Some on Reddit called Mollie Gleiberman a conspiracy theorist when I cited her argument that these people always wanted to build Computer God and conquer the universe. I did not know that our friends tried that gambit as soon as Emile introduced the TESCREAL concept.
Michael Vassar called sleeping with his staff at MetaMed polyamory. Polyamory is common, and bosses and teachers sleeping with employees and students is common, but the combination stands out.
There are a lot of attempts to push polyamory on white-collar and chattering-class culture, but many men in the USA seem to push it so they can tell their primary partner “I sleep with my groupies because I am polyamorous” and tell their groupies “who cares that you have a boyfriend, how about polyamory?” It also lets insecure men show off that they have not just one hot babe but several, and we know many rationalists are desperate for the rest of the world to recognize their genius. The problem, to be clear, is not necessarily with polyamory, just with people who use it as a way to get a gang of domestic servants.
I still have scars from events like the ones documented at https://allegedlythewebsite.org/ So many men in the skeptic and adjacent blogosphere used “sex-positivity” to mean “I can hit on you and encourage you to bottom at kink events, and you can’'t say I am creeping you out or you are looking fro a job not a playmate.” Similar dynamics are common in academia, polyamory was just one trendy excuse in the 2000s and 2010s. Scott Alexander experimented with polyamory and was living with a sex blogger in 2013 and I think Yud had connections in the NYC poly and kink scene.
A LessWronger asks the bold question: is polyamory net negative for most people because jealousy and drama take so much energy to deal with? Does not go in to “chat, my boss is also my lover and holds the lease on my housing, and now I am competing for a promotion with another lover-roommate-coworker, is that bad?”
Not sure about the Libertarian connection, but the comments feature Eliezer Yudkowsky and at least one member of the MAPLE cult (Goldenberg).
A “no attacks on people’s characters” policy seems like a terrible idea in this space because so many people are grifters, liars, and apocalyptic cultists. At some point you have to say “you are a bad person who uses false words to do bad things.”
Also a German Minister of Defense. My impression is that Arday was a fabulist, but so are many academics at wealthy research institutions, and the global campaign against him was clearly motivated by racism. Not sure about the plagiarism because I am not on Cambridge’s academic integrity committee.
Her twitter https://x.com/s_r_constantin says she is married to Andrew Rettek. Rufflejax accused Rettek and Vassar of emotional abuse while they were all in a polyamorous relationship and says he liked his women barely legal (“I deserve a hot nubile college girl every year until I turn 40”). https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1009625312844550146.html So Constantin is close to a lot of bad people.
Roam Research seems like a generic note-taking app endorsed by Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative and Sarah R. Constantin. Anything else notable about it?
Roam is also endorsed by an OpenAI staffer who thinks Scott Aaronson was one of her best professors.
All I really know is her old Wordpress blog. She is the kind of person who keeps launching new sites without leaving a forwarding address on the last, not the kind who still runs her blogspot blog from 2004 so links won’t break. I never really explored these people’s history on livejournal or tumblr and just mine their Twitter history when needed.
She does not seem woo-friendly.
Did not know those parts of her CV! At least two of the four CFAR founders have said things like “The actual drive in the background was a lot more like “Keep running workshops that wow people” with an additional (usually consciously (!) hidden) thread about luring people into being scared about AI risk in a very particular way … Even from the very beginning CFAR simply COULD NOT be honest about what it was doing or bring anything like a collaborative tone to its participants.”
MetaMed was founded by Michael Vassar, and Palantir is Alex Karp’s creature, and both of those are bad dudes.
Sarah R. Constantin, who noticed that EA has a lying problem, now has a Substack. She reminds me of Julia Galef, because she does not advocate the most dangerous aspects of TESCREAL, but never says “my TESCREAL buddies are creeps pushing crank ideas funded by fascists.” https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/getting-back-to-it
Dwarkesh Patel seems to be one of their media operations like Vox Future Perfect and the Collinses.
I have seen a few opinion columnists like Noah Smith pass on “what if the AI engineers a lethal virus?” Biosecurity seems like a mundane wonky policy issue like making farmers provide toilets to their workers and checking the beef for BSE.
I am going to create a summary post on MAPLE, but one of the open letters criticizing them has a section on COVID:
During a two-week retreat in 2022, COVID was moving through the community. It began with accommodations—interviews outdoors for ventilation, the sick practicing apart—but Soryu progressively mocked those who needed rest, admonished us for being deterred by “a tiny little cold,” and folded everyone back into the zendo regardless of who was sick. Interviews resumed in a 9x9 room with little ventilation while Soryu himself had COVID. Symptomatic, visibly fatigued people kept the full schedule on heavily reduced sleep.
I am shocked, shocked, that a TESCREAL community had bad COVID praxis after 2020!
