It's the Guardian, but it's still a good read. All of Sneerclub's favorite people were involved.
Last weekend, Lighthaven was the venue for the Manifest 2024 conference, which, according to the website, is “hosted by Manifold and Manifund”. Manifold is a startup that runs Manifund, a prediction market – a forecasting method that was the ostensible topic of the conference.
Prediction markets are a long-held enthusiasm in the EA and rationalism subcultures, and billed guests included personalities like Scott Siskind, AKA Scott Alexander, founder of Slate Star Codex; misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Miri).
Billed speakers from the broader tech world included the Substack co-founder Chris Best and Ben Mann, co-founder of AI startup Anthropic. Alongside these guests, however, were advertised a range of more extreme figures.
One, Jonathan Anomaly, published a paper in 2018 entitled Defending Eugenics, which called for a “non-coercive” or “liberal eugenics” to “increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare”. The publication triggered an open letter of protest by Australian academics to the journal that published the paper, and protests at the University of Pennsylvania when he commenced working there in 2019. (Anomaly now works at a private institution in Quito, Ecuador, and claims on his website that US universities have been “ideologically captured”.)
Another, Razib Khan, saw his contract as a New York Times opinion writer abruptly withdrawn just one day after his appointment had been announced, following a Gawker report that highlighted his contributions to outlets including the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine and anti-immigrant website VDare.
The Michigan State University professor Stephen Hsu, another billed guest, resigned as vice-president of research there in 2020 after protests by the MSU Graduate Employees Union and the MSU student association accusing Hsu of promoting scientific racism.
Brian Chau, executive director of the “effective accelerationist” non-profit Alliance for the Future (AFF), was another billed guest. A report last month catalogued Chau’s long history of racist and sexist online commentary, including false claims about George Floyd, and the claim that the US is a “Black supremacist” country. “Effective accelerationists” argue that human problems are best solved by unrestricted technological development.
Another advertised guest, Michael Lai, is emblematic of tech’s new willingness to intervene in Bay Area politics. Lai, an entrepreneur, was one of a slate of “Democrats for Change” candidates who seized control of the powerful Democratic County Central Committee from progressives, who had previously dominated the body that confers endorsements on candidates for local office.
this is Lightcone, hosts of the totally not race science convention, falling afoul of the FTX bankruptcy
I’m not quoted in the story, but I did supply a pile of background for it. Authors are Jason Wilson and Ali Winston, who spend a lot of time chasing neo-Nazis for the Guardian US.
original URL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/16/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-eugenics-scientific-racism
Not a cult.
Definitely not a cult.
Have we mentioned how very much not a cult we are?
The services and infrastructure: hosting a web forum
edit: sorry, three web forums
Thank you for doing god's work
that was noticed by the gobshites and they're not happy about it, i think the tracingwoodgrains person really dislikes you:
(i find it symptomatic, but not at all surprising that the person who criticised bostrom is not with the movement anymore, but scientific racists and hbd-curious fuckers like tracing… are.)
@mawhrin @dgerard It never ceases to amaze me how anyone can read the word vomit these people fling into the world and think it's good writing.
it's the type of the very dense cult jargon that you stop noticing only when you're ears-deep into the cult.
I can't work out a search to tell me for sure, but I do believe that's the first link to nu-sneerclub from anywhere on the three rationalist fora
i'm sure there's a reading of this string of TW conspicuously avoiding saying the specific thing he's talking about that isn't "TW considers the racism a load-bearing feature", and he'll clarify this any time now
Senpais have noticed us!
Ain't lightcone the ones who funded the effective charity that was a husband, a wife, two employees and a brother in law who fucked an employee, angering the wife? I seem to remember her writing a long tirade about how hot tub meetings and travel photos proved that working conditions at the charity were very good, and there's nothing inappropriate about any of the above.
no, that was Nonlinear:
Ah, I think I was confused because Ben Pace was investigating nonlinear under the auspices of Lightcone.