(2021-02-13) Metz Silicon Valley's Safe Space

Cade Metz: Silicon Valley’s Safe Space. The website had a homely, almost slapdash design with a light blue banner and a strange name: Slate Star Codex... written by a Bay Area psychiatrist who called himself Scott Alexander.

epicenter of a community called the Rationalists

the conversation that thrived at the end of each blog post — and in related forums on the discussion site Reddit — attracted an unusually wide range of voices.

The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.” They were considered a threat to one of the core beliefs driving the discussion: free speech.

Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche. There are good reasons to try and understand that psyche, because the decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions.

Elizabeth Sandifer, a scholar who closely follows and documents the Rationalists. “But this can lead to real problems. The contrarian nature of these ideas makes them appealing to people who maybe don’t think enough about the consequences.”

in late June of last year, when I approached Mr. Siskind to discuss the blog, it vanished

his given name, Scott Siskind

The roots of Slate Star Codex trace back more than a decade to a polemicist and self-described A.I. researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky

Because the Rationalists believed A.I. could end up destroying the world — a not entirely novel fear to anyone who has seen science fiction movies — they wanted to guard against it. Many worked for and donated money to MIRI, an organization created by Mr. Yudkowsky whose stated mission was “A.I. safety.”

They were “easily persuaded by weird, contrarian things,” said Robin Hanson

“They are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson.

I called Sam Altman

It was, he said, essential reading among “the people inventing the future” in the tech industry

He wanted to talk about an essay that appeared on the blog in 2014.

The essay was a critique of what Mr. Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander, described as “the Blue Tribe.” In his telling, these were the people at the liberal end of the political spectrum whose characteristics included “supporting gay rights” and “getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots.”

there was one group the Blue Tribe could not tolerate: anyone who did not agree with the Blue Tribe (outgroup)

Mr. Altman thought the essay nailed a big problem: In the face of the “internet mob” that guarded against sexism and racism, entrepreneurs had less room to explore new ideas. Many of their ideas, such as intelligence augmentation and genetic engineering, ran afoul of the Blue Tribe.

Mr. Siskind was not a member of the Blue Tribe

He identified with something called the Grey Tribe — as did many in Silicon Valley

The Grey Tribe was characterized by libertarian beliefs, atheism, “vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up,” and “reading lots of blogs,” he wrote. Most significantly, it believed in absolute free speech.

in some ways, two of the world’s prominent A.I. labs — organizations that are tackling some of the tech industry’s most ambitious and potentially powerful projects — grew out of the Rationalist movement.

In 2005, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, befriended Mr. Yudkowsky and gave money to MIRI

Yudkowsky introduced him to a pair of young researchers named Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis. That fall, with an investment from Mr. Thiel’s firm, the two created an A.I. lab called DeepMind.

In 2014, Google bought DeepMind for $650 million

The next year, Elon Musk — who also worried A.I. could destroy the world and met his partner, Grimes, because they shared an interest in a Rationalist thought experiment — founded OpenAI as a DeepMind competitor

In 2013, Mr. Thiel invested in a technology company founded by Mr. Yarvin. So did the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, led in the investment by Balaji Srinivasan, who was then a general partner.

I told him I could not guarantee him the anonymity he’d been writing with

Protecting the identity of the man behind Slate Star Codex had turned into a cause among the Rationalists.

On the internet, many in Silicon Valley believe, everyone has the right not only to say what they want but to say it anonymously.

I spoke with Manoel Horta Ribeiro, a computer science researcher who explores social networks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He was worried that Slate Star Codex, like other communities, was allowing extremist views to trickle into the influential tech world. “A community like this gives voice to fringe groups,” he said. “It gives a platform to people who hold more extreme views.”

two weeks ago, he relaunched his blog on Substack.

He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform.