summary of drama as it pertains to the Austin LessWrong rationalists and Vibecamp

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EXTREMELY SHORT SUMMARY IF YOU'RE UNLUCKY ENOUGH TO CLICK THIS AND SUDDENLY NEED TO PEE REALLY BAD
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▪️ I was banned from the local Austin LessWrong/yudkowskyian rationalist group for the reasons elaborated on below.

▪️ Following this, I was banned from Vibecamp, a post-lesswrong meetup group, for mentioning the real name of people in the circle circulating rumors about me in my explanation of why and how I know they're untrue. (Read: I don't know who exactly said what, but I know for sure what arrangement of people it came from and why it is false.)

▪️ Throughout this summary I use "lesswrong rationalist" and "post-lesswrong" to refer to what are called postrationalists. This is because the term "rationalist" used standalone is misleading if not dishonest and the previous terms are more accurate for several reasons. http://simp.ly/p/2GxCjn

THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE (12/27/2021):

Against my explicitly stated desire not to, the discord had an afternoon-long argument about how I was unfair to Aella for posting this http://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10228473763976085 as she "could not respond." This claim is clearly false given that it is a public post and she had 80,000 twitter followers — now over 90,000 — so she could have responded literally anywhere. I came to understand the perception of unfairness was because she "does not follow me" therefore was unaware of it, and could not reply *in my comments* as she is not my friend. I don't want to be friends with Aella so of course she can't, and the expectation that every author should make everyone they are criticizing aware of every criticism is clearly unreasonable. This struck me as clearly either status-biased or attraction-biased (i.e. simping) or both, and I said as much.

(The fact that they condoned the creation of rumors in a private discord after I was unable to respond to them or know what those rumors are was, apparently, a hypocrisy lost on everyone.)

A similarly intense argument proceeded about a post Arpan made which argued that, under a stricter sense of the word "doxxing", Scott Alexander wasn't doxxed because it refers to releasing a dossier of information and not simply realnaming someone. I argued that Arpan's argument, while insensitive, is clearly true in the technical sense. I've been doxxed twice; both incidents were document dumps, i.e. a list of identifiable information about me and my life. Merely calling me "Alfred MacDonald" instead of "Unremarkable Prostate" or "arch0wl" or "immanuelkantwasafurry" or any of my other pseudonyms is a concept creep of "doxxing" in the way that calling drunken sex rape is a concept creep of rape.

That same evening I was banned, as was Arpan and anyone known to be from the city of San Antonio, and the Discord was given the following announcement:

Jackie (9:29 PM) Hey everyone, I just wanted to let everyone know that I have removed Alfred and several other people from this server for the following reasons:

1. Making several people uncomfortable to the point where they say they don't want to be in the same events with Alfred or be in the same server as Alfred

2. Trying to pit members against each other in clearly manipulative ways in private messages, and being manipulative in other ways

3. Sharing private information about group members to outside groups

4. We don't necessarily know at this point in time which members from the San Antonio meetups are primarily Alfred's friends who will lurk the server and share screenshots with Alfred, so for now all of them are removed

He is also no longer welcome at meetup events.

If you wish to discuss, please do so in #meta. GI"

****** THE SUBTEXT OF THE ACCUSATIONS:

1. the "privacy" part of the accusations refers to when I effectively sought out relationship advice.

I had and still have a groupchat about relationships. I had a romance with a local chick from the Austin group; we fell for each other hard enough that we repeatedly took breaks from each other. These did not work. (For example, after Break #1 she showed up at a party where she expected to see me. I received a "why weren't you there?" DM at about midnight.) Break #2 happened suddenly and abruptly and her mannerisms were both out of character and reminded me of an ex girlfriend of mine with heavy borderline personality characteristics. As that relationship was highly traumatic I was concerned with avoiding anything that seemed even sort-of BPD, but I didn't feel I had neutral enough judgment to make this assessment by myself. As a sanity check I shared screenshots asking for advice -- most people in my groupchat gave me shit for this as the screenshots were at times intimate but most did not think it was an egregious violation due to what I was trying to avoid. However one person on the schizo (colloquially not clinically) end of things left the chat for this, which caused a friend of that person to also leave, and that's what caused points #1 and #3 on the list of accusations below.

