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?
Maybe that social graph would be more of a dot. So many of these people date each other and serve on each other’s boards and live in the SF Bay Area, Austin TX, the NYC area, or Oxford, England. On the enshittified site people talk about their Twitter and Tumblr connections.
I’ve thought about making one but I never got really got past the “gathering info” stage as I tend to go on hiatus for months at a time for the sake of my sanity. That being said, here are some things you might find interesting:
Extropia’s Children - a series of substack posts about the rationalists and related groups. One of the better sources of their early history that I’ve found, and has links to the original sources for a lot of stuff.
MIRI’s “Top Contributors” page - which shows that Peter Thiel was their biggest donor until 2015, when he pulled funding because he felt that they had become like a luddite Burning Man Camp (and it was also a year that the Rationalists actually did go to Burning Man). Thiel was also given an honorary position in SIAI. Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz has been their biggest funder since 2015 through Open Philanthropy.
Yudkowsky coined the term “effective altruist”, despite their claims to the contrary. Will MacAskill and Toby Ord were both LessWrongers before starting EA, and LessWrong was EA’s biggest recruitment source for years (I think this is noteworthy because EA now tries to distance themselves from the rationalists rather than acknowledging that they’re an offshoot)
FTX was also an offshoot of the rationalists/EA (hence the polyamorous group house, FTX prediction market, etc). Caroline Ellison was a personal friend of Scott Alexander Siskind and even told him about their overleveraging strategy on tumblr a few months before FTX collapsed SBF financially supported ACX and his psychiatrist, George Lerner, worked in the same office as Scott Alexander IIRC (I’ve lost track of the source, will post later if I can find it).
This recent Rolling Stone article about the Zizians - which filled in a number of gaps in my knowledge, in particular how Yudkowsky and Thiel met.
This a timeline of events related to sexual assaults in the rationalist community that I myself compiled and posted on the subreddit. (I think I have an even longer timeline of events somewhere, I’ll look for it later)
Anyways I’d be up for sharing info, there’s a bunch more stuff I know and I could basically send you a giant list of sites I’ve bookmarked over the years that would aid in mapping out the connections. (edit: I guess that wouldn’t really be “concise” but I think if we want a concise posopography we’ll have to make it ourselves)
It was in an ACX blog post, siskind just admitted it out of nowhere. edit: Well ok because he was obviously discussing him, but the possibility of any connections between them wasn’t really on anyone’s radar by then I think.
edit: Got it: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopharmacology-of-the-ftx#footnote-anchor-1-84889532
Thank you!
That reminds me of Kelsey Piper randomly posting that she helped James Damore get his first job after Google and she would do it again gosh darn it! So much of social media is people in the Bay Area recruiting people for their petty feuds. One of the shibboleths as ScienceBlogs broke up was posting that Damore was a bad bad person and not just a very ordinary clueless wealthy young dude you never met.
Do you remember where Piper said that? Somewhere on Xitter? It sounds familiar. (Edit: here it is. I remembered the “James Damore was egregiously wronged” part but had mostly forgotten the rest.)
Damore’s memo blew up in 2017; ScienceBlogs was a shambling husk after most of the serious writers left in 2010, when management decided to offer Pepsi an advertorial disguised as a “nutrition” blog. (I left too, but I wasn’t a serious writer by any stretch of the imagination.) That capped off a long trend of the Seed Media Group management not listening to the bloggers, even though SB was the best thing they had going for them. Complaints on the back-channel forum were downplayed or ignored, etc. SB puttered along under National Geographic’s ownership through the Damore era, but the writing was on the wall in 2010 that the site couldn’t last.
The community that had formerly focused on SB got another nasty knock a few years later, when sexual harassment allegations came out about Bora Zivkovic, one of the prime organizers of the ScienceOnline conferences. That was a real betrayal that wounded a lot of people, and the organization only held on for one more conference before going belly-up.
Kelsey Piper has an up-to-date RationalWiki page including how she connected with SBF (she was on the board of an Effective Altruism club with Caroline Ellison at Stanford)
There was a creepy time when all the ex-Scienceblogs / Atheism Plus / Skeptic circle of bloggers posted an angry post about the enemy of the day. That was not at all what I understood as skepticism or free thinking, but they had already discovered that original, independent, research-based posts are hard and repeating the party line about what someone said on the Internet is easy. So is beefing with a friend who had the wrong take about what someone said on the Internet.
I must have confused my memories of the really nasty era around 2010-2012 with my occasional checks on FreeThoughtBlogs afterwards. I have not really thought about that world in the COVID era.