this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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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).
One thing that really shifted my perspective was realizing how many of the people and institutions in these rationalist and rationalist-adjacent social networks are funded either directly or indirectly by Peter Thiel - even people who seem to be ideologically opposed on the surface. I wasted so much of my time arguing with people on forums about their ideology only to realize that I had been hacking at the branches instead of the roots: Peter Thiel's money.
(Not that I mean to put all the blame on Thiel but he's clearly a big and highly connected node in this network)
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.
Jane Street has an interesting cachet in at least my nerd circles because they require everyone they hire to learn Ocaml[1]. It would not surprise me if they are fash-adjacent, but only because I believe everyone in Wall Street is fash-adjacent.
[1] I think - maybe it's only the technical staff
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.