2. Alex Zavoluk, one of the 3 local organizers at the time, was giga-horny for Aella and is low-decoupling as it pertains to evaluating the truth or value in what someone says independently of social status or sexual attraction. I have beefed with him and her separately and IMO, given how affected he is by these biases, I suspect he was looking for a reason to remove me and seized on that.

3. The "manipulative" accusation stems from messages that originate almost certainly because I used to be involved with either (a) eigenrobot's wife and/or (b) circles related to her and a friend of theirs, which is elaborated on below also.

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EVALUATING THE SPECIFIC CLAIMS
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1. Making several people uncomfortable to the point where they say they don't want to be in the same events with Alfred or be in the same server as Alfred.

Reality: partially true, though misconstrued.

At least one of these people was the person I had a romance with, but knowing them this was done as an innocuous courtesy and I'm guessing it was misconstrued as some kind of ultimatum. (Note: This has been resolved for a while now.)

The other people making this kind of ultimatum should be obvious — this is a reaction to the dispute over my criticism of Aella's post. I don't need to name anyone; you either know who they already are or can take an educated guess.

***********

2. Trying to pit members against each other in clearly manipulative ways in private messages, and being manipulative in other ways.

Reality: completely bullshit.

The last people I have DMed in discord are:

https://i.imgur.com/SRH6T7f.png

asara, cherrvak, jynelson, whytefeather/trolo, Meefburger, btrettel, untoward and whytefeather are all dated 12/27/2021. last message to lesalia is dated 12/24/2021, GeneralAntilles 12/14/2021 and wolfrayette 12/13/2021.

Only one of these messages I sent recently that could be construed as "pitting" anyone "against each other" (read: it isn't) and it was about who I thought the StopBeingABitchAlexZ account could be. My DM used the verbiage "I don't have any way of confirming this though, keep in mind" and "I'm being deliberately vague here for the sake of privacy" and "Please don't bring this up. But, given the circumstances, that's my top suspicion and I figure you deserve the information."

Given how recently these decisions occurred, there is no other message this could be about.

(Thanks for honoring my "please keep this between us" request. Aren't I supposed to be the one in trouble for indiscretion?)

Manipulation, by the way, in really white upper middle class settings is sort of like a power word because it's like the Matrix. It appeals to the paranoid in us and you never know if I'm doing something insidious. I could be manipulating you at any time, you don't know, you could be a bluepill ready to turn into Agent Smith at any moment. So this is a great way to stoke unreasonable fears that I'm working against you in secret.

More to the point: If anyone from the above list of people DMs has any messages that are construable as pitting anyone against each other other than this one, please express your concerns to me, because that isn't behavior I approve of either and I would like to know if you think I'm doing that so I can not do that.

In fact, if you disapprove of anything at all I've done independent of this incident you are free to message me on FB about it. The insinuation that I'd do anything dishonest to any of you is serious and I'm willing to go to bat about it.

(Note: this was written around Dec 28, 2021; as of Mar 30 2022, zero people have initiated a DM about unspoken concerns or want of clarification.)

***********

3. Sharing private information about group members to outside groups.

reality: real, but with a caveat

I know what this is about, and it pertains to effectively relationship advice. I also know who specifically made this complaint. It's unfortunate that they did, but I'm not going to hold it against them. (If I intended to, you'd know.)

This is important however: seeking relationship advice in the confidence of close friends is a categorically different thing than anything I've done on the LW discord. If you never trusted me over DM, that would be reason to not message me, but there wouldn't be carryover to a discord server itself. As it stands, even if I *were* ready to post any private detail about you at a moment's notice, this would be unrelated to whether I or my friends should be able to participate on a (what was until about 10PM today 12/28/2021) semi-public discord of ~120 people where dozens of people lurk, where the discord invite link is obtainable from google and where the server has few to no clarifying statements about some kind of attitude toward privacy beyond I guess "don't talk to NYT reporters."

(I don't, and have never, cared about what you post on the discord server. This is imaginary.)

If any sort of outside-discord discussion about your personal details were a real concern, what you could have done instead was vet lurkers heavily and update the rule about privacy, then notify everyone that this is a thing you want people being vigilant of. If the concern were really outside-discord discussion of what happens on discord, this would have been clear long before this decision.

