SneerClub

Does anyone know what this June 2019 text from Epstein is about? I have added some links to RationalWiki and Wikipedia but not corrected spelling and corrected OCR errors. Was it at one of the institutions he sponsored like MIT Media Lab? Or more like his conference in the Virgin Islands? It seems to mix mainstream figures and people in the Libertarian/LessWrong network.

Its almost the end of the year so most US nonprofits which want to remain nonprofits have filed Form 990 for 2024 including some run by our dear friends. This is a mandatory financial report.

People connected to LessWrong and the Bay Area surveillance industry often cite David Chapman’s "Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution" to understand why their subcultures keep getting taken over by jerks. Chapman is a Buddhist mystic who seems rationalist-curious. Some people use the term postrationalist.

Form 990 for these organizations mentions many names I am not familiar with such as Tyler Emerson. Many people in these spaces have romantic or housing partnerships with each other, and many attend meetups and cons together. A MIRI staffer claims that Peter Thiel funded them from 2005 to 2009, we now know when Jeffrey Epstein donated. Publishing such a thing is not very nice since these are living persons frequently accused of questionable behavior which never goes to court (and some may have left the movement), but does a concise list of dates, places, and known connections exist?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hun4EaiSQnNmB9xkd/tell-people-as-early-as-possible-it-s-not-going-to-work-out

We often mix up two bloggers named Scott. One of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims says that she was abused by a white-haired psychology professor or Harvard professor named Stephen. In 2020, Vice observed that two Harvard faculty members with known ties to Epstein fit that description (a Steven and a Stephen). The older of the two taught the younger. The younger denies that he met or had sex with the victim. What kind of workplace has two people who can be reasonably suspected of an act like that?

An opposition between altruism and selfishness seems important to Yud. 23-year-old Yud said "I was pretty much entirely altruistic in terms of raw motivations" and his Pathfinder fic has a whole theology of selfishness. His protagonists have a deep longing to be world-historical figures and be admired by the world. Dreams of controlling and manipulating people to get what you want are woven into his community like mould spores in a condemned building.

So seeing the reaction on lesswrong to Eliezer’s book has been interesting. It turns out, even among people that already mostly agree with him, a lot of them were hoping he would make their case better than he has (either because they aren’t as convinced as him, or they are, but were hoping for something more palatable to the general public).

I used to think that psychiatry-blogging was Scott Alexander's most useful/least harmful writing, because its his profession and an underserved topic. But he has his agenda to preach race pseudoscience and 1920s-type eugenics, and he has written in some ethical grey areas like stating a named friend's diagnosis and desired course of treatment. He is in a community where many people tell themselves that their substance use is medicinal and want proscriptions. Someone on SneerClub thinks he mixed up psychosis and schizophrenia in a recent post.

Bad people who spend too long on social media call normies NPCs as in video-game NPCs who follow a closed behavioural loop. Wikipedia says this slur was popular with the Twitter far right in October 2018. Two years before that, Maciej Ceglowski warned:

This Bruenig follow up to his recent drubbing of Kelsey Piper was entertaining, but it got me thinking about just what she is now gesturing at.

The rats would love to have a coherent position on the Palestinian genocide but there's just no one from the polycule that's written about it in their nerd blogs so they're all going to have to continue rejecting all evidence.

Since Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is apparently still a thing, I figured I'd spend a few minutes before fediverse monster-movie night to collect relevant links: