ivyastrix

This post is so good. Erika nails Rationalists wanting the respectability Science would give their arguments without practicing the rigour.

The 'uwu im just smol bean researcher :(' is how any critique is usually responded to.

One correction, Kimbal is no longer on the board.

So given the Vibecamp's safety team current stance on handling incidents ie leaking private DM's I feel it's appropriate to disclose how things were handled circa Vibecamp 2.

Someone OD's (took to much not died) on GHB and was eventually carted to the teahouse, one of the Vibecamp org team was there and suggested that medical services shouldn't be called because it might force the answering of uncomfortable questions around drug use (Maryland is a 'good samaritan' state wrt reporting OD's for both the victim and person reporting so this was a bad call, I should probably have been more pro-active here and found that out / advised them).

My overall impression of Vibecamp's ethos is that one of their primary concerns is the event / community / etc public image and they will do questionable things to protect it that I don't think a reasonable person would consider as justified. I think this extends to Rationalism as a whole, ie Aella often frames things in the 'outsiders vs us' hierarchy.

the tl;dr is I wouldn't place any faith in Vibecamp's staff if I was to attend again for harm reduction or safety. They've repeatedly shown those things take second place to the image of the event.

The waterboarding thing was introduced by Vibecamp's head of safety at other events, and a lot of the pdku programming seems to be in the area of light bdsm / boundary pushing. imo they work from some base general formula and try and differentiate / create intake funnels for other events.

Holly nails it.

When the Rationalist Internet Defense Force has commented on my stuff, some of them have done the 'this is wrong b/c bad epistemics'.

Scientology is a perfect comparison and I really don't know how anyone can deny these people are cultish.

I've mentioned the SFZC in some writings and there's definitely something there.

hello friends some extra info here:

the person in question (not Brent) is a former organizer, the two stories are either that he did something bad (possibly sexual harassment?) or that the main Vibecamp founder pushed him out, I've seen some google docs hinting at the latter but as with everything in this ouroboros of awfulness impossible to really say what happened

brent's original cancellation dates back to early MIRI, the author of that video was careless with one of the codenames such that if you know a few things about the person you can tie them to a real life identity

the two loose possibilities (i've learned to not really trust anyone unless they have actual documentation) are that brent raped someone (possibly underage? this part i'm not 100% sure on) or the victim wanted to cover for her actual rapist and blamed brent

i find the latter really highly unlikely but that's the scoop

full disclosure in that i feel (now) that the editorial decision to include names could have gone either way and i think some criticisms of that are valid, accountability journalism is a tough thing to do perfectly or get right the first time

forgot to include the manual : https://archive.ph/cSDnZ

aka rape play

yep!! probably legally too

andrea and meredith from jakegate are friends of mine and I consistently look to them as examples of how to properly handle misbehaviour

They at least realize Yud's book isn't very good and no one's going to bomb datacenters with their current crop of AIfluencers.

fwiw I was DM'd once with someone saying the worst sexual abuse hasn't been made public and happens at Lighthaven, and Oliver seems to not take it very seriously. Grain of salt etc but if there's one group of people I would trust less with reporting sexual assault to than Vibecamp it would be Lighthaven.

ty <3

i agree, and I think the 'AI is going to kill us so yolo' attitude from influential people is mainly why problems are avoided or hidden