Arthur. Have been looking at this for a while. I tracked a strong affinity between Cummings and Epstein, but would love to know more about the Bay Area Rationalistshttps://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/03/the-coronavirus-crisis-herd-immunity-has-infected-uk-policy-but-who-was-patient-zero-for-this-toxic-transatlantic-idea/ …
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Replying to @peterjukes
Oh man where do I start
@ElSandifer would be a better person to ask than me3 replies 0 retweets 7 likes -
But yeah the rationalist clique is basically Epstein-adjacent, they're the wackjob Internet true believers orbiting around all the stuff Epstein liked to fund re: eugenics, AI and other techbro obsessions
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Replying to @arthur_affect @peterjukes
Oh man, that's a complicated topic that nobody's written a straightforward overview of. (My book deals with them, but I would never call it "straightforward.") The short form is there's a blogger named Eliezer Yudkowsky who is really obsessed with being reincarnated on a computer
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Yudkowsky proceeded to derive an entire philosophical system of "rationalism," nominally from first principles and a statistical concept called Bayes' Theorem.
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In reality, but it was a towering monolith of motivated reasoning that sought to reach the conclusion "therefore we'll be reincarnated on a computer."
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But it was very good at making a particular sort of autodidact with questionable social skills feel like the center of the universe. (Yudkowsky, unsurprisingly, is an autodidact with questionable social skills.)
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Yudkowsky eventually got himself bankrolled by Peter Thiel and created an "AI research" nonprofit that has conducted no notable AI research but has pissed off the entire effective altruism movement by loudly arguing that funding its AI is more important than preventing malaria.
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Dominic Cummings is a documented fan of Yudkowsky, and the herd immunity scheme is a dead ringer for the sort of "we ignored all expert discussion of this topic, started from first principles to reinvent the wheel, and ended up with a really lumpy wheel" style Yudkowsky employs.
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I *suspect* that Arthur read the headline but not the essay and mistakenly thought that there were Jeffrey Epstein/Yudkowsky connections. This wouldn't be a shock by any means—Yudkowsky's fandom has massive "Me Too" issues and plenty "actually it's called ephebophilia" sorts.
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I'm not saying Yudkowsky et al actually are Epstein cronies - they're not important enough for that - but they're definitely adjacent to Epstein's cronies in idea space, i.e. they're fans of Steven Pinker, Tyler Cowen and the rest
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