Since this decision is clearly related to a single dispute — the facebook post I made — this is obviously out of retribution/personal bias against me than the security of anyone's personal details from the server.


***********

META.

This will be unsatisfyingly vague to some of you, far too vague to be convincing, and I sympathize. High-confidentiality social norms have this incredibly abuseable exploit where anyone can spread rumors about you and the inaccuracies will rarely if ever go corrected because people following these norms are forced to speak in HRish nothings like "there was a dispute."

Regardless, you may want to reconsider how invested you are in a community if a combination of gossip, rumors, and unrelated outside beef is the reason you can get removed from gatherings with your friends, with your friends as a consequence at risk of removal too. Years of investment in your social network could be reduced to pointlessness.

translation: Don't re-add me if you have a sudden change of heart -- given the egregiously poor reasoning and standards of evidence used to remove me, I'm not exactly interested in rejoining knowing something similarly whimsical could happen to me or my friends again, and even if I did communicate it would be muted and reserved knowing that we could be removed for gossip. If I did rejoin I would have to be assured that something like this wouldn't happen again, which I'm not sure is possible at present.

But, to return to the purpose of this: I do care that those of you who I am friends with want to stay friends, so again -- if you have any concerns about knowing me personally, please message me. Or text me. Or signal, or whatever.

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THE MAIN LETTER ABOUT MY ISSUES
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The main letter is less of a sequence of events/accusations and more of a statement about our differences in values.

The full letter is available here: https://app.simplenote.com/p/02HJS2

The relevant parts as they relate to What Happened are pasted below.

Recall in the original list of accusations that one involved privacy/screenshotting. The "uncomfortable" reason is derivative of this same reason, i.e. the incident with privacy comprises both the "sharing screenshots" and "making others uncomfortable" part of the reasons for banning me.

This incident occurred when I shared a conversation in a groupchat where I was asking for what was in effect relationship advice. (This is not entirely accurate, but for !!!privacy reasons!!! this should be enough for your purposes.) That's the extent of things. One person who is staying unnamed left over this; Kim left when Arpan posted his dumb "actually by one definition of doxxing Scott wasn't akshually doxxed" post.

One person who I am again not naming for $privacy responded in a way that -- I am not going to sugar coat this -- I find insane. This person went through the entire message history between Arpan and myself and manually deleted every message. We know this was manual because there was a time delay and because certain messages were not deleted that would have been if they used a bot. That is hundreds of messages. It took to do this. For... what exactly? Do you think bisexual Indian techbros in the process of moving to Miami are going to rob your house or something? (This is rhetorical; there is almost certainly no reasonable justification grounded in probable or even plausible events. This is volatile threat-modeling, and I am somewhat disturbed at what inhabiting the mood necessary to do this would be like. I am also not the only one.)

For elaboration on my reasoning used to make the above statements, see the below section about privacy and information.

****** COMMUNITY INSTABILITY ******

Anyway, as far as I know, not that many people have been banned in the Austin community's history. The people I know of who have been banned have been:

- Nicole's ex
- Steff
- me + Arpan

In that order.

Steff was banned because some of you were insane enough to think she was leaking to the NYT or something. Either way, you clearly weren't rigorous enough in this decision. I don't think much has changed. There is a Gell Mann amnesia type scenario at work here for the ability of organizers to act rigorously and coherently and transparently, among other things, and the burden of proof is why you're right *this* time.

Consider, also, that anyone supporting the decision might be doing so because they, too, don't want to get banned. Once you've opened this box you can't close it.

So, it's clear that:

1. Getting on the bad side of certain people strongly reduces your chances of staying if organizers find something they feel might warrant banning

2. The group has a history of banning for schizo shit (see: the steffisode, the fact that you banned an entire city because anyone who has touched a breakfast taco might be an Alfred MacDonald psyop)

This, in and of itself, should make you question how much time you want to invest here, when linear time/attention means you are necessarily ignoring other groups you could be participating in.

****** THE SCARY DM RUMORS *******

In the Austin rationality group a person went around and anonymously messaged bizarre rumors about me, such as that I am manipulative or worse.

