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The Power of STeroids

Going down a rabbit hole re: lesswrong, effective altruism, AI researchers, and this group "Leverage" that existed in oakland a few years ago. Some of this stuff is tangentially related to Sam Bankman Fried and his polycule of nutters, I believe. There doesn't seem to be much written about all of this from the outside.

https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b

"The explicit strategy for world-saving depended upon a team of highly moldable young people self-transforming into Elon Musks" jfc. the damage this guy has done by simply existing.

I shared that with a friend and half an hour later she had a link to the Leverage Discord. I'm afraid to join but so curious

from what I can tell he has rebranded and maybe relaunched this organization? it's very weird to me. this isn't NXIVM level shit yet, that I can tell (no branding of sex slaves; some reports of inappropriate 'workplace' relationships though), but it's close, with the packed calendars, continual 'debugging' (think scientology and auditing, or NXIVM's "EM"s), psychological manipulation. Who is funding this shit? Silicon Valley VCs.

I stumbled on this stuff the weirdest way. Berkeley is introducing a new Mental Health Crisis team (like, half a day, 4 days a week, who can deal with something like 3 calls a day). Berkeley has like, a LOT of mentally ill people on the streets in crisis any time of the day. I hate people who comment on Berkeleyside and Berkeleyscanner, but someone did point a link to this article about someone who had a psychotic episode in a restaurant and then physically attacked the crisis worker who came (alone?) in her car. this was in 2017. This is the original story:

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2017/04/25/update-city-mental-health-worker-strangled-choked-carjacking-outside-whole-foods

I looked this guy up and he got 5 years. I found his name linked in a lesswrong post calling out abuses related to two orgs, CFAR and MIRI. He basically was somehow associated with MIRI (I believe) and cracked up.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards

I heard about LessWrong when Decoding The Gurus recently ran an episode about Eliezer Yudkowksy. There's a definite infohazard self-sealing cult-thought to their writings and I'm troubled at how popular it all is amongst AI researchers.

wow @that medium link

“3. Geoff estimated that there were roughly 10 “super weapons” or “super theories.” He said we already had 1–2, one being we had solved philosophy (but not completely, he admitted — all he had left to do was prove that time exists and maybe a few other details, was what I remember him saying).”

Big echoes of scientology

"The explicit strategy for world-saving depended upon a team of highly moldable young people self-transforming into Elon Musks. For a long time, what was asked of me in order to maintain my funding was to “become a self-debugger”

researching who funds this stuff I ran across this: https://survivalandflourishing.fund

which got funding from:

https://saveourplanet.org/projects/survival-and-flourishing/#:~:text=We%20currently%20serve%20as%20volunteers,administer%20grants%20from%20funding%20provided

though oddly, I only found that link by googling, it's been taken off the saveourplanet.org navigation. NGO that seems otherwise benign. But these other groups smell.... nazi adjacent to me. Dunno. Lotta white dudes who think they are destined to save the earth.

Twin Flames documentary on Netflix is great.