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

yes thank you <3

I think that in general there just needs to be more institutional attention on the situation that exists and every time I’ve talked to a journo there’s been a point at ‘this needs more national importance’ and sadly sexual violence by community group members doesn’t do it (and TIME / Bloomberg has already covered a lot of it)

I think an unfortunate truth is that there’s only so much critique can do, ie I could write another 5 blogs on what happened to me and it’s not really going to change anything. Vibecamp leadership has come down with a firm stance of not taking reports of sexual violence at face value and people can decide whether to attend based on that statement. The only thing that would make them really change is a civil lawsuit and any woman who does would face immense blowback (a friend of mine had a very publicized case in another group of people which she won, but she was insanely blacklisted in her industry).

When it comes to Rationalism in general, there is just too much money involved and it’s the same problem of women coming forward about things that happen at Lighthaven wrt blowback. Fucked up things happening are also just normalized for them, from Brent Dill to Michael Vassar to Zizians, and Lighthaven becoming a creator house via https://www.plzdontkillus.com/ is happening because they realize they need better PR.

So I guess all of this is to say I don’t think there’s a lot SneerClub can do besides being data points for people curious about Rationalism that research it, reading between the lines of what journalists have told me they need a group of women to come forward and put their names behind their accusations or there has to be some bombshell money trail / scandal beyond what TIME / Bloomberg have reported on.

Staying on the right side of mentioning names I have personal grievances with: People in that ecosystem are talented at getting favourable media coverage and winning the narrative, there’s not a lot to be done in the face of that other than try to give people a heads up on what they’re walking into. Some will listen, some won’t.

I think it’s an important thing to be generally aware of; MIRI pays Yud ~600k/yr as chair of the board, emergent ventures gives out a lot of grants to adjacent ppl, etc

There’s a lot of in-network stuff that happens too ie chaosprime was in a position to give vibecamp 18K, so I think the money part is important as it might allow some of the worst ppl to buy their way out of trouble

ty, I’ve heard her name here and there but didn’t look too deeply into a lot of CFAR internals.

My master theory has become that there are really two groups of people, impressionable children in adult bodies, and a lot of people who have become post-economic via something else (startup exits, sex work, poker championships) and that gets used as social proof when it comes to convincing people they know what they’re doing in other areas.

I think it’s definitely downstream of SV’s brief love affair with psychedelics (publicly), ket clinics for depression, etc.

I didn’t really start attending parties there until 2022 but I think it’s been the nose candy of choice for that set for a while.

It’s possible but I think they just don’t know what they’re doing.

I think for event organizers there’s a point at which you realize ‘this is beyond us’ and one of two things happens: you take some money from the nice to have pile and use it to make up that gap, or you learn at the expense of other people and I’ve never really been able to understand the decision process that leads to the latter.

Fran has done some really great writing on this, really admire her ability to deconstruct a community she’s fond of.

yeah i mean it’s complex i think!

in general there is a code of silence and social harmony is always favoured, and i am actually a little torn on ‘illegibility’: it does make for cool spaces but it allows ppl in those spaces to avoid problems by never really stating those values

ie communities that don’t have ‘we support victims of sexual violence’ codified anywhere and it’s just an assumed thing which often turns out not to be true, normies handle it poorly, rationalists/etc handle it really poorly, i think Kathy Forth was really right in that you have to specifically want to handle it well to actually do that otherwise you are very likely to do more harm than good to vulnerable women

a major boggle I have is that there are some very bright lines in civil law as to what an event must do, especially that when drugs and alcohol or present they must plan for sexual assault happening and it just seems like there’s no awareness of reality even when events have a lawyer

i think it’s just that the stars have not yet aligned for someone to have a relatively winnable case such that these communities will be forced to have a reckoning because of the laws of the default world (this is why I’m very bearish on network states now, I’ve seen how they can be used as a way to dodge legal obligations)

That’s really the best way to put it. The Sequences / Rationalism are based on an assumption they lead to a superior way of thinking (that Rationalists are better than normies), and most of the problems are downstream of that.

thank you <3

GHB is one of many date rape drugs that people also consume recreationally, and yeah i’m not sure why they love it!

ket is definitely the drug of choice in the SF social scene, and wrt psychedelics I think there is not a lot of care put into them / some really childish perceptions of them, the Michael Vassar / Leverage situation is a whole thing but assuming it’s as described, ie he was encouraging people to use drugs to ‘hack’ their own brains it creates a really bad situation wrt consent

honestly i think there’s just a lot of untreated mental illness which gets idealized, adding psychedelics on top of that is not a great idea

Vibecamp 1 was at camp champions in austin, Vibecamp 2 (and the others afaik) are at Ramblewood in Maryland

Vibegala 1 and 2 were hosted at a mansion/party compound in the berkeley hills, I’m not sure about 3 but 4 was at Lighthaven

Vibecamp is basically rationalist summer camp with talks, lectures, activations and dance parties, Vibegala was hard to describe but kind of urban vibecamp / a very typical berkeley burner party

SA stands for sexual assault (sorry i probably should have just put that in the title given this isn’t twitter or facebook)

doing better thanks <3

I think it’s just the subject matter and proximity, MIRI has always been about AI etc and i think it’s just the influx of money / power / etc due to how AI achieved escape velocity over the past few years

I think that rationalists are very good at marketing the aesthetics of math and probability without practicing the rigour and their personalities have an ‘it’ factor which is very influential towards impressionable 20-somethings that are trying to make their names in this era of the wild west

