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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.
There very obviously is a reasonably ideologically coherent right-wing counter-elite hiding in plain sight in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel is the Grand Heresiarch, Roger Mercer was an early backer from the East Coast, and Steven Hsu, Dominic Cummings and Curtis Yarvin were all early recruited talent. Right now the biggest players are Elon Musk and Mark Andreesen, with David Sacks as court jester. Balaji Srinivasan is pursuing a separate project, but is clearly sympathetic. Richard Hanania's vomit-inducing hagiography of this group makes him the spoony bard of the movement. If the current elite is vulnerable to a coup by a shadowy cabal, then this group have the cash and talent to pull it off. They also control two important power centres - VC money (Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins have the prestige, but A16Z and The Founders' Fund have the cool) and Twitter. The main reason the Thielosphere doesn't matter more is that Trump has cut off all the oxygen for any anti-establishment right movement that isn't MAGA, and the Thielosphere disagrees with MAGA on too many points to be allowed near power in a MAGA regime.
"Rationalists et al." are a group with cash and talent who are close to the Thielosphere on the social graph and are sufficiently hostile to the centre-left establishment that they might have been recruitable in a slightly different world. I am 90% confident that Thiel did spend serious cash and effort trying to bring Eliezer Yudkowsky into his network, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had reached out to Scott Siskind as well. Cade Metz' hatchet job accused Scott, almost certainly correctly, of being widely read within the Thielosphere, and therefore presumably sympathetic.
If I was advising George Soros and Klaus Schwab on emerging threats to their world empire, I would include the Thielosphere on the list of things that aren't an immediate threat but need an eye kept on them if they become one. And if I were the Globohomo Elite, Third Class assigned to dealing with the Thielosphere then stopping them absorbing the rationalists would be part of my job. Obvious options include threatening to drive the rationalists out of polite society unless they dissociate themselves from right-wing heresy (worked on Eliezer) or offering a more attractive alternative.
Amusingly, the flow of money from SBF into effective altruism probably was part of the reason that the Thielosphere and the rationalists parted company. SBF was a (as it turns out, rogue) member of the establishment - even to the point of which VCs invested in him (Sequoia backed FTX largely because they were afraid of A16Z becoming the dominant player in crypto). Peter Thiel couldn't or wouldn't compete with SBF in rationalist-buying. If that was an op, then someone has earned a promotion to Globohomo Elite, Second Class.
People on this forum give these guys way too much credit. The tech/VC types keep making the same mistake of thinking that money and power are the same thing. I’ll update my priors if they can get the politics of their own backyard, SF, in any kind of reasonable order. Visit SF and visit NY and decide for yourself if the tech guys are in any way competent enough leaders to govern better than the finance and law guys.
I’m skeptical (they seem too busy cranking out AI SaaS slop to do anything serious) but who knows.
The tech people are not in charge in SF, and never have been.
thats my point, despite having a ton of money they’ve totally failed to accomplish anything political
If money was all someone needed to become powerful we'd be loving in the 2010s era neoliberal anomie of President Michael Bloomberg and be all the better for it. Power is relative influence over other people to action ones will, but oftentimes what matters is getting people to do something they were inclined to do anyways and convince them that it was your idea. No amount of high end pulled pork buffets could get people motivated to attend Bloombergs political rallies, and no amount of VC lavishing on startups can generate politically influential mass. Commies and MAGA capture the politically motivated crazies dedicated enough to waste time on entryist politics, VC captures nerds who would prefer to jerk off to, and play, MOBA games.
Yes. This is my point. These people are not/unable to make themselves politically relevant.
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