NOTE: This is a personal dispute, at its core, and to refute it I'm going to need to bring up awkward personal details about people.

NOTE2: "Manipulation" is a Power Word, i.e. an extremely abuseable and loaded scare word. Recall what I mentioned earlier.

To begin, the accusation originates from some person connected to Colin Popell / "orthonormalist" and Samuel Henley / "eigenrobot", both of whom are influential on what might be called postrationalist (or more accurately postyudkwskian) twitter; including Samuel's wife their combined follower count is over 40,000 although I would imagine there is heavy overlap.

The reasoning is detailed below:

1. Some of the messages you received reference my reddit history.

2. My reddit account ("MittRomneysCampaign" -- and yes, this is a joking account name) was inactive since 2017. It has been outright deleted since 2019, so the person who referenced this must know me and cannot be someone who just googled me recently.

3. Colin was my friend from 2013-2018.

4. Colin Popell ("orthonormalist") knows my reddit history, and the messages might be referencing a campaign where we pushed antifeminist media to the top of reddit's frontpages.

4.a. This is not even kind-of a secret; I wrote a popular post about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/36wwr6/the_types_of_manipulation_on_votebased_forums/ (The "Ryan" here is my friend from undergrad and unrelated to rationality groups.)

4.b. In fact, reddit is how I met Colin. Until we stopped talking he openly self-identified as "machiavellian", although I think this is a LARP and that he is actually a good guy. ("I know conspiracy theories are real because other people like me must exist" is a Colin quote I'll never forget.) For a long time we were in a groupchat called -- this was his name choice, not mine -- "Dark Triad Tendencies". I and Jeremy Cahill thought the name was cringe so I changed it to "Jaded Rationalist Tendencies" which was its name until the chat died off in 2018 and was replaced by War Club which became Not War Club which is its current incarnation and has about 60 participants.

5. Some people here know Colin through twitter and his web forum.

6. Colin is moving to Texas with his friend Paul Bragulla, who I don't think is part of this circle. Several people here have been talking about this privately.

7. Colin often posts about knowing Samuel IRL.

8. Colin is also trying to get Samuel to move to Texas.

9. Samuel's wife, Mackenzie ("selentelechia"), used to be involved with me and clearly -- in ways I am not going into here but can if this is necessary to refute the accusations -- desired more investment from me.

9.a. Some of you will not get the above subtext no matter how much I gesture, so I will make this explicit: if I hadn't turned her down, their relationship would not exist.

10. Male competitiveness and insecurity is certainly enough to make men in this situation weird about me, and I would not be surprised if that were part of it. It's also the case that, in relationships, to explain away targets of jealousy women will villainize previous men they've been interested in. Any combination of these things are plausible.

10.a. I understand that this is probably awkward and uncomfortable to hear. It's also awkward and uncomfortable to say, but it's pertinent to the accusations.

10.b. This is the kind of inconsequential drama shit I don't like talking about, but because of the messages sent about me am compelled to talk about as this information is an obvious motive for unscrupulous behavior. This is something I would never have discussed had whoever sent those messages not done so. (If you are that person and reading this, I suggest never doing it again.)

11. In addition to the above, I know embarrassing details about Colin's history that I'm not going into here, but his details are less directly relevant than Samuel's because they are redundant with the existing motives.

12. Colin is a person who self-identifies as power-seeking. This is not just my opinion; this is public information.

13. If you are a person who currently identifies as a power-seeking, and used to identify as machiavellian, someone knowing a lot of embarrassing details about your circle might be a problem.

13.a. But once again, I think this is a LARP and he's a decent guy who happened to just think I became a trainwreck. And I was! The period from summer 2017 to summer 2018 was probably the most retrograde year of my life since 2006, and 2006 was when I had revenge masturbation videos circulated of me to a large gaming community wherein I was micro-famous. This is not to claim victimhood points but to say that 2017-2018 was, in fact, that bad and unlike 2006 was mostly my fault.

14. It is a near-certainty that someone from this circle sent you this message in an attempt to save their own sense of status; specifically, due to the degree to which I could compromise their image, or reputation, or both if it came to that.

15. Colin at one point during my relationship with my ex girlfriend Laila suddenly stopped talking to me.

15.a. This was additionally weird because he introduced me to her in the first place. (If I recall they hooked up once in high school or whatever.)

