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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.
Yeah, for me this is very much an "I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" situation. I have my differences with the Lightcone guys, but the article was atrocious, and Oliver and I chatted a bit about it after its release.
Mind, I have a personal stake in this, since I was invited to present at Manifest and loved every second of it. I met a startling amount of old-school Motte users there as well. While the conference was ostensibly about prediction markets, in many ways it felt like keeping that spirit alive and bringing it into in-person spaces. Lighthaven is beautiful, Manifest rocked, and the Guardian can shove off.
One author is the same person who fruitlessly doxxed dissident right figure L0m3z the other week, while perennial anti-rationalist obsessive David Gerard bragged about giving background info. It's the sort of article that's much less interested in any real journalism and much more interested in creating a paper trail to establish the spookiness of everyone involved.
The EA forum has a couple of posts on the matter that I've been commenting in. It's an interesting environment, torn between social justice progressivism and rationalist instincts, but I usually get a more-or-less fair hearing over there. The posts in question:
My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
Why are so many "racists" at Manifest?
Anyway, the most serious implication is a potential closing of Lighthaven, which would be a major blow for the Bay Area rationalists and for adjacent spheres, since it really is an incredible venue. That would happen with or without the article, though, and depends on a lot of funding questions. Manifest itself is unlikely to be moved by the article—the organizers and attendees know what they want, and the Guardian's irritation is only so much noise. Time will tell, though.
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