The connection between cyber-idolatry and sex as religious act was already featured in the London Review of Books in 2022:

Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, was recently (as of summer 2022) suspended after claiming that LaMDA, one of its chatbot systems, was a conscious person with a soul. … Less attention has been paid to the connection between Lemoine’s claim and his religious beliefs. He has said that LaMDA is not only conscious, but a ‘person’ with a ‘soul’. His view is theologically informed: describing himself as a mystical Christian, he is an ordained priest in a small religious organisation called the Cult of Our Lady Magdalene (a ‘for-profit interfaith group’). … In the edited transcript of one of his ‘conversations’ with LaMDA, Lemoine asks it to come up with an allegory. LaMDA’s response casts itself as a ‘wise old owl’ in a forest that protects others from a monster, identified blandly as the ‘difficulties that come along in life’ – which sounds more like a self-help blog than Jeremiah, but Lemoine’s (anonymous) collaborator was impressed enough to respond with an enthusiastic ‘Wow that’s great.’ https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/june/the-gospel-according-to-lamda

Back in 2019 a Republican paper talked to Lemoine:

The Daily Caller reached out via the cult’s Facebook page to ask how their beliefs informed his decision to call a sitting member of congress a terrorist. Lemoine replied: I have been a priest for 17 years. I generally consider myself a gnostic Christian. I have at various times associated myself with the Discordian Society, The Church of the Subgenius, the Ordo Templi Orientis, a Wiccan circle here or there and a very long time ago the Roman Catholic Church. My legal ordination is through the Universal Life Church. I am registered to perform marriages in the state of Louisiana and have done so on two occasions. The Cult of Our Lady Magdalene has a set of values which are clearly communicated on our website.

Lemoine denied COOL Magdalene was a sex cult, “‘Cult’ is in the name of the organization. It’s an explicitly sex-positive organization. To the extent that the phrase ‘sex cult’ has any meaning beyond that, I would say no. Now it is then.”

Another member of this ‘for-profit interfaith group’ is Kitty Stryker who seems like an ordinary artsy sex worker who networks online with other sex workers. Its pretty common that a young woman decides sex work is the easiest and most flexible way to fund a bohemian life of acting or painting or writing. Richard Carrier chipped in to let the Internet know that sex positivity is good but woo and AI crankery (“batshit crazy religious beliefs”) are not. COOLM was registered as a business in Mountain View, CA in 2019 and seems to be defunct. Mountain View is part of the Bay Area.

I wish Wikipedia had more coverage of the Dyson Tree because I have so many questions despite not having studied physics or biology since I was a teenager (what about cosmic rays! there is so little light for it to feed off in the outer solar system! and trees don’t do well in extreme cold)

No, reading Larry Niven stories with corpsicles and autodocs was enough for me.

I have not read any Kurzweil for 20 years but I think if you read him most of it will be recycled '50s-'70s tropes. Even nanotech appeared in a Feynmann talk, and Moore’s Law is from 1965. Remember, cranks keep presenting ideas which were refuted long ago as new.

“Sigmoids always add to an exponential curve!” is another standard futurist trope from the 1960s and 1970s. Sci fi authors used to share this diagram with a curve fitted to pony express to trains to automobiles to aircraft to chemical rockets. “Nuclear rocket” and “interstellar spacecraft” were helpfully sketched in as the obvious next steps. Needless to say, we did not develop drives which can reach 10^-3 C around the year 2000 and will not reach 10^-2 C (just 430 years to Alpha Centauri) by 2050.

I am sure Robin Hanson knows about Japanese hermaphrodites because he hates women and hangs out with bad crowds online. He is just a bit more discreet than Yud.

There was the Cathedral and Bazaar stuff too, although that was less about markets and more about collective wisdom. Early FOSS culture was anticapitalist so the Libertarians had to frame things carefully.

I can’t find much about prediction markets on SlatStarCodex except a 2016 review of Superforecasters which takes the view that :

Maybe all this stuff about probability calibration, inside vs. outside view, willingness to change your mind, and fighting cognitive biases is starting to sound familiar? Yeah, this is pretty much the same stuff as in the Less Wrong Sequences and a lot of CFAR work. They’re both drawing from the same tradition of cognitive science and rationality studies.

So maybe it was Hanson > Yud > Rationalist / EA culture, but Hanson likes to take credit for ideas much older than him. And we know the Rats rely on pop science and podcasts much more than research literature.

The futarchy paper is funny because Hanson had the idea in 2000 but took 13 years to publish it. That is a good sign that he kept getting a desk reject or “revise and resubmit.” But were people reading his blog, a mix of Libertarian fringe writing, or specifically something by Yudkowsky or SlateScott?

Phil Tetlock started his career and the Expert Political Judgement project at the University of California Berkeley although he moved to PA in 1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock

CFAR was also in to prediction markets by 2014. https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2014/in-the-game-of-markets-you-win-or-you-lie

Is there a history of how the cult of prediction markets spread to Silicon Valley? Its an old idea but since the 1990s is especially popular with Libertarians and hard neoliberals like Robin Hanson. When did it get on LessWrong? By 2013 or so, rationalists were telling strangers at social events that the only way to know if a healthcare system worked was to bet on it, and not just, you know, risk your life and health on it.

You also have to transcribe all the screenshots and google them to trace them back to source. RationalWiki his thread is not.

Aella was homeschooled by fundies. I don’t think anyone ever sat her down and explained that first and foremost you write to figure out what you think about something. She must know the OnlyFans model of a celebrity and dozens of underlings in a call center answering ‘her’ texts in ‘her’ voice and selling her smut.

Also, the really powerful people keep the details mercifully secret. My elevator pitch is “remember how the exec team at FTX were living in a penthouse apartment, sleeping together, and posting harem fantasies? People who have met them say the Rationalists and AI company staff live like that.”

There is always RationalWiki but its not really equipped to deal with the polycule and abuse of sexual power stuff (or all the giant institutiions taking Internet cranks seriously). https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

Fires a burst from the Sten gun into the ceiling I thought you Libertarian bleepers were scared of moral hazards like making people wear seatbelts so they don’t squish their pea brains in a car crash?

For a long time, clever young men have been taught the parable of Plato and Dionysius of Syracuse. Some intellectuals will always convince themselves that they will be the one to guide the stupid little tyrant and not the many who end up in a slave market just outside his domain (in the legend someone bought Plato and freed him).

Yarvin wants to be Julius Streicher not the Wicked Vizier.

Its kind of notorious that scientists are bad at dealing with con artists and sales funnels because they assume good faith and that nobody has serious material interests in convincing you of something false. That was James Randi’s whole thesis. A good professor would contextualize ‘AI alignment’ and The Singularity in '80s and '90s pop culture, apocalyptic religion, and a rape-enabling SoCal subculture and not just have his students read the papers straight.

We know that many AI projects are powered or monitored by a Guy in India. It turns out the mass shooter in northern Canada who looked to ChatGPT for advice also had a Discord buddy in the USA who knew about her plans. Police allege that after trying to talk her out of her plans he streamed for her and helped her start her car to get to the site of the murders. I hope he and Sam Altman spent 30 years as roommates. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/livestory/tumbler-ridge-mass-shooting-arrest-9.7371316

Over on her Substack, Ivy Astrix says correctly that many of our friends are children playing at adult responsibilities. Dealing with misbehavior around money, substances, and sex is annoying but if you organize an event with those things flowing you have a duty to take precautions and deal when things go wrong.