16. Regardless, she would DM him for advice during the low points of our relationship. Like most engagements of this kind she wouldn't message him during the high points, so their relationship involved exclusively negative information.

17. These weren't just normal "low points"; they were *really low* because that was a dumpster fire of a relationship.

17.a. To name one element among a shitload, just about every BPD stereotype you can imagine occured, as well as just about every toxic relationship stereotype. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDFdroN7d0w Take this sort of intensity, except consider that we weren't important people, and reiterate that once a week and for hour-long stretches. To wit, I was broken up with thirteen times; the relationship ended when I gave up and ended it myself. In no other relationship of mine has this dynamic occurred; to name some examples I'm still friends with my last ex, Rachel, who some of you have met, and am also still friends with my longest ex, Jessica, who is director of digital customer experience at UTSA.

17.a. If were receiving DMs about that relationship from anyone, I would think they were insane. So, I didn't blame Colin nor Mackenzie for not wanting to speak to me then because I wouldn't have wanted to talk to me either.

18. However, there is reason to believe they acted as a cohort. Mackenzie stopped talking to me roughly around the period Colin did. My last dated interaction with Mackenzie is 2/17/18 and my last with Colin is 12/4/2017; my last "seen" message by Colin is 3/16/2018 and they go dark after that. These are proximal and they lived in roughly the same area and hung out with similar people. They could have just both independently wanted nothing to do with my dumpster fire relationship -- which I wouldn't fault -- but nonetheless the proximity and circumstances do make this look like it was a decision made as a cohort.

19. Colin runs a forum at https://aristillus.xyz

20. All of the above-mentioned people are by-design influential on this forum.

21. All of the above-mentioned people are additionally influential among their twittersphere.

21.a. To wit, their accounts have been linked in the discord several times; "the discourse" has been used to describe them and it's clear several users think post-lesswrong discourse gravitates around Samuel in particular.

Due to the above, the messages some of you received could be any of them or none of them, but:

22. those are their respective motives, and

23. it's indisputable that someone connected to that circle is talking about it.

To emphasize, "someone connected to" is the essential verbiage. It's entirely plausible that whoever is messaging you is neither Mackenzie nor Samuel nor Colin but in fact some rando from Colin's forum and/or twitter who has heard enough poor thirdhand information from them to foolishly think that they benefit from acting on it.

Nonetheless it remains the case that this part of my life was hearsaid to *someone* involved with this circle, which led to the telephone-game bullshit you're getting now.

But let's be real. If whoever is anonymously messaging you were confident, they would have attached this accusation to something more than an anonymous message. I, personally, doubt it's Colin or Mackenzie themselves because both know me well enough to know that I would, eventually, issue a refutation of this kind.

Once again: had those messages never occurred, none of you would know any of this, and I am annoyed I've even had to type about it.

With that said, I've given you *vastly* more information to work with and corroborate. You may scrutinize any of it, and in fact I encourage you to; what I'm saying will hold up. What's going on here should be obvious by now.

****** THE SEX-WORKER RUMORS ******

I've heard someone (and I have heard Aella, though this may be false so keep that in mind) said I outed a sex worker to her Muslim family -- or something to this effect. This is irresponsible and recklessly inaccurate and comes from the result of conflating (literally conflating, as in merging) two relationships I had where both of those women had Muslim families.

One was with a Somali girl named Eaman. She was not a sex worker; not even kind-of. She did work to help homeless people in South Austin, and she felt bad about drinking, and her family strongly disapproved, so she said she was an alcoholic. (This is IMO not unlike how Mormons will over-diagnose with sex addiction.) I did think she drank too much but not dysfunctionally; she showed up to work, she paid rent, she filed her taxes. She didn't seem dysfunctional, so I refused to call it alcoholism. Nonetheless I think she wanted a medical rubber stamp to officialize the shame she felt from her family. Because I refused, she insisted I was gaslighting her. At no point did I ever contact her family, and in fact I would not have even known how.

The other was a Lebanese woman named Laila. It was an open secret that she did sex work. By "open secret" I mean her family knew before I had ever spoken to them, and she had a video on pornhub that had 4 million views, and she told her sisters how much money she was making by dancing. Her stage name was her real name. There was absolutely no secrecy about it.

