to fail, and they can always talk a friend into wiring them another $100,000. So they sling the lingo but generally know less than a high-school graduate who reads books on personal finance from the library and spent a few summers running a house-painting business.

Does anyone have a favourite story?

Edit / mentioned MetaMed

this is a hoot

https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117003533670109098

Hi there,
I am Shriya, reaching out on behalf of Frame Fellowship, a 10-week residential program in San Francisco, US for creators who want to become leading voices on AI and its impact on society. We were following your content and thought you are exactly the kind of voice we built this program for.

Side-note: this is a known failure mode of crowds that use psychedelics for spiritual growth. Sure, don't trust everything your brain says on (or after!) psychedelics, but be especially careful of trusting a subculture that is "on" psychedelics. From a thousand miles away I can't say for sure but it sounds like psychedelic drugs and their consequences are a load-bearing part, if not the center of this story. - PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN, comment to r/SlateStarCodex, 2022 https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/qa14kg/my_experience_at_and_around_miri_and_cfar/

While we will never know the details until someone publishes a memoir, people in Bay Area LessWrong talk a lot about psychedelics. They were popular in the 1960s counterculture (there was a LSD-and-marijuana fuelled attempt to levitate the Pentagon in 1967). This is a jury-rigged substitute for the on-the-ground reporting, social history, and ethnography which we desperately need. The first part covers events up to 2018, when the movement and movement leaders were mostly sympathetic to better living through chemistry.

Some people who talk about psychedelics might mean LSD and related hallucinogens, others might include other 'hippie drugs' like marijuana. Many of my sources are either casual posts or memories of traumatic experiences hazed by substances and emotional and sexual abuse, so may not be precise and accurate.

The following quotes many posts by Scott Alexander. To my knowledge, he has never publicly encouraged anyone to take a controlled substance without a proscription, and never stated that he himself has used such substances. It might be possible to find similar posts on LessWrong and the parties' Tumblr blogs but I only have so much time.

Early Posts 2011-2015

• 2011: A Shannon F., who lived with her husband, the cofounder of the New York chapter of Less Wrong, and his wife, expresses desire to cut down on substance use:

If I cut down to once/week of pot smoking with possibly the occasional hallucinogen if I can get them working, then that’s only 1-2 nights of altered state/week,” http://choiceful.livejournal.com/970554.html as quoted at BetaBeat.com (the exact link to the LiveJournal is wrong).

F. and her housemates had multiple connections to Peter Thiel. F. at one time dated Yudkowsky. Her Livejournal is not fully archived but it has a "drugs" tag. My understanding is that the most popular hallucinogens in the US are magic mushrooms and psychedelics. Shannon F. was an Internal Family Systems life coach (an interest she shared with Andrew Critch at CFAR) and one of her partners was a libertarian Seasteader. One of her gurus told her she should hire servants and make sure she did not overpay ("So cool...", Nov. 15, 2012"). It sounds like a standard take-my-expensive-classes-and-you-will-get-rich grift.

• September 2012 to March 2013: gwern experiments on himself with LSD microdoses later written up https://gwern.net/lsd-microdosing
• 30 September 2013: Scott Alexander posts Links for Octember. One paragraph is an intrigued but gently skeptical note on psychedelic therapy. David Gerard is in the comments.

Yet another article on the amazing therapeutic and nootropic promise of LSD. But this one has a twist – the idea of LSD micro-dosing! Take a tiny fraction of a regular dose – they suggest – and instead of merging with the Universal Fractal Consciousness, you just feel a little better, calmer, more productive, and more “in tune” during your day. A random person on Reddit reports success, and that’s good enough for me. Too bad I (SlateScott) am in a position of responsibility where I have to serve as a Positive Role Model for others and so probably shouldn’t try it.

He wrote this about the time he moved from the Bay Area to the Chicago area for medical residency. A nootropic is a drug which is supposed to make you smarter. Users of everything from caffeine and alcohol to the latest designer drug tell you it makes them more productive but randomized controlled trials often disagree. I would expect a psychiatrist to be familiar with the perils of self-medication but maybe he was reading racist blogs during that class.

