I have a feeling that both Jordan “Crémieux Receuil” Lasker and Curtis Yarvin will be present as guests. https://less.online/

Yud made them list him under both Project Lawful/Planecrash and the Sequences/HPMOR. I think he is really proud of his million words of forum posts about D&D, BDSM, and eugenics, like an elderly L. Ron Hubbard really wanted to write another bestseller.

They hope to get the creator of Worm (the webcomic serial fiction that Ziz Lasota was a fan of) and Dominic Cummings. Also some postrationalists like The Last Psychiatrist and Meaningness.

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    7·
    7 days ago

    It looks like the guests are mostly LW/EA/postrationalist bloggers, Bay Area tech executives like Paul Graham, and wealthy Libertarian pundits like Tyler Cowen. They are trying to recruit some general geeky figures:

    • Agnes Callard (a UChicago philosophy professor who has visited Lighthaven before, she left her husband for a grad student and got the student hired by her university. Spent 2021-2025 podcasting with Robin Hanson)
    • ccp grey (a pop science YouTuber, no RationalWiki presence but he has posted that he is worried about AI)
    • Bret Devereaux of ACOUP (shows no interest! I think he is serious about being a centrist Liberal who would happily shoot slavers with the 16th Maine and say his prayers afterwards)
    • Dan Luu (software developer in Vancouver, BC, not SF or Seattle, hosts a critique of HPMOR )
    • oktrends (our friends like data and have trouble with dating, and the original OK Cupid blog played with race thinking)
    • smbc webcomic
    • Tim Urban of Wait but Why, Also present at Hereticon)
    • Worm web serial
    • xkcd webcomic (really does not seem like someone who would like them)

    Does anyone spot any outsiders they are hoping to bring in?

    • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      as Soyweiser points out above: noted harsh critic of rationalism and AI (the guy who makes) SMBC is a “bold choice”

      surprised that CCP Grey guy is still around - the asshole who refuses to post corrections to factual errors in his infotainment videos? can you imagine a more perfect fit?

      re: The Last Psychiatrist, is he a postrationalist? The impression I have always had is that rationalists read HIM, not the other way around. His odious Hunter Thompson impression is more appealing to them than is possible to generate from within the movement, I think

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        4 days ago

        Zack from SMBC once called habitual AI users ‘clanker crankers’ in a comic and I’m still disappointed it didn’t catch on.

        He definitely has a history of mocking rationalist mythology but I don’t know if he is aware how actually problematic they are as a subculture.

        Meaning, I can see him giving the benefit of a doubt to a random rationalist event and going to promote his books (about how immigration is good and space colonization is bad lmao) as long as there are enough levels of abstraction between the event and the subculture’s rampant eugenicism and incelism, but I don’t know he knows that means that his mug appearing right next to siskind, yud, aela and hanson would be a really bad look.

        TLP dropped off the face of the earth after he stopped his blog on an incelly note so who knows. Siskind did a huge review of Sadly, Porn when people started realizing it was probably the vaunted TLP book, I feel they’d love to co-opt him.