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Another day, another Guardian hit job.
The title reads "Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back"
Take a moment to form a hypothesis about what kind of group this could be. The KKK? Some fringe right-wingers? An Israeli lobby group?
Turns out their target of the day is Lightcone Infrastructure. Lightcone is running lesswrong, which is a grandparent of themotte.
I personally have only heard of lightcone in context of TracingWoodgrains' writings on the Nonlinear investigation conducted by Ben Pace and Oliver Habryka. (TIL that this is a name different from the handle of a former motte mod. In my defense, I did not read a lot from either of them. Blame my racist brain.)
Of course Trace's critique could not be more different from what the Guardian writes about lightcone.
They start off by linking the NYT article on Scott Alexander. I think it is the one where they tried to doxx him. Apparently the NYT does not like my adblocker or something, the only think I get (besides a picture which indicates that the NYT designers have way too much time on their hand) is the text "Silicon Valley’s Safe Space -- Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared." -- I guess that is one way to phrase it. Of course, the Guardian gleefully doxxes Scott again, not that anyone cares (but it's the thought that counts).
Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic. From the linked article, I would say it is either being tone-deaf or intentionally courting controversy. He even has sympathy for incels. The nerve of that man!
Apparently they found no dirt on Eliezer, which to me seems like a failure of investigative journalism. EY has written a lot more than the six lines Cardinal Richelieu would have required.
Then they come to the "extreme figures" present at Manifest 2024.
Jonathan Anomaly is apparently pro eugenics. Never heard of him. However, given that anything from "select embryos which do not have a genetic disease" to "encourage smart and successful people to have kids" can be called eugenics, and given that the article would cite the most damning quotation, I will assume that he is not a Nazi.
Razib Khan is a
journalistscientist and writer who got kicked out of the NYT because he wrote for some "paleoconservative" magazine. This matters only if you think that failing the NYT ideological purity test is some kind of fatal character flaw.I vaguely recall Stephen Hsu being discussed on slatestarcodex and from what I remember my conclusion was that he got cancelled for a lack of ideological purity -- calling for research into increasing human intelligence is not acceptable, and talking about race differences is even less acceptable.
Brian Chau is apparently an e/acc and thus probably the most controversial person from my personal point of view. But then, engaging in honest discussion with advocates of other positions is generally a good thing, so if Lighthaven is more inclusive than Aella's birthday party, I am kinda fine with it.
Of course, the narrative would not be complete without the specter of antisemitism, here in the form of a quote "[Hsu is] often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people [...]". I think the rationalist community is a bad place for antisemites for the same reason why the marathon Olympics are a bad place for white supremacists.
In the end, the plug for this story -- lightcone having received money from SBF -- has no bearing on the bulk of the article, which is about how icky these ratsphere nerds are. It does not matter if SBF donated to the Save Drowning Puppies Foundation or to the Feed Puppies to Alligators Alliance -- either the donations can be kept or not.
Edit: fixed Khan's profession.
At the risk of endlessly repeating myself: the media has done its job of detecting a potential counter elite (rationalists et al.), figured out what its sin is (spooky eich-bee-dee racism) and is now just churning out hit pieces to marginalize any organization that might come out of it.
It's their job to do this. And SBF is such a convenient easy target to attack both the cryptosphere and the grey tribe that I'm starting to wonder if his rise wasn't an op. He did have super suspicious establishment ties after all.
Though what hits me here isn't that, but how mundane the crime of the undesirable nerds is now. Accusations of racism have so lost power that it almost seems laughable to lob them at people who barely even qualify. Like really, they'reis going to appeal to 90s colorblind liberalism in 2024? What a joke.
Not that it has to make any sense or have any relationship to the truth of course, the article only means "here are a bunch of enemies which aren't so miserable we can ignore them, so go fuck with them".
I think this is giving “rationalists et al.” way too much credit. They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite. The media writes about them out of anthropological curiosity, in the same way they write about isolated tribes in the Amazon. Like there was a big NYT article about rationalist date-me-docs and the tone was the same, “ha ha aren’t these people weird and interesting” that underlies all these pieces.
Of course the tone is more negative now after SBF. But sorry, yes, if a guy in your movement does an enormous fraud, has a high-profile trial, and goes to jail, your movement attracts negative attention. But this isn’t tearing down a threatening counter-elite, this is an anthropological piece about how that weird Amazonian tribe that turned on its neighbors is still being weird.
From the way in which the NYT spins the Scott Alexander story (or at least headline), I think what puts the rationalists in the "designated enemy" camp from the point of view of traditional newspaper journalists is that rationalists are seen as affiliated with big tech and silicon valley startup culture. By writing a blog which is read by important SV/VC/startup people, Scott became an acceptable target to the NYT.
I would argue that many traditional publications are explicitly waging a war against SV.
I think there are multiple reasons for it. First, engineers and scientists are always rightfully suspected of being less ideologically pure than more human-centered professions, because their stuff needs to work in the physical world, not just in some ideological space. The strength of our people may be endless in abstract, but when you require them to produce torque it is very much finite. Metaphorically, our supreme leader may not be weighted down by a single sin, but in the physical space that does not really make him float. Just because most tech companies signal that they are fully on board with woke values that does not actually mean they can be trusted in the way some op-ed writer who majored in intersectionality could be trusted. Probably some of their nerds are secretly making fun of DEI.
Among other drastic changes in our lives, the internet was the biggest change to how journalism works since the printing press. And this was not a change authored by the previous elite any more than monks working in scriptoriums invented the printing press. Where in 1850 you had to rely on professional journalists to figure out what was going on internationally, in 2024 you can get by just reading a selection of amateur bloggers working without the blessings of the former gatekeepers.
More seriously, "write a hit piece on manifest 2024. Search the web for controversies involving any of the speakers any briefly summarize and link to them." is the kind of prompt which could replace this sort of low-effort journalism either today or in the near future.
And to be fair, it is reasonable to be critical of the new elites. The walled garden model favored by Apple feels offensive to me, and Facebook optimizing its site to maximize the amount of time people spent on that site will likely not increase human flourishing. Companies like Uber and airbnb clearly have some negative externalities which makes the value they add to society debatable. OpenAI has all but abandoned their veneer of being non-profit or caring about x-risk from AI. The ubiquitous smartphone might not actually improve the mental development of today's kids.
Perhaps this is just my biases, but it seems to me that the grey tribe (which is very emphatically not congruent with SV techbros) is less ideologically coherent than the red and blue tribes. "A rationalist is someone who has argued with Eliezer" and all that. I would not be surprised if even the startup scene turned out to be less ideologically homogeneous than just "techbros wanting to get rich".
Of course, such ideological crusades are bad no matter if you find yourself among the targets or not. The authors set out to write a hit piece on the rationalists. They wrote their bottom line first. The Bayesian information gained from such pieces is very limited. At the most, you could infer that nobody credibly has accused rationalists of sacrificing humans and feasting on their corpses (because they would have mentioned that) and that some vaguely rat-adjacent people have voiced HBD ideas (because the media very rarely lies (outright) and all that).
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