• 2014: while working as a camgirl in Masschusetts, Aella experiments with LSD (10 Months of Acid, 2016). She later says she became addicted so her doses were probably not micro- or not all LSD (her education ended in high school and her parents were fundamentalists in rural Iowa so I don't think she was equipped to make the good stuff or test it herself). https://archive.ph/RvDdI As of time of writing she tweets annual recaps of her substance use and continues to use substances to alter her consciousness.
• 11 April 2014: Scott Alexander posts Going Loopy

One of the most powerful serotonergic drugs in existence is LSD. And as I have learned from – let’s say long boring journal articles – the main effect of LSD is to make you literally loopy. Your thoughts loop in and become about themselves, your sense of time becomes cyclic, everything you see becomes a fractal or a spiral or both. And you end up in an extreme emotional feedback loop to infinity – either a “good trip” or a “bad trip”.

Alexander could be hinting that he learned about the effects of LSD from treating patients, or from other experiences.

• 24 June 2015: Scott Alexander posts Links 6/15: Monsters, Link

Critical Period 2016-2018

Bay Area Rationalists reported a lot of drama between 2016 and 2018. MIRI spent a total of $280k on legal expenses in 2014 and 2015 to deal with Louie Helm and the miricult accusations (about ten times their usual legal budget). In January 2016 CFAR reiterated that its focus was teaching people to be rational, then in December it announced a pivot to preventing AI Doom. Michael Vassar of MIRI and MetaMed is said to have influenced the old CFAR curriculum but was drifting away from Bay Area LW. In 2018 there was another shakeup after various people pushed out Brent D. and the board members who had protected him. Julia Galef who seemed more naive than malicious also left CFAR in 2016 and dropped out of public view. Michael Vassar really needs to be interviewed, two representative links are https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.michael.vassar and https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Vassar.

• 1 March 2016: Scott Alexander posts 2016 Nootropics Survey results 109 out of 850 respondents comment on experiences with LSD microdosing compared to 314 respondents on Adderall

A bit under 15% of users got addicted to Adderall. The conventional wisdom says “recreational users” are more likely to get addicted than people who take it for a psychiatric condition with a doctor’s prescription. There was no sign of this; people who took it legally and people who took it for ADHD were actually much more likely to get addicted than people who described themselves as illegal or recreational users. In retrospect this isn’t surprising; typical psychiatric use is every day; typical recreational use is once in a while.

I am not a MD or pharmacist, but isn't another important difference that recreational users can use as much as they can afford while medical users have a controlled rate of consumption supervised by someone familiar with its effects and no financial interest in how much they consume? There is also a difference between a student popping Adderall during exam season, and a finance worker taking it daily. Most research on substance use distinguishes people who tried a joint once and people who use it every week.

• 28 April 2016: Scott Alexander posts Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird? (comments by Aella, Steve Sailer, gwern). Gwern chips in about his experiments:

To drop in my (Gwern's) anecdote: as part of my 2012 LSD microdosing experiment, I (Gwern) had taken a (very short) Big Five inventory (the YourMorals.org one) which put my Openness at 87th percentile several months before; 2 days after my LSD trip (with no mystical experience), I retook it and also got 87th. (That was my first and so far only psychedelic experience, excluding obviously the microdosing itself, which had no perceptible or measured effects. It was enjoyable and helpful, I thought, but I haven’t been able to do another because Reasons.) Several months later, I took it a third time and got a 93rd percentile. So it’s at least directionally consistent. I have not noticed any particular change in my beliefs or ideologies I could ascribe to the one trip, also consistent with the idea that it’s a lot of heroic doses which sends people off into Mullisland.

• 21 August 2016: Aella posts 10 Months of Acid about her self-experimentation in 2014. She assures readers that although her LSD use damaged her, "disclaimer: this is not typical acid use. There are many concretely ‘beneficial’ effects from lower, more infrequent doses"

As time went on, I stopped viewing myself as a being separate from the universe. Sensations became interesting to watch, not motivating. I entered such a permanent state of utter peace and contentment that I stopped wanting anything at all. And by the end of it, I barely got out of bed, barely ate. My sleep schedule became erratic, as I woke and slept as I wished. I had vivid lucid dreams. I had stopped working almost entirely and was living off slowly depleting savings. Why would I work? Why would I do anything? I was…. not happy, not sad, I simply was. I was free of desire. I did not fear death.

(... she decided to turn away from oblivion ...)