Correction: a woman who said she was raped by a MAPLE / OAK executive says that:
since this letter was published it has been reported that, Soryu Forall, the Monastic Academy’s main teacher and “guru” has begun to openly engage in sexual and romantic relationships with his students and former students.
That sounds a lot like Yud in the 2010s.
Imagine a Victorian curate beating the village schoolboys, driving his charwoman mad, and pottering about the local antiquarian society with essays about faeries or the customs of India which he has never visited.
Forall is not, by any means, a coder who understands AI at the zeros-and-ones level; he does not have a detailed familiarity with large language models or algorithmic design. I asked him whether he had used some of the popular new AI gadgets, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. He had tried one chatbot. … When I asked whom he looks to or reads in order to understand AI, he at first, deadpan, answered, “the Buddha.” He then clarified that he also likes the work of the best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari and a number of prominent ethical-tech folks, among them Zak Stein and Tristan Harris. And he is spending his life ruminating on AI’s risks, which he sees as far from banal.
Yes, it sounds like Aella has called out some abusers but not acknowledged that abuse and manipulation are central to the LessWrong / EA project. Soryu sounds like a more disciplined, less horny version of Yudkowsky (he got a degree and spent years at a Buddhist temple, but still meditates and reads pop science books to understand Scary AI).
MAPLE sounds kind of Maoist or like a printed-out email about an atheist professor on a fundamentalist church’s pinboard:
In the late spring of the 15th year of training at Monastic Academy (MAPLE), a writer named Sam Kriss came to MAPLE. In the last hours of his visit, Soryu Forall guided the community in a workshop on mindful decision making.
Mid-way through the workshop, Sam Kriss shifted the topic of focus from decision making to structures of domination, e.g. hierarchies, with a particular emphasis given to the lens of Marxism. He asked: “What creates mechanisms of domination?” and “In environments [e.g. MAPLE] where people are trying to clear out the attachment to thinking, are there fewer structures of domination?”
To the first question, the community answered: “Attachment to thinking.” Vimoksha engaged with Sam in detail on this to open a way for him to see how structures of domination are caused by mind.
To the second question, the community answered: “There are fewer structures of domination here than in the mainstream.”
As these points were made and as Sam Kriss was beginning to engage with the points more directly, the community sat in agreement and clarity, happy with these teachings.
As these points were made, I felt a sense of appreciation and celebration for this community of leader-sages-in-training.
Kriss, who is British, has interviewed Rationalists and is the kind of loud feminist whose Wikipedia page would have a section titled “sexual assault allegations” if he had one. It is possible that MAPLE and LessWrong evolved independently but I have a feeling that Soryu is leaving out some lines from his intellectual CV.
Edit / the chela who published a parody video about the abuse allegations wrote “I spent years moving through the communities that publicly claim to be addressing the destruction of life on Earth and the disconnection between people. I spent time in Silicon Valley, in effective altruism, and in adjacent rationalist and existential-risk circles, starting companies and consulting and looking for the place where these problems were being met at the root.” The chela is an Internal Family Systems coach which was popular at CFAR. Last two links are to YouTube.
Has anyone researched exactly how MAPLE split off from Bay Area rationalism? Most of the writeups focus on what happened after they built a giant compound in Vermont, not why so many rats travel there.
They seem to have launched in one small Vermont township in 2014 ("3 Years of Training Awakened Leaders " as of 2017). They moved from Johnson, VT to Lowell, VT at some point.
Edit / Some history here but nothing on the LessWrong connection except something called the 1440 Foundation in California https://www.centerformindfullearning.org/history/
Edit / Local journalism delivers
The people making these machines are listening. According to a 2023 profile of Forall in The Atlantic, he provides spiritual advice to A.I. thinkers, hosting talks and retreats for researchers and developers at leading artificial intelligence engineering hubs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Apple.
MAPLE has also grown, with expansion efforts under similar acronyms formed under the umbrella of Community for the Experience and Development of Awakening and Responsibility, or CEDAR, like its OAK offshoot in Berkeley, Calif., and Willow intensive in Canada.
The Center for Mindful Learning, the parent corporation of MAPLE and its affiliates, controls $3.65 million in assets, according to 2023 tax filings, and brought in nearly a million in revenue each year between 2020 and 2023 thanks to donations from individuals in the West Coast tech industry.
Their Form 990 is here but does not have details of the donors. So it sounds like they have a single guru with wealthy patrons.
In 2015, around the time MetaMed ran out of money, Andrew Rettek raised $2,280 on GoFundMe to hire his wife to write a report on STI transmission risks. https://www.gofundme.com/f/n5kt74 Safer sex is important but its very like our friends to go “thousands of professionals around the world have devoted their lives to this topic, but I bet I can do better in a week with scihub and the power of fanfic.” Some of our friends totally took that report and tried to play the odds rather than stick to strict rules.