GorillasAreForEating

joined 2 years ago
[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Ziz's blog had posts that revealed his identity and mentioned some of the BD stuff, once I found them it was just a matter of putting two and two together, so to speak

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 2 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

Damn, I missed this and now the comment is deleted. Do you happen to remember what he said?

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

Yeah, I think Rolling Stone was worried about getting sued and omitted Helm's name in the first draft (or something like that).

I know who the alleged victim was, and I think there probably was a crime and blackmail payments but the alleged victim didn't want to come forward for a number of reasons (among other things, he's still part of the rationalist community and has faced a lot of harassment from the public after an unrelated newspaper article outed him as being trans). I'd also point out that the only person that miricult directly accused of statutory rape was one of Yudkowsky's employees rather than Yudkowsky himself. That being said, the journalist who wrote the Rolling Stone article claims she got a copy of the police report Helm filed and only Yudkowsky was named.

Even if miricult was total bullshit I'm confident that the alleged victim was lying about not being exploited by other rationalists; a few years later he and a couple of other people posted accounts of being sexually abused by a rationalist (unrelated to miricult) and it led to the abuser being ostracized from the rationalist community.

Anyways I know a lot more about this but I'd rather not discuss the details on a publicly viewable forum to protect the privacy of the people involved.

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

That part of the testimony was finally unredacted in the Epstein files that were released to the public recently, it turns out the scientist in question was Stephen Kosslyn, not Steven Pinker. You can see for yourself:

https://ep-nov-12-data.greg.technology/006/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021174.jpg

I searched the files for both Yudkowsky and Pinker, Epstein seems to have known who they were but there aren't any emails or direct correspondence between them and nothing incriminating (yet)

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (4 children)

I've thought about making one but I never got really got past the "gathering info" stage as I tend to go on hiatus for months at a time for the sake of my sanity. That being said, here are some things you might find interesting:

Extropia's Children - a series of substack posts about the rationalists and related groups. One of the better sources of their early history that I've found, and has links to the original sources for a lot of stuff.

MIRI's "Top Contributors" page - which shows that Peter Thiel was their biggest donor until 2015, when he pulled funding because he felt that they had become like a luddite Burning Man Camp (and it was also a year that the Rationalists actually did go to Burning Man). Thiel was also given an honorary position in SIAI. Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz has been their biggest funder since 2015 through Open Philanthropy.

Yudkowsky coined the term "effective altruist", despite their claims to the contrary. Will MacAskill and Toby Ord were both LessWrongers before starting EA, and LessWrong was EA's biggest recruitment source for years (I think this is noteworthy because EA now tries to distance themselves from the rationalists rather than acknowledging that they're an offshoot)

FTX was also an offshoot of the rationalists/EA (hence the polyamorous group house, FTX prediction market, etc). Caroline Ellison was a personal friend of Scott Alexander Siskind and even told him about their overleveraging strategy on tumblr a few months before FTX collapsed SBF financially supported ACX and his psychiatrist, George Lerner, worked in the same office as Scott Alexander IIRC (I've lost track of the source, will post later if I can find it).

This recent Rolling Stone article about the Zizians - which filled in a number of gaps in my knowledge, in particular how Yudkowsky and Thiel met.

This a timeline of events related to sexual assaults in the rationalist community that I myself compiled and posted on the subreddit. (I think I have an even longer timeline of events somewhere, I'll look for it later)

Anyways I'd be up for sharing info, there's a bunch more stuff I know and I could basically send you a giant list of sites I've bookmarked over the years that would aid in mapping out the connections. (edit: I guess that wouldn't really be "concise" but I think if we want a concise posopography we'll have to make it ourselves)

My favorite science Youtubers? Nah, those channels are IFLScience-tier, their intended audience is literally children.

 

Just for the record, I'm not suicidal.

 

The article doesn't mention SSC directly, but I think it's pretty obvious where this guy is getting his ideas

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

When they made an alt-right equivalent of Patreon they called it "Hatreon". This stuff is like a game to them.

 

An old post from Caroline Ellison's tumblr, since deleted.

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

Apparently Aella and Robin Hanson showed up at vibecamp too, I guess it's a big deal for the greater rationalist community.

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

I did not. Got any details?

Also FWIW I discovered this yesterday: https://archive.ph/SFCwS

No idea if it's true, but even if so I don't think it would exonerate him (though it would put Aella in a worse light)

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 0 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Yudkowsky is pretty open about being a sexual sadist

 

I somehow missed this one until now. Apparently it was once mentioned in the comments on the old sneerclub but I don't think it got a proper post, and I think it deserves one.

 

From Sam Altman's blog, pre-OpenAI

[–] GorillasAreForEating@awful.systems 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

It's like when he wore a fedora and started talking about 4chan greentexts in his first major interview. He just cannot help himself.

P.S. The New York Times recently listed "internet philosopher" Eliezer Yudkowsky as one of the of the major figures in the modern AI movement, this is the picture they chose to use.

 

At various points, on Twitter, Jezos has defined effective accelerationism as “a memetic optimism virus,” “a meta-religion,” “a hypercognitive biohack,” “a form of spirituality,” and “not a cult.” ...

When he’s not tweeting about e/acc, Verdon runs Extropic, which he started in 2022. Some of his startup capital came from a side NFT business, which he started while still working at Google’s moonshot lab X. The project began as an April Fools joke, but when it started making real money, he kept going: “It's like it was meta-ironic and then became post-ironic.” ...

On Twitter, Jezos described the company as an “AI Manhattan Project” and once quipped, “If you knew what I was building, you’d try to ban it.”

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