I’m mostly normal now(wpl:citationNeeded), with only a few remnants. Sometimes certain types of conversations will trigger it, where I’m sitting there and suddenly the eye of the universe has turned on me and I am melting away. It is very intense. I don’t mind, though. That’s a fundamental part of the feeling, really – that I don’t mind when it’s happening.

• 15 August 2016: Scott Alexander posts Tolerance Troubles, an essay on why you need increasing doses of some substances to get the same effect. Several handles in the comments describe their experiences with LSD.

• 2017: Jessica Taylor says that this was the year when she both got a job with MIRI/CFAR and self-medicated with psychedelics. As she remembered in 2021:

the psychotic break was in October 2017, and involved psychedelic use (as part of trying to “fix” multiple deep mental problems at once, which was, empirically, overly ambitious); although people around me to some degree tried to help me, this “treatment” mostly made the problem worse, so I was placed in 1-2 weeks of intensive psychiatric hospitalization, followed by 2 weeks in a halfway house. This was followed by severe depression lasting months, and less severe depression from then on, which I still haven’t fully recovered from. I had PTSD symptoms after the event and am still recovering. ("My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)")

In a comment she says that someone close to CFAR hinted that CFAR encouraged people to use psychedelics. The discussion thread contains many of our dear friends all mutually recriminating and contradicting (some want to blame Michael Vassar, others the main faction of CFAR). Taylor posted a second time pushing back against Scott Alexander's attempt to blame Michael Vassar. I talk more about this under A Bad Trip in Berkeley.

She does not say where she got the idea to self-medicate with these substances, or that anyone encouraged her to do so, but the idea of self-medicating with psychedelics was certainly part of LessWrong online culture by 2018 and people tend to be more willing to talk about illegal activities than post about them. 2016-2018 was the period when CFAR switched to focus on AI risk and was run by people close to Brent Dill, and Michael Vassar was still close to MIRI and CFAR although no longer an employee or board member.

• 18 January 2018: Scott Alexander posts about Aella's LSD habit and a site that combines online dating with skin in the game and cryptocurrency in Practically a Book review: Luna Whitepaper. He encourages people to read her blog about self-experimenting and has no other warnings which I can see.

• 6 June 2018: Scott Alexander posts HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects

I recently worked with a man who took LSD once in college and never stopped hallucinating. It’s been ten years now and it’s still going. We can control it with medication, but take the meds away and it starts right back up again.

This seems to be the first time that a prominent rationalist warns the Internet that drugs can eff you up for life. Aella was not very influential in the rationalist scene back in 2016, I believe she was still living in New England then.

• 19 June 2018: Jax Romana tweets her breakup with Effective Altruism and LessWrong after spending several years in the Bay Area scene https://xcancel.com/RuffleJax/status/1009141601623474176#m She later accuses a specific rationalist:

I know, personally, two women who have not publicly come out about their abuse but were basically held emotionally hostage by Yud with a mix of LSD, "You will die without me", and kink practiced with or without their consent.

As far as I know nobody who was present in Bay Area Rationalism has publicly accused Yud of similar things.

• 18 September 2018: a pseudonymous Medium account accuses Brent D. of various sexual misconduct. One story begins:

I was 19 when I entered the rationalist community. Brent was 40 when we met each other. I moved into the same house as Brent, dated Brent for 2 months, and then lived with him for a year and a half after. ... With Brent, I did acid and MDMA for the first time. Some of the explicit agenda around me taking MDMA was to restore subconscious faith and attraction in him, which did not work. I came away from this with the story that I was pressured into taking MDMA by Brent.

In this context acid usually means LSD. A post called Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores? says that Brent was expelled from the community and the CFAR organization lost several staff and its position as a central social hub in Bay Area rationalism.

Later this summer: perigee, in which our friends start whispering that their community norms around substance use should change

Edit / define nootropic, acknowledge that Aella did have some warnings about LSD before Slate Scott

Copied from the stubsack:

The Inside story of Leverage Research

This should be interesting, it's about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though might be a bit too culty. Don't know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.

edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote it is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in capital G god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.