The worst thing about this is that no one at any point consulted me for my version of what happened, and many of you evidently did not ask for a source, or how you even know that source is credible. I have also not had an apology for the propagation of these falsehoods, nor have any of you apparently felt bad on ethical grounds more generally. All parties involved in the propagation of this crap should know better and conduct themselves with more care towards truth and accuracy.

****** THE VIBECAMP INCIDENT (sent to Brooke, the vibecamp organizer) ******

At some point I attempted to go to Vibecamp, a meetup group for post-lesswrongs. About 300 people were attending, and I had only known/met about 10 of them, which is another 290 potentially kindred spirits. I received this message twelve hours after paying for my ticket:

"We’ve been made aware of the post in which you doxxed a number of the members of this community, and the vibecamp team has decided to revoke your attendance. We’ll be refunding your ticket payment."

****** SUMMARY OF EVENTS AS I SENT THEM TO BROOKE, THE CENTRAL ORGANIZER FOR VIBECAMP ******

"I'm just going to tell you what happened because you are the organizer and I think you deserve a complete picture. this is just for your knowledge and perhaps other organizers if it affects a decision next year or whatever.

(author's note: "just for your knowledge" in this context means "do not share the unredacted version", and indeed I have redacted several details in the version below but this will be sufficient for you to reconstruct what happened.)

one of the people in the discord is [name redacted]. we got to know each other roughly around Nov 14 after I gave a talk about evidence-based fitness

we **really** hit it off. on discord we had a rate of like 130 DMs exchanged per day.

this however is a problem because [redacted].

we both agreed that this was a problem and agreed to not speak until March after she had sorted out her relationship issues

four days later she showed up to a party she expected me to be at, asked if I was coming, and messaged me at around midnight.

after speaking for a few more days she wanted to try not speaking again. we started off using limited messages, such as one per day. however eventually she went back to a total no contact policy and this time her behavior seemed extremely out of character so I sent screenshots of parts of our conversation to some friends asking for advice. two of those friends were local LW people and that is what caused the huge dispute locally in the first place and what led me to writing those letters you read part of, because the two people who were made uncomfortable by privacy issues were referring to that incident.

five days later she called me due to a post I made that she thought was vaguebooking about her

this caused us to talk *again* and we defaulted to exchanging letters rather than DMing, however what would actually happen is that she'd have a lot to say about something I said and DM me in response to a letter and that would consume several hours

in July 2020 I was present at a double shooting at a strip club in San Antonio. (as in, two occurred in the same evening.) I was shot at (vaguely) but not shot. I relayed my thoughts over a long voice monologue that I uploaded to otter.ai

she acted again out of character and instead of responding to stuff like the fact that I was shot at responded to things like the fact that I talked to some girl for five minutes. this reminded me a lot of a traumatic relationship I had so, that time, I told her that I wanted a two week break from speaking to her but that I was going to finish my final letters and upload them to the page we use to read them

on Jan 3 I did that and on Jan 4 I received her response and we had an emotional call afterward. she said in effect that she couldn't keep talking to me. I said goodbye and we didn't speak for about six days

on Jan 8 I published the letters to the community that you read part of, specifically the bit where someone sent out anonymous messages about me.

I am all but sure the person who did this is Ryan Abel / GeneralAntilles (his name is public and on his Twitter page) due to the details from the DMs people received (i.e. about my reddit history)

following this, aella discussed a lot of extremely inaccurate fourthhand gossip that merged and distorted many details from my relationship with an ex girlfriend laila

for example, she said that I told a Muslim girl's family that she was a sex worker. I never dated a Muslim sex worker. what she probably is referring to is that laila's family was Muslim. laila herself is an atheist. however both laila and I did sex work - I was an escort for men. they... knew that laila and I did sex work, or at least her sisters did. I never got to meet her parents because they lived in Virginia.

that relationship was a trainwreck, and is the relationship I still have trauma over. just to name one example of an extremely toxic element — she hit me while driving once, and broke up with me thirteen times and retracted it every time. she almost certainly had BPD. (and out of fairness to laila, do not take what I'm saying as factual - this is still hearsay. I obviously think it's true but keep that in mind.)

