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FTX is Rationalism's Chernobyl

You may be familiar with Curtis Yarvin's idea that Covid is science's Chernobyl. Just as Chernobyl was Communism's Chernobyl, and Covid was science's Chernobyl, the FTX disaster is rationalism's Chernobyl.

The people at FTX were the best of the best, Ivy League graduates from academic families, yet free-thinking enough to see through the most egregious of the Cathedral's lies. Market natives, most of them met on Wall Street. Much has been made of the SBF-Effective Altruism connection, but these people have no doubt read the sequences too. FTX was a glimmer of hope in a doomed world, a place where the nerds were in charge and had the funding to do what had to be done, social desirability bias be damned.

They blew everything.

It will be said that "they weren't really EA," and you can point to precepts of effective altruism they violated, but by that standard no one is really EA. Everyone violates some of the precepts some of the time. These people were EA/rationalist to the core. They might not have been part of the Berkley polycules, but they sure tried to recreate them in Nassau. Here's CEO of Alameda Capital Caroline Ellison's Tumblr page, filled with rationalist shibboleths. She would have fit right in on The Motte.

That leaves the $10 billion dollar question: How did this happen? Perhaps they were intellectual frauds just as they were financial frauds, adopting the language and opinions of those who are truly intelligent. That would be the personally flattering option. It leaves open the possibility that if only someone actually smart were involved the whole catastrophe would have been avoided. But what if they really were smart? What if they are millennial versions of Ted Kaczynski, taking the maximum expected-value path towards acquiring the capital to do a pivotal act? If humanity's chances of survival really are best measured in log odds, maybe the FTX team are the only ones with their eyes on the prize?

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So this "Effective Altruist" was funneling money to the Democratic Party and has a multi-million dollar bet against Trump 2024.

His promo video talks about "climate change" and "pandemic preparedness", literally the two most over-promoted fashionable causes where almost all funding has been a waste or worse exacerbated problems for people who need the most help around the world.

Sorry, SBF is a joke using the EA label as a shield from scrutiny and to bolster his brand.

But we have to admit SBF and Caroline seem to fit the rationlist communities stereotypes. Honestly I see a bit of myself in them: eschewing materialism and living an apparently humble lifestyle, the chill math-nerd vibes, passion for technology and making the world better, the girl looking ten years younger than she is - she could be getting fisetin from the source as me for all I know.

To me this is one of the best things about this little ideological pocket of the internet. We can approach the world with the same sort of curiosity and skepticism, read a lot of the same material from SSC and elsewhere, and yet end up in wildly different places in terms of our beliefs and values. And then come together to try to understand each other.

That's one of the key things that made the motte (and other rat-adjacent communities) valuable and interesting. We are not all the same. Although the motte participants seem to be more right-skewed, there are lot of obedient conformist woke types that follow a lot of the same content.

So now we have a situation where one of the most successful people to be associated with this sphere turns out to have ruined a bunch of people's lives and defrauded major investors of billions. If Rationalism was some kind of united community, this would be a chernobyl. But we're not. Some of us believe that the elements of rationalism that think "we know so much better than everyone else" needed to be taken down a notch and this event only helps.

It's high time we moved to post-rat anyways. The idea of rationalizing your way through the worlds most complex problems was a dead end. EA might have made sense in a stable world with clear optimization pathways. What we are confronting now is a profound social and cultural shift where anything with positive connotations seems to get usurped for evil purposes under the guise of doing good. The collective actions of the world's elite are displaying an almost schizophrenic form of control: e.g. malaria nets to save lives while warning about overpopulation.

I could care less about how this affects the rationalist community. What we're really trying to do here is avoid the bullshit on the rest of the internet where you submit a post with relevant information trying to add nuance to a debate and it turns into just trying to figure out which "side" you're supporting. We can continue that regardless of what happens, and perhaps over time more people will see value in it.

His promo video talks about "climate change" and "pandemic preparedness"

  1. Literally no one is working on pandemic preparedness seriously. None of his funding was for COVID, it was for biosecurity work which could stop the next pandemic. We haven't even gotten gain of function research to stop receiving federal funding; this was and is desperately needed.

  2. While lots of people talk a good kinda-mediocre game about climate change, almost none of them are working on actual fixes. Money going toward carbon capture would be fantastic. (And TBH I think if this hadn't flamed out, some of FTX or Alameda's people would have eventually taken the money and eaten the bullet of dumping iron filings in international waters, previously the highest-profile potential EA Crime.)

It's high time we moved to post-rat anyways. The idea of rationalizing your way through the worlds most complex problems was a dead end.

the rest of the internet where you submit a post with relevant information trying to add nuance to a debate and it turns into just trying to figure out which "side" you're supporting.

Observe the actual post-rats. They're just non-rationalists with a couple cultural signifiers; no more effective, and in general much less, than anyone else in the community or the adjacency. They have absolutely reverted to the condemnable behavior you're mentioning. Post-rationalism is a crock of shit and has been since the minute it started.

dumping iron filings in international waters

Okay, I'm curious, what's this supposed to do? Stimulate algae growth?

Yeah, basically. Dust erosion from continents feeds the ocean ecosystem, and there's certain bottleneck elements the same way there usually are with gardening, where a little more of one thing boosts growth tremendously. Iron is a big one. You can get a whole bunch more calcium carbonate dropping to the bottom of the ocean that way.

Back when I was in school there was a lot going on with studying continental formation/drift and global wind patterns having feedback loops for temperature on multi-million year timescales, but I don't know what came of it.