Also the Leverage article was contracted to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she goes on to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:

I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.

edit edit: Why can't these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020

edit edit edit: Jesus fucking christ she's Curtis Yarvin's baby momma.

edit x 4: Index of the read along posts, part titles are from the original:

• Pt1: Founding Myths
• Pt2: Body and Energy
• Pt3: Practical Magic
• Pt3 Continued
• Pt4: Intention War
• Pt5: How it ended

Brent Dill has appeared on YouTube and was invited to a weekend event by a VibeCamp organizer. There is a 2 hour 39 minute twitter video about how he was supposedly wronged, and a lot of tweets back and forth about the specifics. Even his defenders say that a lot of messed up things happened in Bay Area LessWrong including lying and sexual / emotional abuse.

I posted some quotes on the Stubsack. I don't know what to do because it looks like some messed up things happened between our friends and unnamed young people, and there were coverups, but the details will only be known if someone gets access to their email and text history and interviews them. Some of the same people are probably victims and perpetrators. We don't need all the details to tell anyone curious about them "these spaces are full of abusers, grifters, and cult recruiters and use a lot of drugs, stay away."

Stories about Dill putting his arm around people and telling them that they were the only two who saw what was really going on in society / their group house remind me of stories about Michael Vassar.

Dill once lived in Idaho where Aella grew up.

The incident log for the Red Means No CNC party that's popular in rat / postrat circles.

Highlights include 'non-negotiated' penetration and a woman being dropped on the floor so hard it gave her a concussion.

Looks like both the feds and state law enforcement / intelligence agencies are tracking the Zizians now.

WIRED: Anti-Tech Extremism

From the rationalists are a net negative for society dept: Scott Alexander's latest (that I'm not linking) is all about how you should be using the slop machine to tell you who to vote for.

He's even so kind as to share his prompt:

I’ll be voting in the June 2026 California primary. I’m a centrist liberal abundance YIMBY whose favorite political writers are Kelsey Piper, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein. I’m wary of government overreach, but I’m not a doctrinaire libertarian and want to help people when we can figure ways to do it that work. I’m going to ask you about each race on my ballot, and I’d like for you to list the various candidates’ bios, policies, endorsements, your read on the most important differences between them, and your advice for me as I try to make my choice.

Pretending hallucinations and training data bias aren't a thing must be making some people's lives so much easier. While we're at it, let's also magical think away any possible dire consequences of giving the handful of ultrawealthy unwell weirdos behind LLMs as a service even more direct political influence.

Also the prompt sample itself is just showoffy^1^ nonsense, isn't it? Even if LLMs were as overcompetent as they're being hyped there's no way all that stuff can be deterministically parsed into a concrete set of values that you can check against whatever the LLM digs up from the internet, combined with all the close-enoughs hardcoded in its training data, there's just enormous room for the chatbot to answer whatever the hell it wants.

1. That's me trying not to overuse the term "virtue signalling", but it seems clear siskind is using the prompt to set a sort of partly line for his (outer circle / not completely eugenics pilled) followers. That's probably also the point of including so much chatbot attributed political slop in the article, ostensibly as data points.

Pretty much everyone in the word business has noticed that audio and video are kicking writing's butts in terms of getting an online audience (I am not sure in terms of influencing people in serious jobs). Ivy Astrix mentioned that our dear friends in Berkeley decided that if a camp for wordy bloggers was good, a camp for short-form vloggers would be even better. The camp is about AI doom, but the vlogs don't have to be. You can live in Berkeley for a month, be paid $2,000, compete for $20,000 in prizes, and hang out with ~~illustrious figures~~ Hereticon alumni like:

• Botez Sisters (professional chess and poker players, one of them is down on the idea that teh men have better genes for chess than women)
• Grimes
• CJ the X
• Aric Floyd
• Liv Boeree
• Quinn Finite who dual-classes in visual social media and sexy social media
• Zoe Curzi
• Rob Miles
• Tor Parsons
• Yud
• Aella
• Nate Soares (the last three in the triangle wing, one presumes)

The marketing mentions "a sprinkling of AI experts" even though Yud's position on Twitter is that he is not an AI expert. I don't think Soares or MIles have any relevant credentials or achievements other than social media posts. Another Robert Miles was a University of Hull computer scientist.

Some of the slogans sound lighthearted if you don't know about the phygs and the sexual abuse: "if we're gonna die we might as well have fun" "sleep is optional, posting is not" "we need better messengers" "31 days of chaos" "the stakes could not be higher"

plzdontkillus is definitely less straight and male than their usual lineup, and some of these people would be interesting to meet or have coffee with, but I would not recommend committing to spend a month with them given all the abuse and negligence in rationalist communities.

