Whisper networks are awful, but the way to prevent them is to not let creeps into your community in the first place. And if you trust someone enough to ask them for advice like this, you should probably listen to what they say, even if it is “vague and hard for me to concretely visualize.”

Nonlinear Fund threatened to sue the person who said they were bad bosses with no boundaries who wasted funds! There was a bet on the Manifold prediction market about it. Narrator: Nonlinear did not sue.

Sabine Hossenfelder says she got pitched to create a series of videos about AI doom with a hint that she did not have to disclose the sponsorship (“e.g. AI job loss, AI surveillance, AI totaliterianism, AI takeover, AI-generated pandemics, AI warfare, etc.”) Someone shared a screenshot where the pitch comes from by Drew Spartz using funds from the “Center for AI Safety” in San Francisco. Hossenfelder is a physicist and science communicator who turned to her connections in the Thielsphere and started to make conspiratorial videos about how science is fake and if scientists don’t watch out they will be defunded after her last postdoc expired. We last met Drew Spartz in 2023, where he worked for an “effective altruist organization” named the Nonlinear Fund (part 1) - (part 2). Nonlinear’s modus operandi was allegedly hiring live-in personal assistants to help them be digital nomads, having “casual romantic relationships” with them, asking them to commit crimes, then not paying them.

It always surprises me when someone starts with “AI safety is a sex cult inspired by bad science fiction” or “prompt engineering is ritual magic without the fun sacred names” and then wheels to “but chatbots and ‘Agentic AI’ are still the wave of the future!”

Muhammad also discovered that God wanted him to marry as many women as he liked, but did not want them to remarry after he died. Joseph Smith ‘married’ a lot of younger women too. So I think if you let people rewrite social rules, many of them will decide that the new rule is “I fuck whoever I want, but they only fuck me.”

Oof, if he was raised by Internet Libertarians, I understand why he became such a shitty person.

Sex at Dawn came out in 2010 and was heavily hyped online. It does not seem to have got positive attention in academia. The 2009 edition of The Ethical Slut has polyamory in the title.

Do they actually buy, ship, and distribute nets to poor brown and black people? I thought shorttermists just made spreadsheets and donated to other people’s charities.

Ziz talked about brain surgery and surgical equipment was found in her panel vans.

S.R. Constantin’s after-action report on MetaMed had a lot of this, like what happened when they decided that doctors were statistically illiterate and did not know about the power of checklists:

Some of our founding inspirations were the work of Gerd Gigerenzer and Atul Gawande, who showed that medical errors were the cause of many deaths, that doctors tend to be statistically illiterate, and that systematizing tools like checklists and statistical prediction rules save lives. … Many of the improvements in systematization that were clearly “good buys” have, in fact, been implemented in hospitals since Gawande and Gigerenzer first wrote about them. We never saw a clear-cut case of a patient whose doctors had “dropped the ball” by giving them an obviously wrong treatment, except where the patient was facing financial hardship and had to transfer to substandard medical care. I think doctors don’t make true unforced errors in diagnosis or treatment plan that often; and medical errors like “operating on the wrong leg” that happen in fast-paced decisionmaking environments were necessarily outside our scope.

They also found that base rates work much better than personalized medicine which is exactly what Kahneman and Tversky find.

In 2015, around the time MetaMed ran out of money, Andrew Rettek raised $2,280 on GoFundMe to hire his wife to write a report on STI transmission risks. https://www.gofundme.com/f/n5kt74 Safer sex is important but its very like our friends to go “thousands of professionals around the world have devoted their lives to this topic, but I bet I can do better in a week with scihub and the power of fanfic.” Some of our friends totally took that report and tried to play the odds rather than stick to strict rules.

Edit / the report is here https://srconstantin.github.io/2015/04/30/std-statistics.html

Some on Reddit called Mollie Gleiberman a conspiracy theorist when I cited her argument that these people always wanted to build Computer God and conquer the universe. I did not know that our friends tried that gambit as soon as Emile introduced the TESCREAL concept.

Michael Vassar called sleeping with his staff at MetaMed polyamory. Polyamory is common, and bosses and teachers sleeping with employees and students is common, but the combination stands out.

There are a lot of attempts to push polyamory on white-collar and chattering-class culture, but many men in the USA seem to push it so they can tell their primary partner “I sleep with my groupies because I am polyamorous” and tell their groupies “who cares that you have a boyfriend, how about polyamory?” It also lets insecure men show off that they have not just one hot babe but several, and we know many rationalists are desperate for the rest of the world to recognize their genius. The problem, to be clear, is not necessarily with polyamory, just with people who use it as a way to get a gang of domestic servants.

I still have scars from events like the ones documented at https://allegedlythewebsite.org/ So many men in the skeptic and adjacent blogosphere used “sex-positivity” to mean “I can hit on you and encourage you to bottom at kink events, and you can’'t say I am creeping you out or you are looking fro a job not a playmate.” Similar dynamics are common in academia, polyamory was just one trendy excuse in the 2000s and 2010s. Scott Alexander experimented with polyamory and was living with a sex blogger in 2013 and I think Yud had connections in the NYC poly and kink scene.

A LessWronger asks the bold question: is polyamory net negative for most people because jealousy and drama take so much energy to deal with? Does not go in to “chat, my boss is also my lover and holds the lease on my housing, and now I am competing for a promotion with another lover-roommate-coworker, is that bad?”

Not sure about the Libertarian connection, but the comments feature Eliezer Yudkowsky and at least one member of the MAPLE cult (Goldenberg).

A “no attacks on people’s characters” policy seems like a terrible idea in this space because so many people are grifters, liars, and apocalyptic cultists. At some point you have to say “you are a bad person who uses false words to do bad things.”

Also a German Minister of Defense. My impression is that Arday was a fabulist, but so are many academics at wealthy research institutions, and the global campaign against him was clearly motivated by racism. Not sure about the plagiarism because I am not on Cambridge’s academic integrity committee.

Her twitter https://x.com/s_r_constantin says she is married to Andrew Rettek. Rufflejax accused Rettek and Vassar of emotional abuse while they were all in a polyamorous relationship and says he liked his women barely legal (“I deserve a hot nubile college girl every year until I turn 40”). https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1009625312844550146.html So Constantin is close to a lot of bad people.

Roam Research seems like a generic note-taking app endorsed by Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative and Sarah R. Constantin. Anything else notable about it?

Roam is also endorsed by an OpenAI staffer who thinks Scott Aaronson was one of her best professors.

All I really know is her old Wordpress blog. She is the kind of person who keeps launching new sites without leaving a forwarding address on the last, not the kind who still runs her blogspot blog from 2004 so links won’t break. I never really explored these people’s history on livejournal or tumblr and just mine their Twitter history when needed.

She does not seem woo-friendly.

Did not know those parts of her CV! At least two of the four CFAR founders have said things like “The actual drive in the background was a lot more like “Keep running workshops that wow people” with an additional (usually consciously (!) hidden) thread about luring people into being scared about AI risk in a very particular way … Even from the very beginning CFAR simply COULD NOT be honest about what it was doing or bring anything like a collaborative tone to its participants.”

MetaMed was founded by Michael Vassar, and Palantir is Alex Karp’s creature, and both of those are bad dudes.

Sarah R. Constantin, who noticed that EA has a lying problem, now has a Substack. She reminds me of Julia Galef, because she does not advocate the most dangerous aspects of TESCREAL, but never says “my TESCREAL buddies are creeps pushing crank ideas funded by fascists.” https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/getting-back-to-it