Form 990 for these organizations mentions many names I am not familiar with such as Tyler Emerson. Many people in these spaces have romantic or housing partnerships with each other, and many attend meetups and cons together. A MIRI staffer claims that Peter Thiel funded them from 2005 to 2009, we now know when Jeffrey Epstein donated. Publishing such a thing is not very nice since these are living persons frequently accused of questionable behavior which never goes to court (and some may have left the movement), but does a concise list of dates, places, and known connections exist?
Maybe that social graph would be more of a dot. So many of these people date each other and serve on each other’s boards and live in the SF Bay Area, Austin TX, the NYC area, or Oxford, England. On the enshittified site people talk about their Twitter and Tumblr connections.
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The blogger Pinkerite has studies of people around Steven Pinker but focuses on public intellectuals over the kind of people who serve on boards and organize meetups. Ever since I learned about the face-to-face, Bay Area aspect of all of this I have been wonder how to rethink it. The people who post the most on the open web are not necessarily the most influential.
Extropia’s Children show that you can do scholarship with someone you disagree with (he is a chatbot fan but his timeline is reasonable).
I’ve thought about making one but I never got really got past the “gathering info” stage as I tend to go on hiatus for months at a time for the sake of my sanity. That being said, here are some things you might find interesting:
Extropia’s Children - a series of substack posts about the rationalists and related groups. One of the better sources of their early history that I’ve found, and has links to the original sources for a lot of stuff.
MIRI’s “Top Contributors” page - which shows that Peter Thiel was their biggest donor until 2015, when he pulled funding because he felt that they had become like a luddite Burning Man Camp (and it was also a year that the Rationalists actually did go to Burning Man). Thiel was also given an honorary position in SIAI. Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz has been their biggest funder since 2015 through Open Philanthropy.
Yudkowsky coined the term “effective altruist”, despite their claims to the contrary. Will MacAskill and Toby Ord were both LessWrongers before starting EA, and LessWrong was EA’s biggest recruitment source for years (I think this is noteworthy because EA now tries to distance themselves from the rationalists rather than acknowledging that they’re an offshoot)
FTX was also an offshoot of the rationalists/EA (hence the polyamorous group house, FTX prediction market, etc). Caroline Ellison was a personal friend of Scott Alexander Siskind and even told him about their overleveraging strategy on tumblr a few months before FTX collapsed SBF financially supported ACX and his psychiatrist, George Lerner, worked in the same office as Scott Alexander IIRC (I’ve lost track of the source, will post later if I can find it).
This recent Rolling Stone article about the Zizians - which filled in a number of gaps in my knowledge, in particular how Yudkowsky and Thiel met.
This a timeline of events related to sexual assaults in the rationalist community that I myself compiled and posted on the subreddit. (I think I have an even longer timeline of events somewhere, I’ll look for it later)
Anyways I’d be up for sharing info, there’s a bunch more stuff I know and I could basically send you a giant list of sites I’ve bookmarked over the years that would aid in mapping out the connections. (edit: I guess that wouldn’t really be “concise” but I think if we want a concise posopography we’ll have to make it ourselves)
The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future by Keach Hagey has potential https://archive.is/22O9z
Two members of the Extropian community, internet entrepreneurs Brian and Sabine Atkins—who met on an Extropian mailing list in 1998 and were married soon after—were so taken by this message that in 2000 they bankrolled a think tank for Yudkowsky, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. At 21, Yudkowsky moved to Atlanta and began drawing a nonprofit salary of around $20,000 a year to preach his message of benevolent superintelligence. “I thought very smart things would automatically be good,” he said. Within eight months, however, he began to realize that he was wrong—way wrong. AI, he decided, could be a catastrophe.
This excerpt on Wired slams down names and dates and social connections without getting distracted by all the things that are wrong with what it describes.