The LessWrong crowd don't seem to be worried that subsidies for streaming video are killing the culture of reading and writing and the rational, reflective, slow forms of thinking which it inculates, I don't know if they have talked about the need to cooperate with NIMBYs fighting data centers, or if using law to prevent destruction might involve hiring a law team to make OpenAI's life hell. You can hire a very good lawyer and some paralegals for Yud's salary.

edit/ added full list of celebrity guests

Hi, Ivy Astrix here. I saw some of my work referenced here so figured I'd pop in and do an AMA. I did harm reduction at Vibecamp 1/2, and Vibegala 1/2. Happy to answer what I can as long as it doesn't violate confidences or isn't in service of personal grievances.

Duncan Sabien likes at least two games: punch bug (as long as he is the one doing the punching) and Magic: the Gathering. He has a whole theory of personality types based on colours of magic in M:tG (red, green, white, blue, and black) and got his partner the therapist into it. The four humours are old and unscientific see:

Personalities, organizations, goals, and means can all be thought of in terms of the Magic colors they typify, allowing you to draw interesting connections, make surprisingly useful predictions, identify deficits and growth areas, and increase empathy. I claim that the Magic system, which was designed to be resonant and trope-y and archetypal, does a lot of the same good work that naming things does, and is a richer intuition pump than other popular wrong-but-usefuls like Enneagram or MBTI or chakras or the integral theory colors.

Backlinks show a number of rationalists and one TTRPG designer being excited about it.

Sneerers are having fun riffing on this theory, so lets create a thread for that. https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/the-mtg-color-wheel?open=false#%C2%A7ub

I will begin with the fact that he posted it on Medium in twenty-frigging-eighteen and was offended that they eventually moved it to their "paying members only" section. Who in 2018 could have expected that a 'free' service would shut down or make the experience worse when it ran out of other people's money?

He also makes sure you know that the game designer, who also designed RoboRally, has a PhD. Try to explain Hume to them and they stone you, but invent a CCG which lets a corporation take all your lunch and newspaper-route money and they respect credentials.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/37599571

This is less related to actually existing "AI" and more about one of the myths (or, ultimately, the constellation of myths) that drives people to work on "AI." I posted this on Mastodon, but it probably belongs here as well.

tl;dr: Tech youtuber who got way into studying the negative health effects of infrasound produced by data centers (to the point of his research being cited a bunch in relevant court cases) gets a voluminous substack hit piece published on his work by "an independent writer and researcher funded by a grant from Coefficient Giving to explore topics in AI and other areas"

So after some sniffing around, I realize I’m being brigaded by someone deep in the Effective Altruism community. The author is, quite literally, paid by rotational-wealth NPO to write this very article among many others. I know what you’re thinking, and I know how this sounds. The battle cry of the pseudoscientist is poisoning the well of criticism.

But please do browse his bibliography.

Andy lives in a parallel universe where datacenters don’t waste water, AI artwork is without victims, and using ChatGPT doesn’t harm the environment. This is one of the many takes that perfectly align with the board, contributors, and partners with Coefficient Giving, formally called Open Philanthropy, but changed after its close association with Sam Bankman-Fried was causing some well-earned skepticism.

Quite the coincidence that this comes out right around the time Kelsey Piper decided to get busy "debunking" Ed Zitron.

There's already a follow up about the same people moving on to allegedly debunk a recent neuroscience paper on adverse infrasound effects on bsky.

old sneer club thread

In December I asked who owns Lighthaven? since rationalist organizations were telling their members one thing and the taxman another. I now have a hypothesis.

Since 2022 the rationalists control a $20m event complex called Lighthaven in Berkeley. It is run by organizations with names like Lightcone Infrastructure or the Lightcone Project. They told the taxman that it belonged to CFAR in 2022, 2023, and 2024. CFAR listed a real estate asset and debt liability, so who was the counterparty? You might assume it was a bank, but you would be wrong.

Some facts came out when the FTX estate sued CFAR to recover money which Sam Bankman-Fried gave or loaned them. In 2024, the FTX trustees described the situation thusly:

The complaint alleges that Lightcone got another $20m loan to fund the Rose Garden Inn purchase from Slimrock Investments Pte Ltd, a Singapore-incorporated company owned by Estonian software billionaire, Skype inventor and EA/rationalism adherent Jaan Tallinn. This included the $16.5m purchase price and $3.5m for renovations and repairs.