these rumors almost certainly came from the same person who knew my reddit history - orthonormalist - because that he is how I was introduced to her in the first place

on Jan 10 I had an anxiety attack because it occurred to me that [name redacted] may have been permanently done with me due to what people said about me rather than her own conclusion. I contacted her over a lot of media but she eventually responded over whatsapp and her response was clearly still concerned with keeping me out of her mind and whatnot and didn't indicate any interest in what other people said

I know that even though these details tend to be private she will talk about what has occurred with me with her friends Thom and Sachin, just as you'd tell your close friends about your relationship issues.

Jan 15 I think is when I reserved the ticket. [name redacted] probably saw me in the discord and thought I was trying to see her. in reality I was interested in the people I'd meet, but I can understand why she'd conclude that.

I scanned the discord for people who know about this. those people are

asara (nearcyan)
konstantine (cherrvak)
tjaden (tjade)
steff (...steff)
thom ivy
sachin (forgot username)
ryan (GeneralAntilles)
untoward (aella)

other people who know about this who may be lurking the discord are the people mentioned in the document:

orthonormalist
eigenrobot
selentelechia

if someone else not on this list messaged you that means the grapevine/rumor mill ability of this community works at light speed, because the information you received was less than a week old

(author's note: all reports were, in fact, from this list, and I'm confident about who specifically they were)

for the purposes of you having a full understanding of the events, that's what happened."

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CLASS BLINDNESS
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There is no organic place to put this, but it deserves mentioning and I will and have mentioned it elsewhere: for people who aim to be truthseeking and self aware and conscious of global issues like existential risk, LessWrong and adjacent communities are inexcusably class-blind. I first noticed this in the way one notices a slap to the face when an EA organizer dismissed homelessness as “poverty in a high income country”. Despite the moral preference for utilitarianism, lesswrong rationalists revert to deontological intuitions pertaining to transgressions they find actually important or real or both, which by implication means that you can infer what issues they find less important or not real by the extent from which they are able to keep a cool and postured distance. Other than the unique norms around privacy and doxxing, the revealed morality tends to be the same as what exists in normie liberal environments that trend bourgeois, where chief moral concerns are not real fights, real theft and real betrayals but rather the vague and rubber stamped capital-A ‘abuse’ as determined by your preferred therapist, while obviously bracketing how they’ve paid for it. Their sense of violence is still very much calibrated toward their psychological profile, which is what it would be in any other bourgeois community or more accurately what I call “comfort class”. (https://alfredmacdonald.medium.com/comfort-class-definition-4eba877f210b).

This is also reflected in what is deemed acceptable drug to use. There are Prestige Drugs, which to this demographic are just drugs; they are the “good ones” or the exceptions. Anything that can be labeled a Nootropic or anything that can be “mind expanding” falls into this category, and this prejudice parallels the comfort class's prejudices about exercise, as argued by Daniel Duane in “How the Other Half Lifts” and Carl Stempel in “Adult Participation Sports as Cultural Capital”. (https://psmag.com/social-justice/half-lifts-workout-says-social-class-85221 and https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.893.984&rep=rep1&type=pdf). The most acceptable prestige drugs, which you may have already guessed, are the psychedelics: psilocybin, LSD, DMT and so forth. Perhaps this is an artifact of Timothy Leary and others, or the fact that LSD was popularized at an Ivy League institution; regardless psychedelics are the clearest divide between drugs the lower classes accept and drugs the comfort class accepts.

But you might draw the line of “not good drugs” at psychedelics and think other class-equals are wrong. If so, fair. But where this becomes obviously organized by class is in the regard of MDMA. Note that prior to Scott Alexander’s articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall, which is more accurately phrased “therapeutically dosing” as the aim was to imitate a Desoxyn prescription. I know this because I was one of the few to do it, and you were absolutely thought of as a scary person doing the Wrong Kind Of Drug. MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: three-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it’s significantly more metabolically demanding. Zyzz, an iykyk sort of bodybuilder, famously died in a sauna while on a combination of MDMA and megadosed trenbolone, a steroid that can be characterized as “actually doing what people falsely think testosterone does.” If you think I am at all exaggerating and have easy access to drugs, feel free to use an Omron wrist monitor and thermometer to track your heart rate and blood pressure and body temperature during a standard if not conservative club dose of 100mg MDMA, then on a different day do the same with a 10mg oral dose of whatever junk meth you can find. You will reach my same view.

