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. Edit/ This Miles was doing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham ten years ago but does not mention any publications or industry experience and warns “I do have a broader understanding than some, but I also think that most researchers … yeah, most researchers know everything about one thing and a bit about everything else, and I just know a bit about everything, right?”
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
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.
Just like EA and Rationalism are just rewarmed Christian Apocalypticism and social Darwinism, the horrors in these communities are just California cults and dysfunctional nerd groups. American FOSS, the SCA, and the skeptic/New Atheist/FreeThoughtBlogs movements all had similar stories where a community gets bigger and starts to hold parties with substances and dancing, grifters and abusers join, the older leadership does not want to deal with them, and misconduct escalates. At this point, if the leaders of an organization do not prepare for these situations, they are negligent.
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