Slimrock investments has no apparent public-facing website or means of contact. The Guardian emailed Tallinn for comment via the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit whose self-assigned mission is: “Steering transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.” Tallinn sits on that organization’s board. Neither Tallinn nor the Future of Life Institute responded to the request.

A loan comes with obligation to repay.

Also (Case 22-11068-JTD):

Throughout 2022, FTX Foundation and CFAR were in discussions to purchase the Rose Garden Inn in Berkeley, California as a retreat center for the Effective Altruist community. ... Lightcone RG closed on the purchase of the hotel on or about November 4, 2022. ... The property is subject to a deed of trust and assignment of rents in favor of Slimrock Investments Pte. Ltd., which provided Lightcone with a $20 million loan for the purchase and renovation of the property

Such a deed means that if Lightcone fails to repay the loan, Slimrock owns Lighthaven, much as when someone fails to pay a mortgage and the bank reposesses their house.

When people asked if this endangered the Lighthaven property, Habryka said:

100% of the equity in Lighthaven is owned by a Jaan Tallinn owned company, so it's not really at risk, though the details are a bit messy. I think it's a relevant consideration but not a big one compared to just basic profitability.

In late 2025 he threatened to sell Lighthaven if people did not donate several million dollars.

If we fundraise less than $1.4M (or at least fail to get reasonably high confidence commitments that we will get more money before we run out of funds), I expect we will shut down. We will start the process of selling Lighthaven. I will make sure that LessWrong.com content somehow ends up in a fine place, but I don't expect I would be up for running it on a much smaller budget in the long run.

To help with this, the Survival and Flourishing Fund is matching donations up to $2.6M at an additional 12.5%! This means if we raise $2.6M, we unlock an additional $325k of SFF funding.

SFF does not seem to actually control money, it just recommends that third parties donate money. One of these is probably the Survival and Flourishing Corp, a public-benefit corporation. "Our primary client is philanthropist Jaan Tallinn."

My hypothesis is that Lighthaven is security for a $20m loan from Tallinn's Slimrock company (much like a house is security for a mortgage). That means that donors to Lightcone pay Slimrock, and if they can't keep up Slimrock keeps $20m of freshly renovated real estate in Berkeley (or the value of selling that real estate). That would also imply that Tallinn is collecting tax deductions for giving to a charity whose greatest single expense is repaying money he lent them.

This was posted on catholic easter sunday on the ssc subreddit. It's a posted-on-April 1st-for-plausible-deniability siskind post from back in 2018, where he outlines a kind of argument about how an all-powerfull entity that's God in all but name (and obviously emanated from a culture discovering AGI) is actually "logically necessary".

He calls the whole thing "The Hour I First Believed". I think it's notable for being a bit of a treasure trove of rationalist weird accepted truths, such as:

• All copies of a consciousness share a self, because consciousness is like an equation, or something:

But if consciousness is a mathematical object, it might be that two copies of the same consciousness are impossible. If you create a second copy, you just have the consciousness having the same single stream of conscious experience on two different physical substrates.

Which is both the original transhumanist cope to enable so-called consciousness upload so it's not just copying a simulacrum of your personality to a computer while you continue to rot away, and also what makes the basilisk torturing you possible.

• And it's corollary, Simulation Capture:

This means that an AI can actually “capture” you, piece by piece, into its simulation. First your consciousness is just in the real world. Then your consciousness is distributed across one real-world copy and a million simulated copies. Then the AI makes the simulated copies slightly different, and 99.9999% of you is in the simulation.

which is a kind of nuts I hadn't happened upon before.

There's also a bunch of rationalist decision theory stuff which I think make obvious how they were concocted to serve this type of narrative in the first place, instead for being broadly useful, Yud posing as a decision theory trailblazer notwithstanding.

As we don't have a top level post about this already (nor on reddit) I thought why not make one. Archive.is

Extremely likely the guy was a lesswronger, or at least radicalized by that sort of thinking.

But not much else seems to be known as far as I can tell. Corbin also posted about the HN reactions in the stubsack.

And remember, no fed posting.

Edit: looks like his house also got shot. Archive (after the speculation in this thread, makes you wonder if this was a follow up false flag, as the bottle didn't break last time).