So you might as I do find it palpably weird that a demographic of people ostensibly concerned with rationality and longevity and biohacking and all manner of experimentation will accept MDMA because it is “mind expanding”, and be scared of drugs like cocaine because, um, uh,

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You may have seen Carl Hart’s admission to smoking heroin. You may have also seen his presentation at the 51st Nobel conference. (youtube.com/watch?v=5dzjKlfHChU). The combination of these two things is jarring because Heroin is a Big Kid drug, not a prestige drug, and how, of course, could a *neuroscientist* smoke heroin? His talk answers this question indirectly: the risk profile of drugs, as any pharmacologically literate person knows, is a matter of dosage and dose frequency and route of administration. This is not the framework the educated, lesswrong rationalist crowd is using, which is despite all pretensions much more qualitative and sociological. His status as a neuroscientist ensures that people less educated on the topic won’t rebuke him for fear of looking stupid, but were he not so esteemed we know what the result would be: implicitly patronizing DMs like “are you okay?” and “I’m just here if you need anything.” An ideas-podcast guy like Coleman Hughes can openly talk about MDMA on Dave Rubin without consequence (youtube.com/watch?v=rdh8zPr_ZmI&t=583s), but without the veneer of some deliberate purpose — if you’re just having fun — there is a social penalty for the Wrong Kind Of Drug. Given that this social penalty is not evidence-based, a sensible enough explanation is that it’s an unconscious class association. Street urchins we don’t talk about do crack and heroin, it’s why “San Francisco has a lot of problems”, and the Good Ones — the ones who can afford to go to burning man and ephemerisle and vibecamp — do LSD and MDMA.

If you are this kind of person, I don’t trust your threat modeling of many things, violence included, and many if not most of you *are this kind of person*.

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UPDATES SINCE THEN
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Being rat-canceled is bizarre. It's unlike being left-canceled which is public and obvious and people are so upfront with their issues about you that it approaches being performative. The worst of left-canceling happens in the span of a weekend and two weeks later they've gotten a new thing to be mad about.

By contrast, when lesswrong rationalists cancel you it's as if someone flipped a switch and a bunch of robots have initiated a remote shut down cycle all at the same time. People who you barely spoke to will slink off of your friends list and either stop messaging you completely or, worse, respond less frequently in a gradual and piecemeal fashion until they feel like they can finally get away with blocking you. The groupthink and bandwagoning and adherence to the community's mood approaches a vibe that's cultlike and it's obvious that many people who you thought were your friends are in fact friends with the subculture first and you second. You *do* learn who your real friends are, and that can be depressing.

If you do participate in a subculture like this, assume at least 30% and as many as 50% your friends aren't actually your friends, depending on how optimistic you want to be. This number is not an out-of-ass estimate; I maintained a list at one point. http://simp.ly/p/zZDk5D

This has also taught me that, unlike what they claim to be, lesswrongs are *extremely* ingroup-biased and status-biased. If a major figure has it out for you, your participation in the community has maybe a six month half-life.

I've authored/written/whatever the following things since:

▪️ the essay "Vibecamp and Its Consequences", which is about the problems with privacy norms and how they can compromise the truth https://alfredmacdonald.substack.com/p/vibecamp-and-its-consequences (mirror at https://app.simplenote.com/p/g4n6Kp, and the title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the joke that I was treated as if I was the Unabomber)

▪️ technoyogi bullshit and cure-by-rubricism, an image essay about a kind of tech industry hippie who has managed to propagate bullshit among people who would otherwise think it's too woo, and how rubricism - the use of rubrics and standards for what words mean - can solve that. http://alfredmacdonald.substack.com/p/technoyogi-bullshit-and-cure-by-rubricism

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WRITINGS/CONTACT
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directory of writings: http://simp.ly/p/fCShc3

discord: https://discord.gg/K5KXhgQtD8

contact information generally: https://app.simplenote.com/p/Nm3pD7