The waterboarding thing was introduced by Vibecamp’s head of safety at other events, and a lot of the pdku programming seems to be in the area of light bdsm / boundary pushing. imo they work from some base general formula and try and differentiate / create intake funnels for other events.
Holly nails it.
When the Rationalist Internet Defense Force has commented on my stuff, some of them have done the ‘this is wrong b/c bad epistemics’.
Scientology is a perfect comparison and I really don’t know how anyone can deny these people are cultish.
I’ve mentioned the SFZC in some writings and there’s definitely something there.
hello friends some extra info here:
the person in question (not Brent) is a former organizer, the two stories are either that he did something bad (possibly sexual harassment?) or that the main Vibecamp founder pushed him out, I’ve seen some google docs hinting at the latter but as with everything in this ouroboros of awfulness impossible to really say what happened
brent’s original cancellation dates back to early MIRI, the author of that video was careless with one of the codenames such that if you know a few things about the person you can tie them to a real life identity
the two loose possibilities (i’ve learned to not really trust anyone unless they have actual documentation) are that brent raped someone (possibly underage? this part i’m not 100% sure on) or the victim wanted to cover for her actual rapist and blamed brent
i find the latter really highly unlikely but that’s the scoop
full disclosure in that i feel (now) that the editorial decision to include names could have gone either way and i think some criticisms of that are valid, accountability journalism is a tough thing to do perfectly or get right the first time
forgot to include the manual : https://archive.ph/cSDnZ
aka rape play
yep!! probably legally too
andrea and meredith from jakegate are friends of mine and I consistently look to them as examples of how to properly handle misbehaviour
They at least realize Yud’s book isn’t very good and no one’s going to bomb datacenters with their current crop of AIfluencers.
fwiw I was DM’d once with someone saying the worst sexual abuse hasn’t been made public and happens at Lighthaven, and Oliver seems to not take it very seriously. Grain of salt etc but if there’s one group of people I would trust less with reporting sexual assault to than Vibecamp it would be Lighthaven.
ty <3
i agree, and I think the ‘AI is going to kill us so yolo’ attitude from influential people is mainly why problems are avoided or hidden
yes thank you <3
I think that in general there just needs to be more institutional attention on the situation that exists and every time I’ve talked to a journo there’s been a point at ‘this needs more national importance’ and sadly sexual violence by community group members doesn’t do it (and TIME / Bloomberg has already covered a lot of it)
I think an unfortunate truth is that there’s only so much critique can do, ie I could write another 5 blogs on what happened to me and it’s not really going to change anything. Vibecamp leadership has come down with a firm stance of not taking reports of sexual violence at face value and people can decide whether to attend based on that statement. The only thing that would make them really change is a civil lawsuit and any woman who does would face immense blowback (a friend of mine had a very publicized case in another group of people which she won, but she was insanely blacklisted in her industry).
When it comes to Rationalism in general, there is just too much money involved and it’s the same problem of women coming forward about things that happen at Lighthaven wrt blowback. Fucked up things happening are also just normalized for them, from Brent Dill to Michael Vassar to Zizians, and Lighthaven becoming a creator house via https://www.plzdontkillus.com/ is happening because they realize they need better PR.
So I guess all of this is to say I don’t think there’s a lot SneerClub can do besides being data points for people curious about Rationalism that research it, reading between the lines of what journalists have told me they need a group of women to come forward and put their names behind their accusations or there has to be some bombshell money trail / scandal beyond what TIME / Bloomberg have reported on.
Staying on the right side of mentioning names I have personal grievances with: People in that ecosystem are talented at getting favourable media coverage and winning the narrative, there’s not a lot to be done in the face of that other than try to give people a heads up on what they’re walking into. Some will listen, some won’t.
I think it’s an important thing to be generally aware of; MIRI pays Yud ~600k/yr as chair of the board, emergent ventures gives out a lot of grants to adjacent ppl, etc
There’s a lot of in-network stuff that happens too ie chaosprime was in a position to give vibecamp 18K, so I think the money part is important as it might allow some of the worst ppl to buy their way out of trouble
ty, I’ve heard her name here and there but didn’t look too deeply into a lot of CFAR internals.
My master theory has become that there are really two groups of people, impressionable children in adult bodies, and a lot of people who have become post-economic via something else (startup exits, sex work, poker championships) and that gets used as social proof when it comes to convincing people they know what they’re doing in other areas.
I think it’s definitely downstream of SV’s brief love affair with psychedelics (publicly), ket clinics for depression, etc.
I didn’t really start attending parties there until 2022 but I think it’s been the nose candy of choice for that set for a while.
It’s possible but I think they just don’t know what they’re doing.
I think for event organizers there’s a point at which you realize ‘this is beyond us’ and one of two things happens: you take some money from the nice to have pile and use it to make up that gap, or you learn at the expense of other people and I’ve never really been able to understand the decision process that leads to the latter.
Fran has done some really great writing on this, really admire her ability to deconstruct a community she’s fond of.
yeah i mean it’s complex i think!
in general there is a code of silence and social harmony is always favoured, and i am actually a little torn on ‘illegibility’: it does make for cool spaces but it allows ppl in those spaces to avoid problems by never really stating those values
ie communities that don’t have ‘we support victims of sexual violence’ codified anywhere and it’s just an assumed thing which often turns out not to be true, normies handle it poorly, rationalists/etc handle it really poorly, i think Kathy Forth was really right in that you have to specifically want to handle it well to actually do that otherwise you are very likely to do more harm than good to vulnerable women
a major boggle I have is that there are some very bright lines in civil law as to what an event must do, especially that when drugs and alcohol or present they must plan for sexual assault happening and it just seems like there’s no awareness of reality even when events have a lawyer
i think it’s just that the stars have not yet aligned for someone to have a relatively winnable case such that these communities will be forced to have a reckoning because of the laws of the default world (this is why I’m very bearish on network states now, I’ve seen how they can be used as a way to dodge legal obligations)
That’s really the best way to put it. The Sequences / Rationalism are based on an assumption they lead to a superior way of thinking (that Rationalists are better than normies), and most of the problems are downstream of that.
One correction, Kimbal is no longer on the board.
So given the Vibecamp’s safety team current stance on handling incidents ie leaking private DM’s I feel it’s appropriate to disclose how things were handled circa Vibecamp 2.
Someone OD’s (took to much not died) on GHB and was eventually carted to the teahouse, one of the Vibecamp org team was there and suggested that medical services shouldn’t be called because it might force the answering of uncomfortable questions around drug use (Maryland is a ‘good samaritan’ state wrt reporting OD’s for both the victim and person reporting so this was a bad call, I should probably have been more pro-active here and found that out / advised them).
My overall impression of Vibecamp’s ethos is that one of their primary concerns is the event / community / etc public image and they will do questionable things to protect it that I don’t think a reasonable person would consider as justified. I think this extends to Rationalism as a whole, ie Aella often frames things in the ‘outsiders vs us’ hierarchy.
the tl;dr is I wouldn’t place any faith in Vibecamp’s staff if I was to attend again for harm reduction or safety. They’ve repeatedly shown those things take second place to the image of the event.