I’ve talked to other women and on the social side of things it’s worse than LA entertainment industry name-drop / transactional culture, I think you have some ppl who are popular for the first time and just fall down this mean girl rabbit hole

ppl are looking for meaning in a time of social upheaval and rationalism gives them a blueprint via the sequences and a sense of belonging, cool parties and a semi-commune compound in lighthaven, it’s so easy to get sucked into it (I was a normie with pretty diverse life experience out of tech and I still was)

thank you <3

I do have a lot more support now and have kind of come to a good steady state with things for the time being

I obviously have opinions on how Vibecamp handles things and the most direct thing I’ve ever heard from leadership (separate from this new safety team) is seeing a tweet about how they don’t take reports at face value

and again, I would expect to be dragged on social media if I ever said that after someone was SA’d at my festival, I think the main problem is the bubble of unreality that surrounds the bay and that a lot of people there are really sheltered, and often people in positions of responsibility were just the first to put their hand up versus being qualified or able to do the job

ie the eventual safety team reach out included one of their ppl asking me to tell them what investigation vibecamp did, and i found out that they don’t tell ‘junior members’ of the safety team about past things

so i mean imo just really fundamentally unserious and unwilling to admit they need outside help (I think CEA is in this same boat with what happened to Frances Lorenz) and I wouldn’t ever bother reporting stuff if I was someone else who was going

wrt harm reduction it’s something I’ve done for many years owing to being involved with canada’s drug policy scene and cannabis legalization here, there’s so much help available (there are local dancesafe orgs in a lot of places) that I think once your event gets big enough it’s negligent to not have a plan around it

I think the thing to take away, if anything, is that you should decide your policy on it early and make it clear: are you searching bags of people who attend or are you providing drug testing on-site? these are extremes obviously but your strategy will flow from one end or the other

you might have to do it creatively based on the current vibe in your state wrt recreational drug use but people openly talk about it on twitter so i don’t think there’s any excuse for don’t ask don’t tell policies, those are how people get hurt / die

my big problem, i guess, with how vibecamp is run is this ‘illegibility’ thing which imo leads to negligence, like you’re running a festival where attendees do programming that is a mix betweeen burning man stuff and a rationalist unconference, take that seriously instead of writing manifestos about memes

I’ve written about it from a lot of different angles, this is probably the most ‘broad’ and covers the entire ecosystem (but is long) : https://theasterisk.substack.com/p/reflecting-on-a-few-very-very-strange

you can check out my other posts if you like, they are more from a personal point of view in terms of what things felt like

Thank you for this, I really appreciate it <3

yes please do feel free to reference my work, I’m pretty realistic about the fact that once you talk publicly on something like this it’s more or less open season

thank you for asking but I’m in a much better place now and talking about it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to

Not really, I wrote what I did because I thought it needed to be said and it’s one perspective on things so as I said above, talk about things as you wish.

I don’t know if anyone’s watched this clip of Alex Jones’ condensed views on things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDa0q9-hmTE but I kind of view Sneer Club has the counterstrike against Rationalism’s current unfettered playground (in the circle of truth I don’t know a ton about you folks). I respect the difficult job CFAR, CEA and even Vibecamp have to do but their communities are so insular there’s just not any accountability when something goes wrong (I would be ousted as a board member from my festival if I ever had done something like ignore someone reporting SA for 2 years).

I guess the only other thing is maybe that I don’t think most people in these circles, even the ones I have differences with are intentionally evil or whatever and I wish they had a better way of governance or accountability than public Twitter / LessWrong / etc posts. These social vortexes are really intense and I think if they had more robust internal systems to deal with conflict a lot of stuff wouldn’t happen / would get resolved a lot more cleanly.

thank you <3

from my perspective (which is being on twitter long before visa / life coaches showed up, i’m friends with some status451 blog people which had scott alexander in their blogroll) some people are in existing kink communities but for the most part it organically comes out of Rationalism.

I can only speculate as to why, I think the presence of high profile sex workers / the general fact that hedonism follows money and privilege. The Bay is polycule central and I think Rationalist communities just philosophize about it a lot more visibly. So I guess the tl;dr here is that there are probably a few experienced kink people but a lot of it is just organic rationalist practice, I think Slutcon is attempting to start more of an organized thing around that area.

So, substances: In general I think these communities lean towards psychedelics, but Ketamine is huge in the bay. At one of the parties I was at I ran into a notable AI researcher who told me we needed to postpone hanging out because they were in a pretty deep k-hole.

I think there’s not a lot of overt / public facing harm reduction / responsible use, but some individual people know about things like testing for fent. From my experience Vibecamp has a GHB problem and I don’t know what credentials their current medic has.

No drug shaming here but I think it’s just not a priority for people, early on Vibecamp faced the ‘what do we do about substances’ problem and I can only speculate on what happens now but at least at the time of Vibecamp 2 I felt like there wasn’t a really good handle on it.

TESCREAL is a good place to start from wrt conceptualizing these communities, there are differences between EA and Rats and what they do but there’s a ton of crossover. TPOT has been many things since the pandemic but basically the group of Twitter users for mainly rationalists / post rationalists, with some woo people who don’t talk about rationalism a lot.

Vibecamp population has also been a lot of things, it was really ambiguous at Vibecamp 1 and 2. Hereticon is an event series put on in Miami by Founders Fund, it became something different (and I didn’t go to 2) but 1 was basically a gathering of a lot of cool internet people / some personalities you folks know about who did talks on various things.

Talk about things as you folks want to! I’m in a much better place now and honestly it was that bizarre reaction from these communities that did most of the damage closer to when everything happened.